Does Mark dig Digger? + AARON SORKIN

0:00Simon Mayo: Now, Mark, I don't know why all these trendy podcasters need to sell such tat in their online shops these days. You'd have thought the show would have been enough for them. I mean, look at this tea towel. Simon, I think that's our shop you're browsing, isn't it? Oh, so it is. Actually, those Kermode and Mayor director's chairs are very nice, and it's all incredibly slick and easy. That's probably what confused me. That's because it's powered by Shopify. Shopify is where you go to start your business. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one, which means our top production team can concentrate on, well, whatever it is that they do.

0:34While Shopify does all the hard work, because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business and the tools to do it.

0:41Simon Mayo: And Shopify checkout helps more customers finish their purchase. Then when they come back, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. Simple. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.co.uk slash take. Start your free trial at shopify.co.uk slash take. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

1:19There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

1:33Simon Mayo: Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can become a Vanguard Easter and get an extra episode every Thursday. Including bonus reviews. Extra viewing suggestions. Viewing recommendations at home and in cinemas. Plus your film and non-film questions answered as best we can in Questions Schmestions. You can get all that extra stuff via Apple Podcasts or head to extratakes.com for non-fruit related devices. There's never been a better time to become a Vanguardista. Free offer now available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're already a Vanguardista, we salute you.

2:21Simon Mayo: Well, I'm not completely sure, but you have a manner about you today. There is a definite kind of, let me have a look at it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Glasses, the jaunty expression. Yep, that's right. You're a well-seasoned traveler who's been to America recently, got let in and got let out again. That's the look that you have. I was fully expecting to get a message in the middle of the night saying, they've detained me. They realize who I am. I know. And you were making jokes about it on the program. And I was saying, can you please stop making jokes about it? And then people actually started sending me messages saying, yeah, I'm sorry that he was making jokes about it, because I would feel the same as you did.

3:05As it was.

3:06Simon Mayo: They're ridiculous then. They are absolutely ridiculous. As it was, it was fine. But it took something like three hours to get through customs, because you get there and there are 10 desks for United States citizens and one desk for everyone else in the world. That's prejudice, that is. Mind you, going anywhere, if you come from this country, is pretty much the same. You know, if you fly into, I mean, the only place I go is Copenhagen, you still have to wait there for hours. You know, the flight, fast. Hour and a half, great. You're there, you're ready to go. Two hours later, you finally get to the passport guy, which is just madness.

3:43Anyway, ask me what I did when I was there. I know what you did when you were there. No, you don't. There's something you don't know about. Tell me the thing that I don't know that you did when you got there. I met up with Hello to Jason Isaacs.

3:55Simon Mayo: Yes, I did. Didn't he post about something? Didn't you post about something? Wasn't there a photograph? I've seen a photograph, I think. Okay. What's he up to? Well, he's filming like five movies at the same time. Such a tart. We walked the High Line. You know, there's this thing, it's a bit of elevated railway track, and they've kind of turned it into like a garden walk. So you kind of walk above the city. And we met at one end of it and we walked and we must have walked faster than we thought, because about 10 minutes later, we were at the other end of it. And we both went, that's a lot shorter than we thought it was going to be.

4:31And then we, it's Jason, because he's Jason, he took me to, did you know there's a Soho house in New York?

4:41Simon Mayo: Did you know that? Is he a member? Well, again, he appears to be a member of everything. Yes, probably. So what benefits did you get from that? Well, I sat with him and talked and we sat and talked. And then as we talked, a whole bunch of people came in, you know, sort of. So it was like you couldn't do anything at all because, oh, look, there's Gurinder Chadha. She come over and talks and, you know, talks about whatever she's up to. And then somebody else famous comes. He's just he's the most famous person we know. Um, do you think? I suppose I might be right. Do it like that. Yes. He'll be listening to this.

5:14Say hello.

5:16Simon Mayo: Yeah. I'm just wondering, is he the most famous person that we know? I think he is. Yeah, he could. Well, is he more famous than Sanjeev? I suppose he is. I think he's more famous than anyone. I think he's like literally properly famous. He wears a baseball cap. Or to stop people saying that's Jason Isaacs. Well, I said, are you doing that in order to stop people going hello to Jason Isaacs? He said, no, I'm doing it because of my hair. But I think he was, I think he was keeping a low profile. it was lovely to see him he was he was he was in particularly good form and he said to say hello back that's very nice uh but what is he actually do how many he's i'm not making this up he's shooting a number of movies so he's shooting something in new york and then he's shooting something else in canada so he's going backwards and forwards and you know from one to the other because he's shooting them both at the same time he's so busy he's just he's constantly in demand do you think he could host this show if i was off one time you could ask him i think he probably would wouldn't he dave morrissey's done it back in the old days but i think there was he wasn't quite sure about hello dave by the way he wasn't sure about queuing to the sport and the travel and the horse racing and things like that but we guess why we got rid of all of that nonsense well um you're you're you're off soon and we we i'm not we're not going to say this now who it is but there's an absolute doozy of a presenter.

6:41Yeah, a bit of a low budget presenter. Standing in for the one week that you're off.

6:45Simon Mayo: Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. Absolutely incredible. Absolutely. I mean, I knew David Cameron wasn't doing much, but I didn't know we could get him. Do you remember there was a week when we used to be on a different platform when I was off and you got Michael Portillo to stand in for me because there was a joke about the fact that Michael Portillo looked a bit like me i do and he didn't quite understand the concept of movie criticism because he just read and told us the whole thing all the way through i mean he was doing his best but frank gardner did the same reviewed a film about security by talking about the whole thing tom courtney did it's clearly just talking about a school of thought which says here's the entire movie That's it.

7:31Okay, thank you very much. Just describe for me what happens in the film, in the order that it happens. That'll be fine.

7:37Simon Mayo: Speaking of which, tell us about the films that you're going to be talking about in order without spoiling too much. Yes, so we have a new Brit pic, Extra Geography. We have Verity, which is a sort of modern, erotic film noir thriller, and Digger, which is the Tom Cruise movie that you will have heard tons and tons about, but everyone has been told very specifically don't say anything that will spoil it and we also have a very special guest sorry sorry hang on a second before the guest what you can't say anything about it no no no you can't say anything yes more than normal there was a big announcement that came up at the beginning which said we the filmmakers you know want you to enjoy this in the best possible way and consequently don't do any spoilers at all we'll we'll we'll deal with it when we get to the film okay someone i work with said oh yeah i've heard about that it's a musical i said i don't think it is okay well that's one thing sorted or maybe that's a spoiler maybe that's a spoiler every time you say digger and anyone else says digger in my head it triggers i digger i digger was a boozy beggar for hobbs was fond of his dram and rennie day car was a drunken fart i drink before But obviously it's a different digger.

8:54Simon Mayo: Yes. So Aaron Sorkin is going to be on the show, which is a fabulous thing. West Wing, A Few Good Men, American President, Charlie Wilson's War, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, Social Network. All of that, he's doing the social reckoning. He's written it and he's directed it and he's on this show. May I just ask you, I know you're probably embargoed up the wazoo, but generally? generally what generally because you've seen such a record i'm not seeing it till monday but i'm very excited about seeing it i think your excitement will pay off handsomely excellent thank you is that okay yes that's great i mean i i really if you wait obviously if you're waiting for a car chase this isn't your film if you're waiting for some shoot-'em-up action this is not your film if you're looking for some rampant sex this is not your film are there any dinosaurs in no dinosaurs no spaceships but if you're looking for some sparkling dialogue uh then this is the one for you uh and in take two what are you up to there a couple of films in take two the weight that's w-e-i-g-h-t not the weight like the second track off the pretenders first album and april x which is a futuristic thriller you can get take two ad free by heading to our patreon page just search for coming about patron and you'll find us there.

10:14Simon Mayo: Uh, Ryan in Abington says, um, hello, number one. And number two, last week, Simon told us about run P an app that tells you the best times to go to the toilet during a movie. Yes. While I'm sure it's useful for many movies, I find it doesn't work particularly well for action movies. The app suggests time where you can nip to the bathroom without losing track of the plot. And for action movies, it will often suggest going to the bathroom during an action sequence. Yes. You only really need to see the start and end of an action sequence to be able to follow the plot of the film, but for an action scene, the action is the real reason that you're there.

10:50Simon Mayo: In the latest Mission Impossible, Run-P suggested the best time to go to the bathroom was during the submarine dive sequence, which was one of the standout sequences of the film, and in my view, not to be missed. You'd be better off going to the toilet during one of the explainy dialogue sequences, or in the case of Mission Impossible 8, just arrive one hour after the film started. Tinkity Tongue, down with the usual suspects. Thank you, Ryan. Yeah, I suppose the algorithm there, even if it's just a person, has got it slightly wrong. Because if you're going to a Mission Impossible film, for example, as it does action better than most films, you're not going to want to miss any of the action sequences, are you?

11:26No, exactly. Because as you said, the actiony bits are what you're paying for.

11:32Simon Mayo: Yeah, I think you're going to have to take a water bottle and do that, probably. I think that's... Well, just don't drink any fluid for 24 hours, not medically approved. Don't drink anything before you go. You're just suggesting that in general, are you? Yes. Correspondence at coadamayor.com. Tell us something that's out that might be interesting. Okay, so Extra Geography, which is an adaptation of a 2007 story by Rose Tremaine, very celebrated Rose Tremaine. This is directed by Molly Manners and features two dynamite breakout performances from Molly Duggan and Galaxy Clear. They play Flick and Minna, who are inseparable best friends at an upmarket boarding school, both of whom have got their sights firmly set on Oxbridge.

12:16They are closer than sisters. You know that way that when you're school friends, you're completely in sync. You're sort of, you know, you're almost finishing each other's sentences. Although right from the beginning, there is a suggestion of rivalry. When they play hockey, they play hockey to win. And they love the fact that, you know, that they get celebrated for winning the hockey. And they look down on the world. They look down on their classmates, like needy Phoebe, on teachers, and especially on boys who they all agree are absolutely horrid, until auditions come up for a school play, Midsummer Night's Dream, which is going to involve boys from the boys' school.

12:51And Flickerminner aren't interested in plays, but their resumes in order to get them into Oxbridge in the future require broad outlook. So they read the play and they discover that the play is about love, which they know nothing about. So in order to improve their CVs and make themselves more likely to get parts in the play, they decide that what they're going to do is they are going to make as their summer project falling in love. And then using as a template, the play itself, they agree that what they're going to do is they're going to walk into the classroom and the first person they see they are going to fall in love with.

13:30And the first person they see turns out to be mousy Antipodean geography teacher, Miss Delevingne, with whom they then proceed and indeed compete to fall most completely in love. Here is a clip from the trailer.

13:47What will happen if we don't get into Oxbridge? Maybe we'll just die. Thank God we're here. Finished. Not enough getting distracted by like drugs and boys.

14:06Horrid. What are you going to do for your summer project this year? It's a secret. God, Phoebe. What if we, like, fall in love? Make it our summer project.

14:17Simon Mayo: We fall in love with the first person we see. Hello, Fleck. Hello, Minna.

14:25All they know about love is what they've read in books. and that, you know, they read in books, because they go to the library and they get all about all these romantic books and they discover that love makes your heart flutter and it makes your pulse race and it fills you with longing, but it also fills you with pain and heartache. And they're going, well, are we feeling these things about Miss Delevingne? Meanwhile, the play brings boys into their lives. Urgh. Yeah, exactly. But the presence of boys also further obscures the fact, urgh, horrid, obscures the fact that if there is a love story in them, you know, here, it's playing out right under their noses.

14:59Now, I have to say, I loved this film. I thought it was simultaneously innocent and knowing and arch yet sincere and funny, but also kind of heartbreaking. I was looking at some reviews afterwards because I did an interview with the filmmakers. So other people have compared it to films like Lady Bird, Booksmart, Francis Ha. I think it's closer to kind of the spikier productions like, you know, Heathers or Mean Girls or Clueless. And for me, tonally, it falls somewhere between the kind of brilliant, awkward teen evocations of Richard Iowady's submarine and that sort of sublime swooning of Carol Morley's The Falling, which I love and which is a film which is very inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock.

15:43And that kind of strange dreaminess is in this, although this is much more in a kind of comedic register. I mean, this has got mystery, but it's also got that thing that the very best films have, which is recognition. I am a 63 year old man and watching this, I felt at times like, oh, I understand what the feelings of these people are completely alien to me because I have never, unless you never noticed, I have never been a teenage girl, but I think, yeah, I recognize that. And I, I love the fact that cinema at its best can do that. I mean, I thought this was, it was charming, but it's also quite daring.

16:20It absolutely nails the fact that when you're young, the attachments that you make to people and to things and to projects is heightened. You know, what's that in the open portal phrases when your portals are open and you're feeling everything in a kind of really sort of hypened way. I also thought it reminded me of probably not anybody else of, do you remember that? I was talking about that Julia de Cornel film, Raw, which looks like it's a film about cannibalism, but it isn't a film about cannibalism. It's a film about sibling rivalry. This isn't about falling in love with your geography teacher.

16:55What it's actually about is it's about the heart-rending pains of young friendship and coming of age. And, you know, in the same way as the best Bill Forsyth evocations of this, it just gets it right. I mean, it's a real marvel. It raised the roof at Sundance. It really deserves to do the same in UK cinemas. I thought it was terrific. It's called Extra Geography, and I thought it was really something special. So when is this set? Apparently 2003.

17:23Simon Mayo: So I imagine they've done that because there's no mobile phonage. So, you know, it's just when you said they learn all they know about love is from books. Oh, yes, I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have thought everything they know about love is from the internet. ChatGBT. Well, ChatGBT now and TikTok, certainly. But do they not look at the internet at all? No, no, it's books. No, it's absolutely books. Absolutely books. Books and plays and stuff like that. Okay. All right. I just thought they'd have been online and checking out that kind of thing. You know how it is. No, it's definitely books.

17:56They go to the library and they take out every romance novel they can find and then they sit and read them. And then they write in their notebooks with pens.

18:05Simon Mayo: Okay. Still to come after the break, if indeed there is one, because if you're patron, then you don't get a break. The Box Office Top Ten, Verity, Digger, Aaron Sorkin. And a quick reminder that there are only a few tickets left for our Christmas special, which this year is at the Bristol Beacon on December the 6th. So if you'd like the chance to experience our 90s Christmas death match, then head to the address on the show notes, which is HTTP colon forward slash another forward slash www.fane.co.uk forward slash kermode hyphen and hyphen mayo. Wow. Or just, you know, I think that was pithy, don't you?

18:50Simon Mayo: it's embedded in my memory now. It's got a comma after fame, which is not right. That can't be right. You can't have a comma in an online address. It's fame.co.uk slash Kermit and May with hyphens. That's the kind of thing. Anyway, we'll be at the Bristol Beacon, which is just off the Ring Road. So you can find us, you know, just hang a left, that kind of thing.

19:13Simon Mayo: Hey, Mark Kermode. Fancy a fun quick fire quiz? I thought you'd never ask. Great. How do you protect yourself from spoilers? We never watch the end of the film. Well, a bit impractical, but fine. How do you protect yourself from getting wound up by noisy cinema goers? There's no need. I'm a very tolerant man, as you know. How do you protect yourself from getting bored of the exorcist? It's impossible. Anyway, shall we start this fun quiz? What's more fun than being well protected? Okay, is that part of the quiz? I'm doing the questions, thank you. How do you protect yourself from online scams?

19:46Ah, finally, a sensible question. Nord VPN's next-gen antivirus. Blocks, scams and phishing before they reach you. Fake texts, dodgy links. Your account is locked. Emails. Same app as the VPN. One tap. The biggest protection in the game.

19:59Simon Mayo: Correct. Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app. Head to nordvpn.com slash take to get an exclusive Nord VPN deal plus four months extra risk-free.

20:18At ZocDoc, we know you care about your health. You wouldn't do that early morning cardio if you didn't. So the fact that your annual physical is overdue just shows how hard it can be to get seen by a doctor. Sorry, that doctor's not in network. Press 1 for more options. You've reached us outside normal business hours. The next availability is in three months. But ZocDoc makes finding the right doctor easy. Download the app and search by specialty, insurance, and availability. Read real patient reviews, then book instantly. ZocDoc. Ready to be seen?

20:54Simon Mayo: Okay, box office top 10 then. This is a groovy thing. And we're actually starting at number 10, which is a very rare thing. At number 10 is The Paradise, which was not screened. This is an Indian Telugu language action drama starring Nani as the leader of a struggling tribe in 1980s Sekundarabad. So I haven't seen it. If you have, send us a review. Number nine here, number eight in America is Spider-Man, brand new day, nine weeks in the chart. Which has just done incredibly well at the box office. So that and the Odyssey between them have raised the general box office level quite dramatically.

21:30Simon Mayo: Yeah, and the Odyssey is there at number eight. Number seven here is Pressure. It's exciting weather, man. And I liked it very much. I enjoyed it very much. It is very old-fashioned, but it's got a very good central performance by Andrew Scott, who does that thing about everything being very, very uptight until the moment that it isn't. And I think he does that very well. But as we have, as we have sort of talked about when it says, you know, the untold story, no, the story of the weather and D-Day has been told. It is quite significant, but it's been retold. It's told in every D-Day book. Yes.

22:00Simon Mayo: Retold, but with particular style and panache by Andrew Scott and his cast. Number six here and number six over there, Practical Magic 2. Well, as predicted, this is dropping quite fast now. So the sort of the fans all went to see it in the first week. And we got lots of nice emails from people who had really enjoyed it. I didn't like it, but it now seems to have exhausted the fan base and it's on the way out. It may have one more week in the top 10 and that's it. Number five and number 14 in America is Sean the Sheep, The Beast of Mossy Bottom, which I just loved. I mean, you know, when Arbham knock it out of the park, they really do.

22:40And I really, really, I've enjoyed all the Sean the Sheep stuff and I really enjoyed this. This, for me, would make the perfect double bill with Wallace and Gromit, Curse the Were-Rabbit.

22:49Simon Mayo: Number four here is Sense and Sensibility. And Kirstie says, hi both, full disclosure, I love an Austin adaptation. A bit like Agatha Christie, I think the plots are strong enough for people to faff with them. So went into the new Sense and Sensibility with optimism, which was, for the most part, upheld. Everyone was fab. I didn't mind the flapping hair, although the health and safety of horse riding with it in your face has to be considered. And love the costumes, scenery and general loveliness. Elliot Sumner as Mr. Palmer was an interesting choice and I thought they were brill. But if you want to gender bend, make it Willoughby and don't chicken out on the side character.

23:28Simon Mayo: I got lost halfway through that bit. However, the dancing, I love the anachronistic dancing, is in something like A Knight's Tale. But then the whole film plays with that sort of thing. what Sense and Sensibility did was swing from Austin dialogue and polite manners to drunk flamingos doing close-up magic, which left me sniggering and somewhat baffled. I began to hope that they would dance again. And honestly, I can't remember anything else that happened in those scenes. Anyway, up with Galloping in the Rain and down with Bounders. I mean, in general, Bounders have got us into a lot of trouble over the years.

24:01Simon Mayo: Kirsty, thank you very much indeed. And the dancing is certainly from, it's out of another picture yes i mean the dancing is the bit which because they're all very repressed and they don't express their emotions and then when they dance they express their emotions through the medium of modern dance but it is definitely modern dance because i did say to you they weren't that those dances weren't period dances were they and they absolutely aren't well it's like the hacienda in 1982 that's what it was like for some reason where did that come from i mean they And do-si-do the partner, but also whilst tripping, but probably just on lavender.

24:36Can I just tell you the Hacienda in 1982 did not have people dancing like that. The Hacienda in 1982 was an absolute hole. Because when the Hacienda first opened, firstly, it was empty. Secondly, the sound system was awful because it was a big warehouse with a terrible sound system. And thirdly, if you ever went there, you know, to one of the nights in which it was a disco night, it was like three or four people in long overcoats looking miserable the hacienda didn't really happen until much later on for the first few years it was empty and hole-like well i'm speaking here

25:11Simon Mayo: on behalf of the good lady's ceramicist terry doors who would probably dispute what you said there she was a very early uh member of the aforementioned club and seemed to have a wonderful time unless she was one of the miserable miserable people in an overcoat well i think i will i will defer to her but i remember going to the hacienda on many nights when my friend danny jacobs was vj-ing and there was three the problem that was the problem danny jacobs everyone knew that he was uh you know he was gonna empty the floor i think that's what it was yeah uh three here three there heart of the beast paul sims from chesterfield in derbyshire yes a heartfelt adventure which is tender but also punishing with all the obstacles in the duo's way one of the best films of 2026 with one of the best acting performances of the year nick budgie says this is director's david ayre's best film it achieves a remarkable balance between hard-edge realism and full-blooded melodrama landing emotionally as well as viscerally pit is extraordinary delivering his best performance in years but he's matched every step of the way by odin the dog they genuinely feel as though they're having conversations give that dog an oscar hello to jason which we've already done down with the usual up with pets and a hearty tinkety-tonk much love nick budgie well i agree that the dog was very good i thought the film was very average and brad pitt was very unremarkable i thought he was coasting honestly so he's either unremarkable and coasting or his best performance in years it is somewhere in between it absolutely isn't his best performance i'm sorry i'm glad you enjoyed it and everything but um but it isn't dropping one big top 40 place to number two is Resident Evil.

26:53Yeah, and it's only dropped one, excuse me, it's only dropped one big place off the top spot because it's been knocked off the top spot by a pre new Avengers re-release. So I think Resident Evil's terrific. I'm really glad it had one week at number one. I thought I really really enjoyed it. But it is at number two because Avengers Endgame Encore, which is a reissue of Endgame with a little bit more footage has been stuck out because there's a new one coming out.

27:26Simon Mayo: Nick in Leeds says, Dear Endgame and Encore, having just got out of a ScreenX Infinity vision, didn't add anything for your information, screening of the re-release of Avengers, Avenger Endgame, Encore with a colon. I can't stop wondering if the resultant cash from new bums on seats will be added to its first box office run, resulting in a challenge to re-topple Avatar from the number one spot. And more importantly, should it? Given that there is new additional footage, which, spoiler light warning, actually lessened the film's emotional impact by changing it from being the end to be continued, I don't really feel it's taking should really be counted.

28:10Simon Mayo: But on the other hand, I hated Avatar, so I was happy if it's brought down a peg or two. So what do you think? I don't know, actually. I don't know whether they will round this into Avengers Endgame Total Box Office. If they've added footage, it should be separate, shouldn't it? Yes, I mean, it should be. I honestly don't know what the answer to that is. My problem is I don't care either. I mean, it just feels terribly, you know, let's put that film out again with a few little extra bits in it in order to remind people what's going on so that the next... It feels awfully corporate. Nick, thank you very much, Steve, for the email.

28:49Simon Mayo: Correspondence at carbonamand.com. More of your takes on Resident Evil in the Overflow Car Park in take two, including a suggestion of what it's actually about. Search for us on Patreon to get that and this and the other. All ad-free. That sounds a bit dodgy. Can I ask you something? Every time you say the Overflow Car Park, my head adds the words of love. Why? You say Overflow Car Park and I want to say of love. And I've got no idea why, but I can't hear you say it without thinking the overflow car park of love. Because you're just a big hippie, Mark. Oh, that's what it is. Okay. I think that's what it is.

29:28Simon Mayo: Because you want to buy the world a Coke and live in perfect harmony. I haven't heard of the car park of love. Maybe that was just by the Hacienda. The overflow car park of love. It was the Hacienda once they'd finished hanging around in their overcoats and looking miserable. No, the Hacienda was definitely the overflow car park of we. It was definitely not love. There's a great Van Morrison song, which we play a lot on Greatest Hits, which has a line in it, making love in the tall grass behind the stadium with you. I was thinking, I mean, how unromantic, Van, can you possibly be? Behind a stadium?

30:05Simon Mayo: Really? Yeah. That's the most exciting place you could possibly think of. But you know what's fascinating about that, Simon, is that you are therefore playing the uncensored version of that song because in the original release, they just repeated the line from the other verse because they thought that Making Love in the Long Grass or Green Grass, whatever it is, Making Love in the Green Grass, was a bit rescape, particularly with the additional information about where it was happening. So in the original radio edit of the song, they just take the line from another verse. We don't care about that kind of thing.

30:38Simon Mayo: Speaking of Green Grass, Paul Greengrass would be... Skipping at a running or something. Paul Greengrass will be on the show very shortly. Oh, great. Is he coming on for the release of Uprising? For the Uprising, yes. The Uprising. Is it Caravan of Love? Is that what you're thinking? I don't know. Like the House Martins. I really don't know. But honestly, every single time you say it, I just think the overflow car park of love. The thing is, you would never want to go to the overflow car park of love, would you? Because there's a lot of bad things happening there. Unless it's a car boot sale. Is it a car boot sale?

31:09Simon Mayo: Maybe that's what it is. Anyway, all sounds most unsavoury. Anyway, special guest time in a moment.

31:21Simon Mayo: Hello, Mark Kermode. Hello, Simon Mayo. Quick question. What's your autumn signature dish? Why are you asking? Because I suspect the answer is a takeaway. That is deeply unfair. But is it? Sometimes it's delivery. Well, perhaps it's your pans that are holding you back. food sticking, pans burning, uneven heat. That's unusually generous of you. Gordon Ramsay uses hex clad at home and in his restaurants. You could try them. They combine the searing performance of stainless steel with the convenience of non-stick, so you get great cooking results without the usual clean-up headache. They're dishwasher safe and easy to clean.

32:00Plus, every hex clad product comes with a lifetime warranty, so they could genuinely be the last pans you'll ever buy.

32:07Simon Mayo: Upgrade to Hexclad and make everyday cooking easier. For a limited time, listeners get 15 % off with our exclusive link at hexclad.co.uk slash take. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D, hexclad.co.uk forward slash take. Offer excludes bundles and other items already on sale. Support the show and let them know we sent you. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

32:53Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com.

33:10Simon Mayo: and that special guest moment is right now because our guest this week is top man top writing director aaron sorkin whose latest project is the social reckoning so a few good men you're about to get a very good story about a few good men by the way and jack nicholson which i hadn't heard before so i don't know if i'm sure he's told it somewhere before but anyway famously the west Wing, famously Social Network. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, Trial of the Chicago 7. And now we get to, I mean, there's loads of other things. The most annoying thing about him from a writer's point of view is, because I heard him say, he has written 11 screenplays, Mark, 11 screenplays.

33:52Simon Mayo: They have all been made. There is nothing in his drawer that hasn't been made. Wow. There are very few writers that can say, no, I haven't got There's something here which never got made. Anyway, his latest is The Social Reckoning. You can hear my conversation with the great Aaron Sorkin after this clip from the movie. The reason why you hear it from the left and the right on content moderation, they work in the refs. Facebook isn't the ref. That's the point. Look, that's the point, Charlie. We're not the ref. We're the public square. I'm a free speech absolutist, so accept where there's imminent harm.

34:24You can't say absolutist and accept in the saints. With the new optimizations, with the MSI, The fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet powered. It's hydraulic. Harm, I promise you, is imminent.

34:37Simon Mayo: And that is a clip from The Social Reckoning. Aaron Salkin, welcome to the show. Good to be here. How are you? Good, thank you. Thank you for your time. What hooked you back into the Facebook orbit? The story. I wasn't looking to get back into the Facebook world. There had been a couple of times over the years since the social network came out that it had been suggested to me after Cambridge Analytica, you should do this, that kind of thing. But there just wasn't a story there that was grabbing me. And then I met Francis Haugen and Jeff Horowitz and the Facebook files. And suddenly there was a great story, a whistleblower story, a newspaper story, and all these secrets about Facebook, these terrible secrets that would come to light.

35:23Simon Mayo: So that's a contemporary story, but also a very traditional newspaper story. Yeah. And I'm sure the traditional nature is what appealed to me, too. I like writing the kinds of movies that made me want to write movies. Yeah. So once you were hooked into that story and you'd met Francis and Jeff, at what stage in the writing process did you know you wanted to direct as well? I was my second choice to direct. My first choice was David Fincher. But David Fincher has an exclusive deal at Netflix and was in the middle of preparing to direct Quentin Tarantino's movie, The Further Misadventures of Cliff Booth.

36:11So I settled for me. And it was somewhere in the middle of the writing process. And it's the first time, actually, this is the first movie I've directed where I knew I was going to be the director when I was writing it. The others were surprises.

36:27Simon Mayo: Okay. Is that a good feeling? Sure. It's a good feeling. Listen, I'm not done wanting to work with great directors, but it's nice to know you're not going to have to battle with someone to, you know, get what you want. And when you're telling this story, did you always know how it was going to open and how the film was going to close? It wasn't until I knew how it was going to open that I understood what I was going to write. There's a period, you know, you do all this research, but then there's this period of just climbing the walls, of not knowing what the once upon a time of it all is. How is this going to work?

37:13And so I asked Jeff Horowitz, who's in the movie is played by Jeremy Allen White. I asked him a dramatist's question. I asked him, what was the inciting action for Frances? You know, one day she wasn't a whistleblower and the next day she was. What happened? And he said, well, she had this friend who became radicalized by Facebook very quickly. And she, Francis, wanted to know how this happened. And once Jeff told me that, a couple of days later, I knew what the opening scene was going to be. It's a great opening scene. Thank you. The thing is, you know what the opening scene is going to be, but nobody's ever going to get to see it unless you write the hundred scenes that come out.

37:56after that, so that was my motivation.

37:58Simon Mayo: So the last time I saw Jeremy Allen White in a movie, he was Bruce Springsteen. And his manager, John Landau, is played by Jeremy Strong, who here is Mark Zuckerberg. So slightly, that took a moment. But why Jeremy Strong? He is, he's terrifying, I think. He's extraordinary. Why him? It's a fantastic performance. I think Jeremy Strong is the best American actor under 50 years old that we've got, and he proves it in this movie. He's absolutely fantastic. Are you asking why Jeremy Strong and not Jesse Eisenberg? Yeah, I mean, I kind of know, because you said that Jesse didn't want to do it. Jesse didn't want to do it because Jesse, over the years, he's distressed that he's been conflated with this person who he doesn't really like that much.

38:45And, you know, he's become, Jesse's now a very well-respected writer and director himself. As it happens, I hadn't told Jesse what I was doing over the last two or three years that I was writing this script. I ran into him at an Oscar party, on Oscar night, when he was nominated. And I said, listen, I'm going to be sending you something in a couple of weeks. And he smiled and said, great. And just a few minutes later, I ran into Jeremy Strong, who asked me what I was up to. And I told him what I was writing. And he said, hey, if for some reason Jesse doesn't want to do it, send it to me. And that's what happened.

39:27And he's phenomenal in the film. It was like replacing Joe DiMaggio with Mickey Mantle.

39:33Simon Mayo: Yeah. We'll have to look up those references. It's a very American sporting reference. I am sorry. That's a one great American baseball player with another American baseball player. That worked on the New York Times, but I had to. And is it the same Mark Zuckerberg? I know you wrote both characters, but for me, he's edging to villain here. And anti-hero, yes, but I'm not on his side at all. No. You ask if it's the same Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, it's the same Mark Zuckerberg 16 years later. 16 years later, the company is now worth a trillion dollars. As one of the characters points out, they are twice as big as the largest country on Earth.

40:14anti-hero versus villain. And an anti-hero, his intentions are good. The results are bad. And even his methods could be bad. Jeremy Strong was the biggest Mark Zuckerberg defender that you can imagine. And after, on his last day of shooting, after I called cut, checked the gate on his last shot. He made a beeline to me, and he said if I'd been playing Jeff, I'd have been defending Jeff. And he was done. I would still say, I think the reason why you're feeling like he's harder to like in this is there are fewer moments of being alone with him inside his head the way there were in Social Network where he was also younger.

41:12This is—the social network was about how Facebook was invented. This is about what it's become. And in particular, Facebook's role in the rise of divisiveness and extremism, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. And it's happening because he wants growth at any expense.

41:34Simon Mayo: You said before that you see dialogue as music. when martin mcdonough was on the film was on the show a few years ago for banshees of inner sharing i asked him slightly mischievously because i knew what his answer was going to be if colin farrell or brenda gleason came up to you and said can i change a line can i change a word what would you say and he said i'd tell them to f off i am the best writer on set these are my words you're going to stick to them are you are you slightly more open to suggestion or would you be a little bit similar? Slightly more open. If it's music, you can't change the notes.

42:13You can't. The first movie set I was ever on was A Few Good Men, which was based on my play, the first play that I wrote. And I was in a rehearsal with Jack Nicholson. And I was a kid. this is my first thing, and this is Jack Nicholson, who had a line, I don't mind the bullets and the bombs and the blood, Danny. I don't mind the heat and the stress and the fear. And he came up to me and he said, I'd really like to not say stress. Stress, it just sounds like a, it doesn't sound like a word a Marine colonel would say. It sounds like something a teenager would say. And I said, sure, Jack. I cut the word.

43:00All the while thinking, well, he just killed the rhythm of it. It was, I don't mind the bop, bada-bop, bada-bop. I don't mind the bop, bada-bop, bada-bop. And he cut the second bada-bop. And it's not going to be as good, but it is Jack Nicholson. And I am nobody, so we're going to do it this way. I'm happy to have actors come to me. But now you're not on your first movie. I'm not on my first movie. I am happy to hear suggestions from actors, but I'm also happy to tell them why I can't change it.

43:33Simon Mayo: Okay. I do—listen, if they're having— You'd better have a very good reason. I would need to have a good reason. And I also need to, especially if I'm directing, if for some reason they are having trouble with a line because it's tough for them to get out of their mouth or it's just not fitting with what they're doing. Well, the writer is on the set too. I'm there. And I'll find something that works better for them. You are known for being somewhat of an optimist and having movies which maybe look on the positive side. I have to say, I loved the film very much. I thought the performances that all your main characters put in is amazing.

44:14Simon Mayo: Mikey Madison inspired Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong. Yeah. Fantastic. But when the credits started to roll, I thought, we are in serious trouble. That's what I thought. Because the people making these decisions are Mark Zuckerberg and others may be worse than him. And I don't know what we can do about that. Well, it sounds to me like you responded to the movie exactly as I'd hoped, which is this. You're right. I'm an optimist. I wanted the audience to feel good at the end of the film, to feel that lump in the throat moment, which hopefully you will, from Mikey. But then when you're walking out of the theater, you should realize we're in big trouble and something has to be done.

45:04Simon Mayo: Yeah. If all social media went away tonight, all of it, you can't uninvent anything, but if it all disappeared, we would be in a better place, wouldn't we? There's no question about it. There's no doubt about it. Social media was a good idea, which has, it's out of control. It's gotten out of hand. It's bad for us in any number of ways. This movie, again, examines how it's making us, on purpose, mad at each other. They're purposely showing, your algorithm is purposely showing you things designed to make you angry. and not to mention the effect that it's having on young people, the terrible effect that it's having on young people.

45:52If it all went away in the middle of the night tonight, it would be a great thing.

45:59Simon Mayo: Should we all, do you think, Aaron, should we all share your confidence in institutions, that the institutions will get it right? I think that you should share my belief that these institutions are incredibly user sensitive, okay? That it matters who's in the institutions. And that we'll take greater care maybe with who we're putting in the cockpit. Okay. That sounds like a job for you guys. Yeah, I think you're right. And have you had the—I know you said before about when you finish a project, you've got no idea what you're going to do next, and wonder if you'll ever have another decent idea ever in your life, which clearly you will do.

46:43Simon Mayo: Is this different? Have you rapped and thought, no idea? I have no idea. I don't know what I'm doing next. And you're right. When I don't have an idea, it's impossible for me to imagine ever having an idea. And are you expecting any pushback from Facebook now? Yeah, sure. I, listen, I imagine that somebody is advising Mark and the others, just don't say anything. Just ignore it. But yeah, there'll be some kind of pushback. But you're quite happy with that, and your bosses are quite happy with that, and they've seen it, and everything is signed off and legaled. Yes. My boss is Sony of the studio.

47:25Tom Rothman is the head of the studio. This was not a no-brainer to Greenlight. uh, uh, this movie, uh, and he did it full speed ahead.

47:35Simon Mayo: Uh, Aaron Sorkin, it's always a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Aaron Sorkin talking about his, uh, his new movie. I've got my notes here for the interview and I'm, he's just what, I mean, this happens a lot, but he's one of those guests that, you know, if you had a couple of hours with, it would be fantastic. You know, there's so much, uh, in what he said there. I mean, I do stand by the fact that yes, there is a little kind of uplift. with the Mikey Madison character, but you will leave. You see, this is very, this actually is going to tie in with the Paul Greengrass uprising interview, which hopefully will be with you next week.

48:11Simon Mayo: Angry and powerless is a very bad place to be. And if your main concern is housing or Brexit or unemployment or benefits or immigration, then you have a political system that's designed for that. if you've if your issue is with ai and social media well you can do nothing you can do absolutely nothing so you're angry and you're powerless and that's how i think a lot of well if they're like me that's how you'll leave the cinema well i'm just on the basis of that interview because i haven't seen the film yet which i'm now really really looking forward to um you said that um that you enjoyed the film, which I'm really looking forward to enjoying it.

48:57And I actually think that seeing anything, any story that kind of at least reflects a concern that you may have is in itself empowering. Because I do think there is a thing about even if the position at the end of that film is, you know, we're in trouble, my own feeling is that to see something that reflects an anxiety that you have can be an empowering thing in and of itself, even if it doesn't offer an answer.

49:26Simon Mayo: It reminded me of, and I think it reminds you of, the Michael Mann film, The Insider. Oh, right. With Russell Crowe, Al Pacino, with the expose of the tobacco industry, in as much as they knew that their product was killing people. Yeah. And one of the central things about the movie is Facebook knew what they were doing. Yeah. They knew what the algorithm was doing. they knew it was making people angry and they did nothing that's so that's the kind of that's why it's a traditional film but i love the jack nicholson story just because there was a he's this idea of dialogue as music is is great and you could hear the rhythm in that line which he was able to recall what i should have said i thought he was going to say that the lie that jack nicholson didn't want to say was you can't handle the truth yeah no maybe that one of the reasons he can remember that is because it's going to Broadway and A Few Good Men so there's a new version of it so my guess is that line has gone back to the original Bradley Whitford is starring in the new one so he now says yeah the stress can I also just point you but you mentioned The Insider which is absolutely brilliant and is a really brilliant indictment of the tobacco industry I interviewed Michael Mann about that film when it came out and he was smoking he was not really He was.

50:45What, like it was 1972? No, I mean, don't mean like not during the interview, but before. And I'm just going to figure if you made a film like The Insider, you'd just never, ever go anywhere near a cigarette.

50:57Simon Mayo: Yeah. Anyway, I look forward to talking about the Aaron Sorkin film. So you are reviewing it next week? I am. I'm seeing it on Monday and I'm very excited now. Okay. Well, COVID and January 6th are all going to be part of that conversation. Also, the one other thing I was going to ask him about was, Have you heard about this P-Doom figure? No. You know what P-Doom is? I don't know. This is another terrible phrase out of Silicon Valley. What is it? But it's sort of, and it's tied to AI. Your P-Doom number, the higher it is, it's like percentage of doom. It's how likely is the apocalypse? How likely do you think the apocalypse is?

51:37Simon Mayo: Yes, because of AI. Oh, I see. Right. So a lot of P-Doomers are around 10%, but there are many who have 30, 40, 50%. My guess is Aaron Sorkin's P-Doom number is quite low. But then having seen this movie, it might go up a few notches. Anyway, that's also more for Paul Greengrass next week. So you haven't seen The Social Reckoning. That will be in the show next week. We will have seen it. Tell us about a film you have seen. Verity. And this could not be further from all the sort of heavy stuff that you've just been dealing with. Verity is the latest screen adaptation of a novel by Colleen Hoover, the Nick Sparks du Nos Jours.

52:14Oh, yes. Who, if you remember, initially self-published and then became absolutely huge publishing sensation. Her books have inspired movies like It Ends With Us, Regretting You, Reminders of Him, and now Verity. So this is written by Nick Antosca and directed by Michael Showalter. Now, Michael Showalter's name will mean something to you because he directed The Big Sick, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, for which you interviewed – did you interview Michael Sherwater for that? You did an interview for The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Was that Andrew Garfield? Oh, was it? Okay. Oh, fine. Maybe it was, yeah. Was it him?

52:51I think – now you've got me going. Yeah. You've done so many interviews. You've interviewed so many glitterati that we can't even nail it down. Anyway, he did that, and he also did The Idea Review, which I essentially liked. this is at the end it says a michael show walter film so he's you know he's that level so this reunites uh show walter with idea of you star anne hathaway if you remember when i reviewed idea of you a lot of people being very sniffy about it but i liked it alongside very bankable stars dakota johnson and josh hartnett so dakota johnson is low and ashley a struggling writer who we meet doing a reading of her latest serial killer book and she's reading it in a library and there are like three people.

53:32Then one of their phones rings, so there's only two people. Her agent calls her and says, you've got an assignment. Get yourself to this meeting. And then we see her walking down the street. We hear in a voiceover, she says, I like being in New York because it's anonymous. Nobody knows me. And then there's a road accident. And the road accident happens off screen, but what you see is blood is splashed onto her. Okay. So she's suddenly standing in the street with blood splashed onto her. And then there is Josh Hartnett, this handsome young man who steps in, helps her. He gives her his shirt. He's unfazed by the blood.

54:04And whilst he's sort of cleaning things up, he tells her, it's a lot of plot in the opening 10 minutes. He tells her, it's okay, I've seen worse. I lost a child. And she reveals that she has recently lost her mother. This is all happening in like the opening 10, 15 minutes. Then she gets to the meeting only to discover that the meeting is with the Josh Hartnett character, Jeremy. me. He is the husband of acclaimed writer Verity Crawford, played by Anne Hathaway, who is struggling to finish her latest book after being injured in a car crash. There is a lot of plot. She is being asked to help out, to help her write the books as a ghostwriter.

54:40And she agrees. And she goes to the house, the Lakeside House in Vermont, where she learns that Verity isn't just struggling, she's catatonic. Here's a clip from the trailer. You must have questions. Why can't your wife finish her book series? You really want to know?

55:03This is Verity. Doctors don't think she'll ever walk or talk again.

55:16She said, you are a brilliant, undiscovered voice.

55:26You're the only writer who can finish this last novel. Her fans know her voice.

55:37They would know it's not her. There's a lot of heavy work being done by the score there, isn't there?

55:44Simon Mayo: Yeah, that's right. Because that score is saying important thing, bad thing, scary thing about to happen. Like it's the end of the world. And that score is by Volker Bertelmann, who is honestly having an absolute whale of a time doing this. And he's also, he's scoring every single movie. Volker Bertelmann is becoming the most prolific composer of our time. I think it's him on The Uprising. I think he does music for that. Almost certainly. Almost certainly. Anyway, so she's going to have to do the writing alone. So she buries herself in the office and she's got all the notes that were made. But she also finds something else, something that suggests that all the darkness, which is in Verity's very dark fiction, where it's very, very dark books, maybe that darkness wasn't just limited to fiction.

56:32Maybe there's something else going on. What the hell is going on? What was going on? what's happening now so now it's no surprise if you've seen the trailer the trailer was giving away more information than I've just given you there incidentally like I said lots of plot but you can see from the beginning that you know she is she's going to they're going to become mirror images of each other she's in her office she's reading her notes she's sitting at her desk she's at some points wearing her clothes and inevitably falling for her husband played by handsome Josh Hartnett the surprise is at some point

57:05Simon Mayo: she's wearing her clothes Yes, at some point she's wearing Verity's clothes. At other point she's wearing her own clothes. She's always wearing clothes. I mean, well, actually not always. I thought you were alluding to the fact that there's vast scenes of nudity. No, there's not vast scenes, but there is a sort of frisson. As I said, there's a sort of erotic thriller frisson. And the surprises aren't that any of that stuff happens. It's how is it going to happen? How is this stuff going to play out? because we know that this is about dark fiction and we know that we're in slippy territory because, I mean, first you know that you're in a neurotic thriller.

57:39One way you know that is because there is a point when she's in a room and you overhear a clip on television and the clip that you overhear is Michael Caine and it's Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill. And then there is a clip on TV. There's a little bit of Daphne du Maurier. These kind of little things that are giving you the sense of which genre you're in. Actually, the biggest debt that this owes is to Joe Esterhaus, who wrote Music Box and Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct. And Basic Instinct, of course, is about a woman who is a writer, but is also involved in a murder mystery. And there's a whole bunch of stuff about how much are the books the clue to the murder mystery.

58:21The other thing is that all Joe Esterhaus' scripts have the same setup. They have the same setup, they have the same reveal, and then they have the same last minute pull the rug out from under you thing. That's what they do. I mean, in Music Box, it is literally the Music Box. In Jagged Edge, it's the typewriter. That's how it works. And this conforms very much to that model. The main difference is that this isn't written or played like the leery masturbation fantasies of an oversized man boy, which is what Joe Esterhaus, you know, that's how he writes. It's kind of, you could call it Esterhaus light.

58:58I prefer to think of it as an example of what Esterhaus, how he might have written had he not been that, you know, leering little boy. I mean, the script makes no sense in terms of in the real world, it makes no sense. But in the terms of the genre, it's fine. I mean, it's a B movie. It is a B movie, but with an A-list star and an A-list director. And I rather enjoyed it. And, you know, Johnson and Hartnett do exactly what they do. You know, they look fabulous and flirty. Anne Hathaway hams it up very nicely in old school fashion. there is a there's a nice on the nose thing in the title because of course verity verity means you know truth and but what is truth and well you know what is truth and what is fiction and incidentally this is one of two movies out this week that plays with the idea of what is true and what is fiction and i have to say this one does it rather better than the other one um it also has a kind of satisfyingly ambiguous finale, which is ambiguity is not something Esther has ever really managed.

1:00:06So I thought it was fun. I mean, it's preposterous and it's nonsensical in terms of the real world, but as a genre exercise, it was surprisingly well put together and I did enjoy watching it.

1:00:20Simon Mayo: Okay. That movie is Verity. All of which teases up very nicely because I can see the music approaching very fast. It's time for everybody's favourite part of the show. Never mind all the work that Mark puts into the film reviews, you know, going to see them, working out a carefully thought out response for your edification. What people want is dad jokes, which is what you're about to get in the laughter lift. Oh, good.

1:00:55Hey, Mark.

1:00:57Simon Mayo: interesting little natural history fact for you okay do you know how you can easily tell male and female ants apart i don't you just need to briefly put them in a little bit of water if it sinks it means it's a girl ant if it floats it's a buoyant oh it's buoyant buoyant thank you very much i was thinking it's a man ant I think that doesn't make any sense. We went fossil hunting in Suffolk over the summer, Mark. I was specifically digging. I was. Trust me, I was. Okay. I was specifically digging for dinosaur leg bones. Right. And I thought I had one. Okay. But it was a fossil arm. A fossil arm.

1:01:45Simon Mayo: Okay. Yeah. Not a dinosaur leg bone. Also on holiday. Yeah. I was walking with a good lady, ceramicist, there indoors, through a lovely little churchyard where we spotted a grave that said, here lies an honest man and an estate agent. Oh, I didn't think you were allowed to put two separate people in the same grave, said she. Everybody jumping ahead there. Very good. What is still to come, please, Mark? Digger. I digger, I digger. It was a boozy bigger. Bigger. And if you've enjoyed what you've heard so far, and even, honestly, if you haven't, there's a lot of extra content waiting for you over in take two such as one frame back our extended viewing feature and questions shmestions in which this week we're asked why is it only in horror that we see such extreme quantities of sequels remakes and reimaginings just search come at my patreon and join us over there you can get both takes ad free plus our exclusive fortnightly extra show, extra, extra show, Take Ultra, which features Mark and I enduring the murky world of our YouTube commenters.

1:02:55Simon Mayo: Oh, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie, dearie.

1:03:06Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. So, you're not worried about hosting the whole family for the holidays? Why would I be? Wayfair had everything I needed to get the house holiday ready.

1:03:40What if Mike brings his cheerful dogs? My tree has tons of five-star reviews telling me how sturdy it is. But what if everyone's plus one brings a plus one? We'll see how extendable this extendable table really is. And extra chairs are on the way. Okay. What if there's a blizzard and everyone has to sleep over? Ready to go with extra bedding and towels. From guest-ready essentials to holiday decor you can trust, Wayfair delivers.

1:04:10Simon Mayo: All right, well, we're moving on. I mean, some people had some ads and some people didn't. So now we get to the exciting what's on section, which is where you tell us about anything cinematic or cinema adjacent that is happening either because of you, because of your friends or near you. For example, par exemple, is Nicholas Vesey. Hi Simon and Mark. Aspen Chapel in Aspen, Colorado is hosting its third annual Sacred Cinema series with films that have a spiritual bent. This year we have The Mission with Robert De Niro on October 8th, Martin Scorsese's Kundun, which seems to have mysteriously disappeared from all screening services, Naysa Khmer's Persian classic Babaziz and finishing with Steven Soderbergh's Solaris with George Clooney on November 19th.

1:05:04Simon Mayo: It's all free. More info at aspenchapel.org. thank you nicolas veezy that's how they all speak in aspen colorado by the way that's uh you know the whole john denver thing that was a huge i was just wrong they didn't they don't talk like that they talk like nicolas veezy um nicolas thank you very much indeed uh thanks for the thanks for that and here's marco he's going next on the recent topic of poets and their representation in cinema why not come to a charity screening of simon messa soto's Un Poeta at the London Columbian Film Festival. It's a hilarious satire on raw poetic talent of the future and have been poets of the past.

1:05:45This is happening at the Genesis Cinema in East London, Saturday, 10th of October, 6pm. All proceeds will go to support relief efforts for the Columbian earthquake of August this year.

1:05:59Simon Mayo: Thank you, Marco. Please send in your videos to the The usual address, which is correspondenceatcoverdomain.com. It's Tom Cruise time, everybody. May I just point out before it's Tom Cruise time, on the subject of whether those what's on things are effective, Linda Marrick, who had one on our show last week, I saw her yesterday and I said, how did it go? She said it was sold out. And I'm sure that was entirely, entirely due to featuring on this program. Yes, on that. Well, let's get follow-up. I can't imagine that we have hundreds of listeners and viewers in Aspen, Colorado. But if anyone turns up at that because of this podcast, please tell Nicholas Veazey.

1:06:43Simon Mayo: Or just tell us. Because, you know, it'd be nice to know that it makes a difference. Even if it's one bum on one seat. So now it's Tom Cruise time. Tom Cruise o 'clock. Okay, so Digger, which is the new film from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the Mexican filmmaker behind Amoris Peros, 21 Grams, Babel, Birdman, Revenant, the last of which both earned Best Director gongs. So there was a big notice at the beginning of the screening that was on screen that said from the filmmakers, we want you to enjoy this, you know, and we want you to allow other people to enjoy it in the same way as you are doing. So please do not do any spoilers whatsoever.

1:07:23Don't reveal any secrets of the film. the like the problem is it's hard to know what constitutes a spoiler because i'm not sure what you're meant to not know i also think that you know clearly there will be some reviews that do actually tell you a bunch of stuff what i'm going to do is this i'm going to approach this as i have done in the past with movies like when we were doing the last james bond movie i am going to really avoid as much as is possible specifics about the you know exactly what's in the film i So we'll talk more in generalities. What we can say is this, because this is what everyone knows.

1:08:00It stars Tom Cruise as Digger, who is this wealthy tycoon who must, and this is according to the official strapline, who must save the world when one of his oil rigs malfunctions and causes an environmental catastrophe across the planet. Here is a clip from the trailer. Mr. President, 55 minutes ago, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig. causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. What was estimated casualties in the hundreds of thousands? Now, Digger here got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. What the hell is that? That thing is huge.

1:08:48Course, they all heap the blame on me. You just drowned half the damn continent. What the you gonna do, devil down? So, we also know that Cruise's performance involves a ton of prosthetics. Everyone's seen the thing transforming him into this portly, balding old guy with an outrageous accent. We know that from the trailer. Apparently, the makeup originally took six hours. They managed to get it down to one at Tom's instruction. Stellar cast includes Sandra Huller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, and Riz Ahmed. And it's filmed by Emmanuel Lubezki, who is a brilliant cinematographer on 35 mil using VistaVision.

1:09:22The budget, a whopping 125 million. So none of that is spoilery. That's all stuff that's in the public domain. As is the fact that Iñárritu came up with the idea for this in the wake of The Revenant. So 10 years ago, he said, I had an idea, not a script, not a film, just a relentless recurring obsession that has endured through all these years. I knew who this character was. I knew how he spoke, how he survived, how he seduced reality into agreeing with him. but it took me 10 years to do this film because I wasn't looking for a story I was looking for the right way of saying it and then 2019 when Tom Cruise was doing Maverick that was when they started talking about him doing it the script is now I think the multiple credits uh Sabina Berman like Dundin Dolores those people Jez Bartleworth's name is in there as well so big star-driven production from an Oscar-winning filmmaker with a huge budget how to describe it without doing anything that is a spoiler.

1:10:19One way of doing that will be to talk about other films that I think are significant here. So the films that this put me in mind of included most notably Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche NY, Synecdoche New York, which was a sprawling art pop production with Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ailing theatre director who creates this vast elaborate stage production, which which becomes bigger than life. It sort of kind of overtakes reality and it sort of blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality. Now that film divided critics and I didn't like it. If you remember, I thought it was kind of insufferably up itself.

1:10:58Digger also put me in mind for obvious reasons of Eyes Wide Shut, which was Stanley Kubrick's sprawlingly indulgent final feature in which Tom Cruise plays a man who in a fit of jealousy goes off into the night looking for sexual pleasure ends up at this great mask ball orgy, which may or may not be happening. Because the thing is based on trauma novel, dream novel, dream story. And there's a whole suggestion in Eyes Wide Shut that none of it is really happening. And that film really divided critics. And I didn't like it. I thought it was insufferably up itself. Actually, the film that Digger wants to remind you of is another Kubrick production, which is Dr.

1:11:38Strangelove, which is this kind of tragedy comic farce about impending nuclear disaster, in which a series of larger than life caricatures of presidents, generals, industrialists, you know, pontificate in slapstick fashion about a potentially world-ending disaster, which they are in the process of bringing about. Now, I like Strangelove, as does everybody. This wants to be Strangelove for the climate crisis age. It isn't. In fact, the thing it's closer to is a film which no one's heard of, which is Deal of the Century, which is a William Friedkin film that desperately wanted to be strange love.

1:12:12It was from a script by Paul Brickman. It was from the 1980s and started Chevy Chase and Sigourney Weaver. And it really wanted to be a kind of strange lovey film about the arms race, but it wasn't because it was nothing like as clever or funny as it needed to be. Nobody liked it. Nobody liked Deal of the Century. It crashed and burned and disappeared. and it didn't even divide critics and i didn't like it not least because i thought it was insufferably up itself so what you've effectively got rather than a 21st century strange love which is what i think it really wants to be is what i would call deal of the synecdoche and wide shut on the plus side you might say you might say it's you know it's encouraging to see a studio putting this much money into a big auteur-led art house folly.

1:13:08You know, I mean, people are saying that this, you know, in the wake of one battle after another and things like that, it's like, okay, studios are now backing big auteur productions. The problem is the last time this happened, when you've got studios backing really big budget auteur movies, we ended up with Heaven's Gate destroying United Artists. And, you know, some critics have embraced Heaven's Gate. I never liked that movie. I always thought it was an indulgence and insufferably up itself. This, Digger, is an indulgence. A grand and, I have to say, insufferably up itself, look at me folly, in which everybody appears to have taken an overdose of acting pills, but in which that criticism is promptly defused by the postmodern meta declaration that, oh, they're meant to look like they're acting.

1:14:01And it's like, you know, like postmodernism, being meta means never having to say you're sorry. You know, you think this animatronic cat that Tom Cruise is stroking looks theatrically shonky? Well, that's okay. We meant it to look like that. You think these performances are wiggy and preposterously over-egged? Well, that's okay. We meant them to be like that. You think the recurrent fourth wall framing device in which beautiful views from the window are revealed very, very early on to be window dressing, you think that's heavy-handed? It's okay. It's meant to be heavy-handed. Now, I'm not quite sure why the filmmakers have been so strict about not revealing anything, you know, the twist, because the thing is the film doesn't really have a twist.

1:14:47It has this meta-framing device that's flagged up very, very early on. And it's nothing new. I mean, we've seen it in everything from, you know, Lars von Trier's Dogville to Almodovar's Human Voice and that Sebastian Lelio thing, The Wander. You know, a device which says, look, we're making a film. You know, we're drawing attention to the fact that we're making a film. And the only twist here is that what is a familiar framing device becomes a sort of slightly less familiar core conceit. And that's kind of it. And what that means is for the first 40 minutes or so, before the film really starts to play its hand, it looks clunky and grating and overacted.

1:15:29And then it shifts into, oh, I see what you're doing. How long are you going to do it for? To which the answer is a very long time. Now, in its defense, in the later stages, it sort of pulls things together. It pulls things together much more effectively than I had thought it was going to, because there was a point about halfway through when I had completely lost patience with it. And then in the latter third, it kind of, you go, okay, fine. You've done that better than I thought you were going to. The problem, I mean, it may be that the second time round, it would look like a better film if you knew where you were from the beginning.

1:16:08But I can't imagine anybody coming out of this and going, I really want to sit through that again. As for all the previewing stuff about Tom Cruise is going to actually win the Oscar this time, he's actually going to get his competitive Oscar. It's not just that this isn't the best performance of his career. It's not the best performance in the film. The best performance in the film is Riz Ahmed. Riz Ahmed really should win something because he's terrific. He plays is Digger's chief scientist, Ganesh. And he does that really well. And his performance is, you know, pretty much worth the price of admission.

1:16:43But elsewhere, you've got people like Sandra Huller, who I think is one of the greatest actors of her generation, in a role that is completely wasted. I mean, just completely thrown away to the point that every time she walked in, I forgot that she was in the story. There's also, there is a very adventurous score by Cosmo Sheldrake. which sort of seemed to be channeling the spirit of the work that Jerskin Fendrix did. You know, because Jerskin Fendrix has now sort of become known for his, for his film scores. But I think, you know, when we were watching, when we were first seeing it, so it's like, okay, that's very, very experimental.

1:17:20I think this is kind of in a, in a, in a similar way, it's experimental. And if I still had a Scarlet show, I would be annoying the bosses every week by insisting that I play some unlistenably squonky thing from that soundtrack. but for the rest of it i haven't read the reviews because they were embargoed until um late last night so i don't know what the what the critics have said but my prediction is that it will it will divide critics this is just on the basis of the screening that i was in i could kind of feel it doing it that it will divide critics it will open big because of its star power i think it will then drop like a stone in the following weeks due to word of mouth i think it'll lose money and I think at some point in years to come it will be embraced as a cult masterpiece that was misunderstood by stupid critics like me because we weren't clever enough to understand its brilliance which is exactly what's happened to Eyes Wide Shut you know everyone now says oh Eyes Wide Shut it's a must be it's not Eyes Wide Shut is not a good film and it doesn't matter how long away from it we get and how much you think somebody said I did think about Eyes Wide Shut somebody said, oh, you edgelord, not liking Eyes Wide Shut.

1:18:29No, that's not edgelord. Nobody liked Eyes Wide Shut. What does that mean? It means, oh, you think you're so edgy, you know? And it's just like one of those really annoying things when people think that you're saying something to be edgy. And I'll get a certain amount of it for this. This is not brilliant. It is at best an occasionally jaw-dropping failure. And I mean jaw-dropping in a good way. Like, you know, you have to applaud its ambition and it's hubris but you also have to admit that it's nothing like a smart or important as it thinks it is is tom cruise any good does he play old well no but the answer to that question is that there is something inherent in that question which is part of the spoil oh god i mean insufferable is is the restrictions that they put i mean this is like a standard

1:19:20Simon Mayo: question is the is the lead star any good at doing what he's trying to do and you're saying that you can't no no i'm not i'm not saying that i can't what i'm doing is i'm policing myself very carefully your question was is tom cruise good at playing an old man and the answer to that question is no but it's no in more ways than than than you think and it's no in more ways than i'm than i can reveal due to the central conceit of the thing which is is he meant to be any good at playing an old man. And even, I think you can hear, even from the way I'm describing this, I mean, I'm finding myself insufferably up myself because that's, it's kind of part of what the movie is.

1:19:59And I'll also say this, when I watched it, I said halfway through, I was fed up with it. In the final third, I thought it kind of pulled itself back together again. I came out of the cinema thinking, well, it's meh, you know, it's meh. There's some bits work and some bits don't. the further away from it i get and i'm 48 hours away from it now the more annoying i found it the more i think about it the more empty it seems to me yeah well we're five seconds away from your

1:20:27Simon Mayo: review and i'm i i can't stand the film i haven't seen it every literally everything that you've said about it makes me want to uh go and watch anything else yeah well but i am going to say once again, because I was quite pleased with this, it is not strange love. It is deal of the synecdoche end wide shut. I don't quite follow all of that. But anyway, in the context of your review, I do. But I'm going to have to go away and study it all night. That is it for this week. It's been a Sony Music Entertainment production this week's team. Dom, Eric, Josh, and Heather, the redactor. He's not going to get credit.

1:21:06Simon Mayo: He's not even on the show today. So there has been no redactor. All the glory to Dom, Eric, Josh, and Heather. In take two, we're directing you to the Overflow Car Park. More chat about current film releases. Giving you some film viewing suggestions related to one of this week's new releases. So on the subject of Digger, we're looking at the best Tom Cruise non-action roles. Which is interesting. And don't forget me, Babbers, we're in Brazil in December. Mark, what is your film of the week? Well, in a week in which Hollywood threw$125 million at the screen to make Digger, I'm very proud to say that my film of the week is extra geography uh thank you one last email from Tabitha Tabitha from Brighton here second time emailer from early this year pregnant lady turned new mother glad to inform you that as well as my gas and air I did indeed enjoy some kermode and mayo before welcoming our sweet baby boy we are the equivalent he's gas and i'm air please please can you give a big welcome to your newest member of the church cassian bruce beaty lovingly named after the boss himself so i hope simon approves that sounds like a great name uh unsurprisingly i've not had much time for movies or podcasts recently so lots of catching up for me it'll be a lovely surprise if you do read this out when i eventually listen to it in 2027 thanks for all the lols from tabitha i'd have thought the overnight feeds is a perfect opportunity for you to count up, Tabitha, but you know best.

1:22:35Simon Mayo: We'll be back next week. And also, there'll be a fantastic take two, which has landed adjacent to this one.

1:22:45Finding a doctor is hard enough. Finding the right doctor, even harder. Someone who takes your insurance, has an available appointment when you need one, and feels like someone you can actually open up to. That's where ZocDoc comes in. Download the ZocDoc app to search and compare doctors by specialty, insurance, and availability. Read real patient reviews, find the right fit for you, and book instantly. Because getting seen by the right doctor matters. ZocDoc. Ready to be seen? Download the ZocDoc app today.