A Mailbag for All Time. Plus: Alex Ross Perry Returns!

24:41I don't know if this would be my number one in history, but I'm really curious what would have happened if Stanley Kubrick didn't die and he finished directing AI. I think that's a movie that I might have liked more. But I also, in turn, then would have liked to see where Spielberg would have put the energy that he was intrigued by with that scripted movie into. Like what movie would he have made because he didn't get to make AI and take it over from Kubrick would have been interesting. We'll never know. Also, Kubrick almost made Napoleon. Right. Oh, that's a great one. That's a great one. And that Tashin book that is the entirety of the pre-production of Napoleon.

25:19It includes like the script, all the storyboards, all the costumes, like everything that had been picked out. And then I forget what the reason was that that movie was not made. but that's literally a 700 page book with one of those fashion books that has like that carbon paper, like the paper is so thin. It's like you're reading an ancient Bible. Okay. Kubrick's Napoleon plus Barry Lyndon could have been the greatest double feature of all time, but he wouldn't have made Barry Lyndon if he had made Napoleon. That's why he took all that energy and research and put it into Barry Lyndon. So that would have been weird if he was like, now that I've completed Napoleon, I shall make Barry Lyndon.

25:51What if he did Barry Lyndon first and then Napoleon? Okay. Next question. Dana, can you talk about the movie theater business model? You mentioned in your Oscars hangover mailbag episode that certain movies would not be financially able to play in a thousand theaters nationwide. Why is that? When a movie decides to have a limited release, I assume part of the way they control this is by picking certain cities. But do they also limit their movie to a certain number of theaters in that city? And if so, how do they choose? It's both. It's an agreement between the theaters and the studios that they want to book certain films in the case of thunderbolts there's not really much of a conversation every disney movie plays on thousands of screens they don't do limited release they don't do you know slow rollouts for films i think this most adequately applies to like your a24s your neons your sony pictures classics the films that like you know usually start small like friendship opened over the weekend right in only a couple of feet and only a few theaters around the country and I think it's going wide on Memorial Day weekend.

26:54And so I think the limited release opening is kind of testing the ground for how wide it can or should go. Friendship's the kind of movie to me that I would guess it'll go into 1 ,500 theaters. It'll be a super competitive weekend because it's Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning, and Lilo and Stitch. Right. So it's kind of like counter-programming. But the theaters have to want to book the movie and the studios have to want to expand it. So it's like a negotiation and how they're booked. I don't know. It's like a symbiotic relationship. It's kind of the reason that CinemaCon exists. It's not actually to give us funny stories from Las Vegas.

27:33It is because these studios are to some extent courting the movie theaters. Now it's like a very bizarre codependent relationship because what else are the theaters going to do? You know, so that's a little bit of a, we want you to show these things, but also you don't have any other options. But yeah, there's ongoing conversations between both sides of what is going to be the best business for us. Yeah, and I don't think that there was much, too much talk about Sinners last year at CinemaCon. I think maybe Ryan Coogler was on set and shared like a Zoom video. And then this year, because the movie was two weeks away, there was hardly anything about Sinners at all.

28:20But that's the kind of movie that's kind of interesting in this question that's being asked because that was a movie that fought for the premium large format screens and got them and got them for two weeks. And then Thunderbolts came in and took those screens. And now after two weeks, Sinners has taken them back. So I think Sinners is getting IMAX again this coming weekend. And that isn't something that was prearranged. It's something that basically was caused by demand. So as much like planning and strategizing as you can make, if a movie takes off, it can get theaters that it wasn't originally planning on because the theater business has to be attentive to the customer demand.

28:54So it really is case by case. I don't know. What was the movie we were talking about where I was like, this movie can't play a thousand screens? Was it a Nora maybe? I have. Maybe. Yeah. It might have been. I actually don't know what the maximum theater count that movie ever had was, even though it ended up doing like 20 million total in U.S. box office. But, you know, the business is in a weird spot. It's harder and harder to find phenomenons. And so they have to be like more reactive. You can't just be like nine months in advance. You can't just be like, well, our schedule is locked. Like, do you know what the number five movie at the box office was this weekend?

29:32Revenge of the Sith? No, good guess. Thank you. Clown in a Cornfield. Okay. Which is a new horror movie from IFC and Shudder, which is pretty fun. and great title it's and it is what is on the label I assume that is the premise yeah so it's like thousands of beavers or hundreds of beavers but with murderous clowns which one is the is it hundreds or thousands it's hundreds but thousands could be the sequel could be the hundreds of beavers folks I know we're listeners to this show I listen the greatest title ever ever it was a great film Clown in a Cornfield is I didn't have that on my bingo card is like opening at number five a month ago, six months ago for sure.

30:14But here we are. We live in a time. Horror reigns. Bob, what's next? Philip asks, my question is, which fake movie from the studio works the best? Okay, so I am not caught up yet. All right. Oh, okay. Because... I think all of the ones that Philip mentioned here are probably from episodes that you've seen. There's Sarah Polly's artful drama about a woman finding herself. I've seen that one. There's Scorsese's Buscemi vehicle Kool-Aid. Sure. and there's Ron Howard's Taxi Driver action movie oh right those are the options that he's given I think there are more throughout the series so maybe you don't but these are the yeah yeah yeah I'm sorry once again I was watching a lot of Paul Newman movies which has the most commercial viability which works the best is how it's phrased I mean you gotta go with Scorsese like that's and the I would watch it even though like I slightly agree with Catherine Hahn it's like Steve Boucher Demi, wonderful actor, is not like the first person I pick to headline, you know.

31:18Because he's not beautiful enough? Or like, what are your thoughts there? No, I just, well, it's, I mean, I guess it's a new spin on a cult leader. And so it's a different interpretation of the magnetism and the cult of personality, literally, that sprouts up. But, you know. In the most recent episode, Zoe Kravitz appears in the episode. Oh, cool. And she is nominated for an award for a movie. Mm-hmm. And then she is pitching a future film. Yeah. The future film is called Blackwing. I won't spoil it for you. Okay. But that's the one that I was the most like, hmm. I would watch this? I would like to see that.

31:58So that's my answer. Okay. The Ron Howard movie I thought looked terrible. Yeah. Not my vibe. Funny episode, but I thought that looked really bad. I thought it was a really funny episode just because of the way that they went about it, where they were like, I love this movie. And then it went on for 45 more minutes. We've been there. We've been there. We've all had. Yeah. We've literally also been in that screening room. Oh, the literal one? Yeah. No, that was on the Warner Brothers lot. I saw, that's where I saw Horizon Part 1. That's where I've seen. You've been in this. Oh, yeah. I've been in that room.

32:30Oh, it's that room? Okay. What else have I seen there? That's where I saw The Way Back. the one of the last that's the Ben Affleck yes sports drama sports drama that was like one of the last pre-pandemic movies that I saw trying to think but so yeah I've literally been in that though they sit in the middle in the front in the front I will sit in the front but I'll forever yeah okay next question comes from Tim I'm curious about why Amanda majored in classics and hope that she will discuss it some on the pod I was the only person with the major in my entire graduating class and I meet so few people who share this background.

33:07So I'm genuinely interested. But the real question for the movie podcast is does Amanda feel or think any sort of way about the ancient history movies? Asking this with the idea, of course, that we have Nolan's Odyssey adaptation coming up, coming in hot. So this is going to be a point of discussion. I don't know if I've ever heard you answer this. Thank you so much, Tim, for asking, for being curious. So I think the reason, so I went to Dartmouth and they have a wonderful classics program and they just have a lot of great professors. And so I think I had to take a survey course and I met Edward Bradley as one of the professors.

33:46And it just seemed sort of like a small college, like old school, like fun experience. I like part of it was the professors in the department. But the other thing was, it did feel like the classics were the building blocks for most of like Western storytelling. And so to because I like reading, because I like movies, I, you know, because I like the arts, I was like, this seems like my blind spot. And so to study these, these stories and this world will then give me the language, like story language to then to read everything else. And that is sort of true, at least for the Western canon. What was your intention?

34:29Like, what did you hope to do with it? Nothing, which is, you know, useless. I mean, I guess... You weren't like to be an academic or to be just a journalist? There was a time where I thought maybe I'll be an academic. I did also like maybe want to work in books or magazines or... I think maybe I thought I wanted to be in books for a while. I'm surprised you didn't become a book editor. now that I know you as well as I do? Because I like it was it was on the table, but it's so slow. And I wanted to do magazines, you know, like magazines is actually the fusion of, you know, books and then my attention span.

35:08Well, back then, but now it's TikTok and one magazine. Yeah. But so, I mean, I do like reading, so I thought it would be useful. So that's why I so as a result, I don't really think that it affects. I don't pay a huge amount of attention to, they don't really make that many like classics adaptations. I'm obviously very excited for the Odyssey, but I would say that it more informs the way that I watch all movies or something, you know, and you can just, it's not even that they're ripping it off. You just like, I have a respect for the patterns and the like the forms and the formulas of literature and what people can do with them.

35:50And it's not copying to me. It's that real artistry isn't finding a fresh way to tell, like, the three stories that, like, we all come back to. I was thinking about this particular concept actually over the weekend. I was listening to Plain English, Ringer podcast hosted by Dark Thompson. And their episode last week was about, is this the worst time in American pop culture? Like, are things as bad as they've ever been? And Spencer Kornhaber, who's a writer at The Atlantic, I guess I'd written a piece about it. I have not read that piece. what they were using Derek was kind of premising it upon a couple of things one of which was music and how new music is accounts for the lowest amount of listening than it ever has apparently in the kind of American consciousness but then the other thing was just that the IP-ization of movies and television has created this kind of circling the drain quality which is something that we talk about all the time hopefully have been nuanced about over time the one thing that kind of like scratched at me is they were having their chat And that Derek was zeroing in on was it's not that it's just IP, like over 100 plus years of movies.

36:57This is even more true in the centuries of books is that there is like an archetypal story structure that is repeated. And I would venture to guess there's been more than 10 adaptations of Robin Hood in movies since 1920. I would venture to guess the same is true of Christ-like stories or of Knight's Tales or of Romeo and Juliet-esque doomed lovers. And sure, like, there's something super specific and kind of soul-deadening about 11 Transformers movies in 15 years. Right. But even the Transformers movies are like underdog stories about a band, like a group of bandits who have to overcome, you know, the more powerful, you know, galaxy conquering Zeus like figure.

37:41Like, so if you kind of like pull back a little bit, I think you can be a little bit more generous about the state of stories if you put it in that context. But you kind of have to do some of the work that you were doing in college, I think, to have that perspective on it. Well, also, the first Transformers movie, which is a fresh spin. A masterpiece, thank you. Well, but also like a fresh spin on, you know, Robin Hood, but also, like, I don't know, Sisyphus or, you know, whatever. The first time you're reinterpreting it in that way or you're starting with this recognizable story, like, in a new world and what does that new world, like, teach you?

38:22It's fun. by the eighth one when you've then had to like reinvent and add like five more villains and you've gotten away from the basic story structure you're saddled with all this canon and also like it's just robots going like this you know like the robots going like this is the only good thing um but that is very good so but yeah and it is and it is very good but it's like it i i think what you're saying is true and right and is honestly like a lot of the reason that we like genre movies because genre movies are just these archetypes and stories that like we know so well. By the way, we're not doing anything that this is just Joseph Campbell.

39:02Like it's not, we're not like reinventing the wheel here. So I think, I think you're totally right and then it is also possible to get saddled down and like sequel-itis and just the hat on a hat on a hat on a robot. I think I just get a little bit concerned when people are like, it's never been worse and I'm like, how many, Did you watch all 280 films that were released in 1937? Right. Like, if you didn't, I'm not sure you're qualified to absolutely certify that fact. Because at that time, there were tons of incredibly redundant Westerns that were using the same story structure over and over and over again.

39:37Maybe they didn't have as much lore attached to them as what we have now. But they had a kind of blandness in the way they told their story that you could just completely tune them out. What's worse? You know, like I think it's all just kind of a squishy debate and I'm as guilty of anybody as of like raising the temperature on a take. But it's an interesting thing to think about even at our lowest moment that most of this stuff is just iterating on stories that are thousands of years old. Yeah. You studied not thousands of years ago. How many years ago did you study? Like six years ago. And I remember everything.

40:08That's the other thing that my, like, you know, my mastery of both dead languages, ancient Greek and Latin was exact. And anytime Zach and I are traveling and we find like a Latin inscription, he just loves to be like, all right, what does that say, big kid? I've never gotten one right. Like literally never. Latin is hard. The other, the other reason I majored was that you had to, there was a language requirement. And for most languages that are spoken, you had to go to language lab. but for Latin obviously you didn't so a lot of the athletes and especially all the hockey players took Latin and so I just like took Latin with the hockey players which was a great time they knew how to throw a party enough said Bob what did you study in college?

40:54I studied good old journalism I have a journalism degree at New York University which is my alma mater beloved definitely no problems going on there at all these days they make you double major you can't just major in journalism so I was also an American studies major. Oh, yeah. The classic American studies. The one true myth. Zach was a social studies major, which is the actual myth. Honestly, yeah. American studies is basically just like social studies, but they're like, we've thought differently about it now. You know, we have some different takes on it. So those are my majors. Okay. What's next?

41:30Question comes from Cameron. Question for Sean. As a burgeoning physical media obsessive, I'm curious if there are any Blu-ray white whales out there that you've been hunting for but haven't been able to obtain. I've been trying to find 28 years later at a sub$100 price. I believe they're reissuing 28 days and weeks later ahead of the release of the new film. So you can take that one off your list. I do have the double disc that features both movies on one thing, which I don't know when I got it. It must have been a long time ago, probably around when it came out. So I do have that. Dogma is like a long desired one that is finally coming out they're re-releasing the movie in theaters in June yeah I'm trying to figure out what to do I mean you gotta to finally do Kevin Smith try to get Kevin on the show Matt and Ben on the show CR Yassi threw her hat in the ring she wants in oh really?

42:18she wants because of the Alanis of it all I really like Dogma but I just assumed that you guys were gonna just go full Kevin Smith you're more than welcome I mean you know it could be a nine person pod You sit between Matt and Ben. That seems great. So I was thinking about this also when we were doing Paul Newman. There was a really great Blu-ray company that went out of business some five or six years ago called Twilight Time. And they issued editions of Exodus, Ombre, and The Long Hot Summer on Blu-ray. And those are all like$80,$100 on eBay. and I'm like, I don't really know that I need to own these movies, but I would like to have them for my collection.

42:58So those are on my list. And then Near Dark is probably the single biggest one. There is a, I think, I'm almost certain there's an existing American edition of Catherine Bigelow's Vampire Movie, but it's consistently like at least$100 on eBay. And it's weird that it hasn't been issued. I have to assume it's like a music rights thing, that it hasn't been re-released because a lot of people would buy it. but that's the short list I made there's also like hundreds of movies that are just not available in the format that I could make a 10 hour episode of but I won't do that to spare you thank you is there anything you would like to own on Blu-ray everyone is like when will Amanda when will the domino fall when will she topple I don't have a collector's mindset I just don't for this so like the thing where you're like I really need to own the long hot summer I think it's important that people be able to see movies you know that like they not be lost to you know time and corporations and the foibles of technology and licensing but like I don't also I just don't have that mindset where it's like I need to have every single thing here in my house right now okay and I buy I and I do understand like the format also I you know I for books I prefer to have like I guess I am a I'm a physical media for books I mean like you've seen my house it's really I was gonna call you on this but I'm glad you will fight this but I can't be there's no way to be definitive with books you know and so I just kind of buy the ones that I want to have and that I want to revisit and I I don't know I'd rather go to a movie theater to see an old movie.

44:43You know, I'd like, I'll put the money towards like video. It's just showing more stuff that I want to see all the time. Okay. But that's, that's where I am. I like, I really honestly don't think it's going to happen. I just, the plastic's also really ugly. Like I just do actually think it's, it's pretty ugly. I'm sorry. Okay. That's where I am. Next question comes from Scott. I recently spent an entire Saturday enjoying a Los Angeles movie marathon with a friend of mine. We watched Hail Caesar, Boogie Nights, Wrath of Man, Point Break, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. If you had an entire Saturday to spend watching a themed movie marathon, what theme would you pick?

45:20And what snacks might you have? I mean, I do this all the time. This is my job. So the question is not that novel to me. You don't need to be snotty about it. I have a fun idea. Okay. Oh, great. Yeah. Go ahead. Just a thing I've been thinking about. Okay. And I think inspired by like a couple of drafts that we've done and that I was sort of able to do it. So I wanted, I would do a yuppie cinema. And also it's inspired by certain parts of people's lives, not naming any names. So here's what I've got so far. Baby Boom, Working Girl, Broadcast News, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction. Yeah. And then I think you ought to have like pesto pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, you know?

46:02And what are some other really, really 80s foods? You want to watch 10 straight hours of moderately wealthy people having problems that are manageable. Don't you? But it's an interesting cultural moment. It is also just because those are all like 87, 88, 89. So they are movies about my parents, more or less. And the time that we were born into, which is sort of interesting. I find it funny. I find I love obviously I love Working Girl. I love broadcast news. I love Fatal Attraction. I think like Baby Boom and Wall Street are culturally interesting and I like them. I don't know. It's just like a funny.

46:48Who's watching your kids while you do this? Right. I guess the person who inherits them via a mechanism that's never really explained to Baby Boom. It's okay. Yeah, there's a flaw in the film. Um, I don't know. I mean, I, I did, I did this for the free to cinema last year. The great cinema. I'm not angry. I'm not just kind of like, I do this, you know, I'm literally just like my whole job is thinking of themes for movies and then watching the movies and then explaining the theme on a podcast. Yes. So I, when I was getting ready this morning and I was like, I was doing several masks. So I actually, I did.

47:31I wore my LED mask for part of it. And then this was crucially when I took my LED mask off. But I was just sitting there looking at my computer and like Zach came in the room and like looked at my face and then like looked scared in a way that I recognized. It was like Darth Vader taking off the mask. He was like, and I realized I had to explain my facial expression. And I was like, I'm just like, I'm just doing some mailbag questions. And I'm like, I'm, I'm thinking I'm modulating reaction. And I was like, you didn't do anything. He was like, okay, I thought I did something. And then he said to me, he was like, be kind to your public.

48:07They want to ask you questions. So be kind to your public. They want to ask you questions. I know you're not giving me this lecture after eight years of being unkind on this podcast. Okay, what's next, Bob? Bob, you have a marathon that you would program? I mean, it's hard for me not to just think about the fact that I would watch every Mission Impossible movie in one day. But that's really too obvious. this is one of my favorite things about rep theaters is when they curate stuff like this you can tell that they're really just kind of like searching for a theme and then putting all these movies in there like Metrograph does a really great job of this right now they have a collection of illustrating the future like all the movies that Sid Mead did the production design for which I went and saw Blade Runner doing so like little stuff like that I think is really cool so if this is the type of brain that you have when it comes to watching movies check out your local rep theater or listen to this podcast or listen or I hope you're already listening Bob I'm just clocking this artwork behind you oh yeah this is is this new no this is I've had for a little while but since we moved you re-hung I really I like it in my office thank you yeah there you go uh Spencer asks my question is about family movie traditions the three of you had growing up for me it was a blockbuster runs every Friday night immediately after school no exceptions so what were those family movie traditions you had growing up and any you're looking to pass on to family and friends.

49:30I mean, blockbuster runs are also part of our youth. Yeah, I mean, totally. It's not that dramatically different. I remember spending hours and hours and like, you know, looking at the backs of VHSs and hoping that there would be like a cassette behind the cover, you know, that you could grab. A very resonant feeling. But the family tradition that comes to mind is, I think probably started in high school or maybe when I was, or college. But for Thanksgiving night and Christmas night, I would always go to the movies with my dad and usually my Aunt Betty and Uncle John. And that's a fun thing to do.

50:16but my dad always had the pick and just like a hilarious run of like the worst holiday movies you know like the savages like uh synecdoche new york um i'm trying to think of that will now make it three references to synecdoche new york on this podcast what else uh let's see what's something and a half grams with nine great do you remember the drug yeah the inaritu movie yeah Is it nine and a half? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, like all the numbers get jumbled together, but it was not an uplifting holiday movie. Um, you know, so, and then I remember, and then 21 grams, 21 grams. Yeah.

50:57So he just like gets it, uh, incredibly wrong. And I'm sitting there with my aunt and uncle just being like, this is like really, uh, inappropriate for all of us to be watching this together or, you know, classics like we, we went to see the romantic comedy morning glory, which is wonderful and when we left my dad was like so well that won any oscars same reaction to chris rock's top five which was i think the first holiday movie that my dad that zach and my dad spent together oh no no it was actually inside lewin davis which my dad and zach absolutely loved and i was like it was pretty good and then my dad said amanda doesn't like it if people don't talk in the movies which is true which was great criticism so hard to believe you ended up here so my dad roasting me uh on the holidays is my favorite holiday uh movie tradition i don't we didn't have a ton of traditions i went to the movies all the time obviously with my parents my parents split up when i was about 10 and so i would spend every other weekend at my dad's house my dad lives on the beach in a kind of like really run down version of a michael mann house um and he lived in uh oh shit what was the name of the community it was right next to like Gilgo Beach where all those terrible murders happened.

52:14And, you know, when we were kids, every Saturday night, HBO premiered a new movie at 8 p.m. on the network. And so sometimes it would be a comedy and sometimes it would be an action movie. And sometimes it would be like an absolutely depraved crime drama. And my dad, like every Saturday night, was like, well, let's watch the HBO movie, whatever the new HBO movie is. And I'm certain that I saw several men get their heads blown off at like 10 years old because my dad was like, whatever. We're watching this. And my brother was six at the time. So that's a fond memory that I have of being a kid and seeing movies.

52:48I mean, as far as right now, what traditions we have, Alice and I go to the movies all the time. Eileen comes with us, obviously, a lot of the time too. And now every Sunday we've been watching a Godzilla movie, which has been really fun. And it's like themed up and she's like, I'm ready for Godzilla. Let's do it. We watched Ibira Horror of the Deep, which is about a giant evil crustacean that goes to war with Godzilla yesterday. wasn't my favorite but Alice just standing on the couch cheering during the fights just like I need Godzilla to do it you know and like at one point Godzilla rips off the crustacean's claw and starts beating him with it great moment Mothra is her fave so she's like cheering Mothra on to wake up cause like all of the native people that like worship at Mothra's feet and then they have to like sing a song to awaken her so she'll be like wake up Mothra Wake up.

53:39Anyway, a really weird tradition that we have going, but inspired in part by Tracy, who told me that he and his son had been watching all the kaiju movies, and she's been digging it. So that's a good one. That's really nice. Yeah. Do you and your family have any - We have Friday night movie nights, but it's mostly Knox just being like, I want to watch either Porco Rosso, thanks to Sean and Bobby for that recommendation. Though I do have to say at one point that Knox had a straw and then put it in his mouth like a cigarette, and he's like, I'm being like Porco. And I was like, well, maybe I should have screened this.

54:15I think CR has watched Porco with Nox many times on Friday night. Elite. Robin Hood. They're both planes. You know, he hates animation. You know, those love planes. They are really beautiful planes. Robin Hood's really in the rotation after Vidiots did the special screening. Great one, the Disney one. Top Gun Maverick, obviously. and Mary Poppins has really been hanging on in a big way. Yeah. Singing in the Rain has fallen out which is a little depressing for me but we had a good run. These things come in waves. We'll get there. Yeah. Want to do one more Bob? Yeah. I really love this question from Sharon.

54:50Sharon says on an earlier episode Sean mentioned that he anticipated years down the road conversations with future filmmakers about the film I Saw the TV Glow. This film was appreciated and discussed by critics and cinephiles but remained largely unknown to the wider public. From this comment, I began to wonder what other films from the last few years that were not widely recognized by the Academy or general public have been added to the film canon? What are the lesser known recent films that are the most likely to inspire the next generation of filmmakers? I like that question. Before we get into it, Jane Schoenbren's new movie was just announced a few days ago, which I think they talked about on the show teenage sex and death at Camp Miasma which is going to star Hannah Einbinder and Jillian Anderson which is at movies so that's exciting.

55:41I mean I wrote some stuff down like I just tried to look at the last few years of movies that we liked that were you know cinephilic but maybe didn't take off in any other way. The biggest one for me from last year is Nickel Boys which I think still hasn't really found its cult moment You know, like it was really loudly proclaimed. It's just a tough movie to watch at home because if you have any distraction, you kind of lose your way in it. So, but I do think that that's a movie that you could see a world where even like two years from now, it gets like a repertory screening reputation. I mean, that's what'll happen.

56:18And then also last year, I thought of Red Rooms, which we talked about multiple times though we never devoted an episode to it. I don't know if you ever got a chance to see it. I didn't, but it was like a solid 25 minutes on the top films of the year. Yes. Well, me and Adam and Chris were all like, you know, in the sicko meme throughout the entire film. And I've seen that film start to get memed a little bit online that in a way that tends to signal that it's going to be a big one. I don't know. What are some other ones for you in recent years? I wrote down Nope and was surprised that you didn't, which I mean, I understand it was moderately successful.

56:53It made like$300 million. So, you know, or maybe not that much. It made a lot of money. But it did make a lot of money. But it's funny, even some thread that you started was having some fight about like Jordan Peele and how many are like hits and how many are misses. And Nope was like really tossed up, you know. Yeah. It was 170 is what it made ultimately. Yeah. Which is good, but not great. But that has been a real cause of yours and a lot of cinephiles of just like, this is the one. Yeah. I mean, you're right. And I think that there is an increasing belief among some people that that is kind of, even though it's not as fun a movie as Get Out, that its themes are so big.

57:36Right. And it's also a movie about movies. Yeah. And movies about movies, I think something is held against them a little bit too. Like they can get very culty, but then it's a little bit like this is only for nerds. But yeah, I like Nope. Nope, that's a good one. Just some obvious ones like Babylon. Sure. We've spent a lot of time on. Didn't really do very much business or do much with the Oscars. X and Pearl, the first two movies in Tai West trilogy, I think are really, really big among cinephiles. People love those movies. The Fablemans? We've been trying. I think we're going to get to the end of the decade and people are going to say this is one of the most important movies of his career.

58:21And some people did say that and we were very passionate about it on the show, but it was not a huge Oscar movie. It was not, it didn't do that well at the box office. It was almost like Spielberg waited too long to make his super personal, you know, biographical story for some people. But there are many shots in that movie that are very self-reflexive and get people kind of like pondering about themselves, about their relationship to movies, about their relationship to art. It's a great movie. It is also, I mean, as soon as you said, I think Fableman's is the answer, but also we all slept on West Side Story.

58:56I mean, like you and I did it. Like we loved it. And obviously it was affected by the pandemic. But it was like, this is like a really great movie by one of our great living filmmakers. And no one seems to really care. I was a little cool on a bunch of Spielberg stuff in the 2010s. and I've been super hot on his last two and think that they're among his best movies of the last 25 years. So, there's others like First Cow I think also got a big hit because it was one of the last movies released before COVID. Right. And so like a lot of people streamed it and watched it at home. And so, you know, I think Kelly Reichert's kind of profile was raised somewhat among younger movie watchers.

59:32I see a real baby girl. I see it percolating. That's an interesting one. It's like, I think that it had a certain corner of cinephiles and then also... It obviously wasn't like widely seen, though it did pretty well. People were asking us about Nicole Kidman not being on our list on our 35 over 35. That seemed to be the big omission. And there's always one where we forget about somebody. I wouldn't have put her on the list, though, because she hasn't been the star of a movie that was an authentic box office hit in like 15 years. Right. It's been a really long time. It doesn't mean her movies aren't good.

1:00:05It might, honestly, what happened might have been that she fell off eligibility for one of the prior lists because she does so much TV. And then we just forgot. Yeah. The other reason was just she just does a ton of television. And so she's kind of shifted. But this is really, baby girl, people are seeing it. People are referencing it. It's like, I think it's starting to get memed a little bit, like the milk and everything. You can just kind of. What do you think about the take that it didn't go far enough? that it should have been even more sexually explicit and or depraved?

1:00:40There are plenty of sexually explicit or depraved movies out there. Like, you know, I think... I like to me it didn't feel dishonest or censored in in that way like the the parts that fell a little flat were like the girl boss stuff and not the sex stuff stuff I thought the stuff that was like the girl bossing the stuff like the girl stuff that stuff you know what's like the girl stuff like the stuff you know the stuff like taboo but not like perverted and weird or not too perverted and too weird just kind of like something that you're not supposed to say rather than it wasn't like violent exactly and I think that there that is what makes it interesting is the specificity of it so I liked Baby Girl I liked it too Bobby what about you?

1:01:33you got some recent classics that you think are going to go in the canon in the next few years? I'll throw two at you I don't know that this movie is going into the canon, but I do think it's doing weird enough stuff that people who make films will cite it in 20 years, and that film is Megalopolis. There's some stuff visually and just audacity-wise that I think is inspirational to people who want to make the movies. And of course, there was enough coverage about that movie that there's a lot to learn about it. The other one is The Northman. I think a lot of people are going to be like, that inspired me to make something so dedicated to a specific vision about a story that is not necessarily commercial, but it's still an incredible act of filmmaking.

1:02:13Those are the two that I would say. Both really good shouts. Megalopolis comes up again in our conversation with Alex. It does. King of the segue. Yeah. Thank you. Should we go there right now? Yeah. Okay. Let's go to our conversation right now with Alex Ross Perry. Thanks so much for all your questions out there.

1:02:33Alex Ross Perry is here. He's here to talk about pavements but i was thinking about this you more so i think even than cr than tracy letts than all of these you know van lathan these joanna robinson these people who like would be king would be third chair like you have been fighting the fight for longer than anybody i feel like on this show i will say at no point in that sentence that i know where it was going it started off as soon as tracy came into the picture i was like okay i know where this i thought it started off about about we're going to talk about tapes or something. No. Or, you know, physical movies.

1:03:05But then you just pivot it to people I've never met. Maybe. I mean, I guess it's, I was just saying, this is, you know, maybe the fourth. Have I recorded in more physical spaces for appearances than any guests? Because you guys did one in New York. You were there? Well, no, you did one without me in New York. But I was thinking last night when you were talking about the long process of making this movie, that we recorded the day that you, or like the day before you were doing your Pavement Museum exhibition. And I, when like we were in New York and you were trying to explain to us what was going on.

1:03:40And I like nodded politely. And I made promises in what, that was New York Film Festival. So it would have been September 23. 22, yeah. 22. It was almost three years ago. And I made promises about what the movie would be. And yeah, I was like, it's this and this and this. You followed through. And it did actually happen. I know. It's weird when stuff like that works out. Sean came to the museum that's in the movie. We recorded in person. That was, I think, something I've never heard replicated, which is we did horror draft and you just gave commentary, which I was extremely into. And I feel like that format has never been repeated of like.

1:04:19I mean, in many ways, that is the like half of these episodes are him just being like, let me tell you about Minecraft. and I'm just like, let me tell you about the rest of the world. This was really like me, you, and Chris had had draft prep and you were like, I'm here to talk about my aversion to this genre and my unwillingness to explore it at all. And it was, I thought, quite good. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about you. I think of you every Halloween now and your various backyard installations. How is that going? It's going to pop off this year because I moved upstate. Right, right, right.

1:04:52So I have a big yard now. Okay, but everything came with you. Well, I only had a few things and they were small. Can you share any of your plans for this year? Well, I've already started buying blow molds. Okay, good. My plans are that I moved and like Facebook Marketplace, like in small towns is really useful. In New York, it's not. In LA, it's probably not. Okay. And I just, you can start picking up Halloween blow molds in like March. Okay. And I'm collecting. You don't open it to the public? Is it like another museum? But I was told when we looked at the house, like Halloween in this town is crazy.

1:05:24Oh, good. So I was like, good, I need to compete. You said you're somewhat proximate to Sleepy Hollow, which is exciting. Yeah, we're like less than an hour. Yeah, it's a lovely part of New York. And that's further south. Yeah. We'll be there. Well, so wait, in terms of recording. The amount of information covered in like three minutes is so astonishing at this point. This is how we do. Because me trying to talk about how many locations I visited. So you're here in LA. You've never recorded with us in LA before? No, you did in Hollywood. You came into the old studio in Hollywood. and I think you've said was like year one of the show it might have been year one was it for Golden Exits yeah okay so you also went to the Manhattan office in One World Trade you also went to the Brooklyn studio which is no longer open so this is my fourth physical there's one more do you remember oh in South by Southwest South by Southwest yeah yes with Elizabeth Moss yeah oh now that's obviously not a proprietary space of yours but well it is now I bought it after that conversation and I wanted to memorialize that space another Spotify land grab So I've recorded in a huge amount of physical spaces, which is weird because I feel like I often do it on Zoom also.

1:06:27That's true. You've been on Zoom a few times. My point is… Has anyone else been in that many spaces other than employees of this company? I don't think so. I mean, I haven't been in that many spaces. Yeah, that's not true. Because I'm not South by Southwest and I don't think I've ever been in the Manhattan studio. Is that true? Yeah. Wow, we've got to correct that. Your last New York trip was the Brooklyn studio. I guess so. Yeah. Shame on you. What have you been doing? Having kids? Yeah. Tough. It's only slightly more austere than this one. Okay. You don't feel warm and at home here? It's warm.

1:07:00Can I take my jacket off during the recording? We are also allowed to stop down and adjust the temperature. I see you, Jack. Thank you for your support always. You walk into an office like this and you're like, it's either going to be 55 degrees in here and I need to wear a jacket for two hours or it's going to be like weirdly warm because of the lights. I think it being an unseasonably warm 93 degrees in Los Angeles this morning is a factor. We don't quite know how to react to that in May. It's usually 70 or lower in May, oddly, in this city. Anyhow. Hey, welcome to LA. Scintillating stuff. You screened pavements last night.

1:07:32Yes, we did. You've been screening it around the country, around the world. You went to Canada? Relatively, yeah. You went to Venice? Yes, I went to Venice. You went to Venice? Famously. New York Film Festival? Yeah. The world's getting smaller when you include that. But Rotterdam, and it played a bunch of places I didn't go. Rotterdam, pretty fancy. of the London Film Festival. Okay. Which, you know, should be on your radar. It should. I'd love to go. Feels like the kind of thing you could lobby for. Yeah. Sure. Who's, I mean, she could lobby and I could decline. Would you decline London in October?

1:07:59I love London. October. Oh, that would be, we could, is it like right after New York? Or is it before New York? It is directly after New York. Oh, so we could just keep going. Keep flying east. Okay. Sure. You know? Thanks for furthering this issue we have on the show here. It's a festival I have a lot of affinity for. Okay. But you did not go you did. I did. Okay. It's held in the Prince Charles among dozens of other theaters. We love the Prince Charles. It's a beautiful time of year to be in a beautiful place. And I was there for this. And then, you know, when you're young, you can go to 15 international festivals.

1:08:26When you have family, you can go to like two. Right. Has the film been rapturously received and have you been called a genius? It has. Yes. These are all true things, which is interesting, not because I want that for myself, but because it's an obtuse thing that's risky and strange. And it's the risk of failure in this is severe, not because it's like controversial, but because it's like, you're just giving someone something that's in a shape that is radically unfamiliar. And the response could just be like, nice try. Right? Like, I can't even think of something that that's like. So the fact that people are...

1:09:04Megalopolis, perhaps? Almost, yeah. There's a little hint of that. This is the indie rock Megalopolis. I feel a huge affinity for Megalopolis. And when I saw it, basically like four or five days before our New York premiere, I was like, this is so in step with what I'm about. And I loved the experience of being like, this is just someone else who's working through something and going like, why does it have to be this way? Why can't I just like do something different? I wish the film had gone further. As I've conveyed to you, my ultimate edit of Megalopolis is it edited together with this Mike Figgis documentary.

1:09:36Oh, yes. Where it's like... Have you seen that? No. But like, as with this movie, which you've now both seen, like wouldn't most movies, or at least a Megalopolis type movie, be better if it's like, this scene's not working. And then you just cut to them making the scene and you're like, all right, now this has some juice. Well, some of the greatest movies of all time do have that component. Like Apocalypse Now has that, Fitzcarraldo has that. And those movies' legends are bigger because of the fact that those things exist. that sort of like external documentary about the making of the thing. But you decided to put the documentary inside the making of the scripted film and the musical that is also inside another kind of documentary about a reunion.

1:10:15Like it is all of the pieces altogether smashed in. It's like a turducken. It is, yeah. I think I feel like people used to talk about a lot. I was going to say, do we need to translate that for people under 30 who listened to this bypass who like weren't on the internet? Yeah, it was like a meme before me. Like people just thought it was funny. My memory of it is that it was John Madden at the NFL games on Thanksgiving that was rolling out the turducken to be served to whomever was attending. Again, is everyone under 30 logging on to that? Do they even know who John Madden is? I don't know. Do they play that game?

1:10:45Many people do. I don't know. It's a turducken of a movie, which I've never said before, and I'll never say again because it's a horrifying phrase. Maltham has said about Wowie Zowie, it's an album with its own B-sides on it. 18 tracks as opposed to the traditional 10, 11, 12. So we just thought let's like make a movie with its own discarded material in it, but let's make a movie with its own EPK in it. But you also told me. Electronic press kit. Let's make a movie with its own like table read in it. Let's make a movie with its own, like I'm in the movie. Like make a movie with the director in the movie, both as a character and then in like footage.

1:11:20I didn't know we had a camera rolling when I was talking, but I'm like sure put it in like that's a fine moment but the extra material also becomes part of the text it does it is the text yeah it's the text because it's like a movie about process I don't know like that's a weird thing to say if you haven't seen it but like if you're making a documentary which I've never done before except for my short piece on Paul Schrader for the Criterion channel it's like what are you making and you make something first and then that dictates what you're shooting next and then you're like we'll figure this out we'll figure this out and the first thing we filmed was seven eight nine days of the band rehearsing and we were like this could be very boring and i thought it was very interesting so the next thing we filmed i thought well the build-up to the show became more interesting than the show itself i feel like we're probably going to skew like 70 30 and then 70 30 became kind of like that should be everything.

1:12:18And as you may know, the structure of this film to me, I was like, let's just rip off Dunkirk. Okay. I see it. I see it. I think once I say that, people are like, you know, that's incredibly obvious now that you say it. It is. It is like a tripartite. I did not think of Dunkirk while watching it. But it is things taking place in different temporal spans. Dunkirk is a week, a day and an hour. And about an hour into the movie, they all are happening at the same time. And I seriously, when I was in the movie, I was like, I've never seen something like this. I cannot believe that these three things converged, seeming like they've taken place concurrently, even though I know they haven't.

1:13:00And I just got really excited by like, this is a hundred million dollar World War II film made by one of our greatest. Let's just copy that as a structure and a format for a nonfiction film about a 90s alternative rock band because building these different components into a cohesive thing just felt achievable to say like we'll hit that dunkirk moment like an hour and 10 into our movie where everything is suddenly like it's locked in and now like the we all four wheels are turning at the same time and the moment in the movie where the band is performing a song called grounded well-known to fans at the Fonda Theater here in LA.

1:13:39Joe Keery is playing Grounded in a filming fake biopic moment. Michael Esper is performing Grounded on a musical theater performance of Pavement Song. And a super group of young women, Bully, Soccer Mommy, Snail Mail, Speedy Ortiz, are playing Grounded at the ribbon-cutting of this museum that Sean graciously attended that you were seeing movies at the New York Film Festival during. They're all four cut together. And we have archival footage of the band playing Grounded, so five. And that moment, which is two minutes in the movie, is like, that is four years of work to have a bunch of different people playing the same song in different things filmed over two years.

1:14:21And that kind of effort is really interesting to me because it doesn't look hard. It just looks like you're cutting these things together, which is so easy to cut things together. but you have to build every one of those things from the ground up. Like it's the simplest thing to watch and the hardest thing to make. And that challenge of process to me was like, I want to make a movie that way, but not for a hundred million dollars for barely a million dollars. And what if we did that? Like, could that be done? Why would that be done? I've never seen that. They all look like documentary moments, but there's not a single thing in there that I didn't, you know, vehemently put my finger on the scale to create.

1:15:01why not can I ask yeah ask all of them alright more I'm asking Sean if I can step in because okay I'm so excited to have you here for I feel like I'm not used to being like at the back half of an episode now I haven't put out a movie since Her Smell where we talked at South by Southwest for like maybe 20 minutes so you're so you're ready I'm happy to be in the back half and I'm happy to have you here so jump in I want to ask about how you get And you're both in the movie. We didn't even mention that yet. Our names are. Your names are in the movie. Spoiler. Spoiler. It's in the trailer. You zoomed in.

1:15:37Is this in the trailer? Yeah, we are in the trailer. That's wonderful. And my sister-in-law, I told you, my sister-in-law saw it at Film Forum. She was like, hey, I don't really know what Pavement is, but did you know you're in this trailer? And I was like, I do. I do. You know they're in the trailer because you posted a screen grab of it when the trailer came out. Did I do that? Yeah. My brain is shot. I am shot. Okay. Anyway, that's lovely. Okay. Okay. The broad version of this question is like, where the hell did this come from? Right. You know, but let's bring it back to the Dunkirk moment.

1:16:06Okay. So, as you said, there is a point pretty early in the movie where you have four or five different things going on. You've got archival, you've got the document, you've got the biopic. Yeah. You've got the musical. Yeah. You've got the museum. Yeah. Those are my three things. Yeah, so those are your three timelines. Yeah. That you built. archival plus the actual documentary. This would be like if Dunkirk also had a component that was footage that John Ford shot during World War II. Yeah. Or, you know, David Lean more realistically. Right, right. And yeah, like that would be a fine. In which we serve was blended together.

1:16:44Right. Yeah. Yeah, with Dunkirk. So it's many years of work and a lot of creation to get to that point. Right. When did you and how did you decide that what you really needed to this, in addition to the rehearsal footage that you mentioned, was all three of these things, a biopic, a musical and a museum, and that they all needed to come together? Immediately. This was the idea. Yeah, I was recently asked and I was on like a phone interview so I could just like look at my computer. And like my first document, which is May 2020, like which I must have done within a week of Danny Goodbye, one of the movie's producers, just saying, would you be interested in this?

1:17:24Malkmus seems not unlike a fictional character in an Alex movie. Put together some ideas. And the ideas changed, but the idea, one of the, it was a bad biopic on paper. it was a museum on paper and then it was a art film on paper and I said it would be like art film like Edvard Munch like a very austere silent movie about like an alternative musician which is essentially Last Days and that idea obviously didn't click but I did later find that I texted him I was like have you seen this movie asking him if he knew the film one of my favorites a film kind of in and out of circulation physically I feel by the way not very present these days in the culture I feel like it did come out a few years ago but anyway for whatever reason like this just goes into the sort of um like the movie junkie answer which is if you love stuff you just watch things all the time yeah and we all you know this this is your life this is your job and to me the whole question is like I just consume I consume and I consume and I consume and I consume fiction and I consume non-fiction and I'm inspired by whatever and the freedom to to say I'm inspired by something irrelevant is very nice.

1:18:35Like, usually you can't do that. You can't. I was saying to Sean last night, the Sean-produced Alanis Morissette documentary, or EP, or I don't know what your credit is on these movies. Yeah, EP. Like, that movie and the Tina Turner movie on HBO I must have seen around the same time, and they both have those women going to a Broadway show of their music. Right. and it's just like in a film you like nothing else you could do you'd be like that's inspiring to me and it's not even that seeing it once was inspiring seeing it twice was inspiring and I got very excited by that because like you get older and you get tired of what you do and you're just looking for something else you're looking for the freedom to be like I need to just smash the wall I need to do something different because it's boring and this opportunity a multifaceted portrait of a extremely complex multidimensional brilliant figure like Malcolm S and the strange output of this band and their odd story over the years, I just instantly was like, there's so much freedom here.

1:19:36I can do whatever I want. Especially because the band said, don't make a traditional documentary. Don't make a movie about how great we are. We don't want to be in it at all or very much. So you need to think of other ways to tell the story. And sort of it should feel written. And with that, I was just like, so we'll have other people playing you. we'll have a whole jukebox musical where we hear the music that way let me film you as you rehearse for this tour and that might be it that might be all i need and then come to the ribbon cutting and that was kind of basically the promise i delivered on because you know you just look for permission to be like i'm bored but i'm inspired by many things and there's a line in the movie where malcolm is saying like um what he says like inspired by like the eagles for range life or classic rock for silence kid.

1:20:25I'm always inspired by things that sound like shit to me. I don't know why that is, but I still am. And it's the same thing. It's like, people are afraid to be inspired by something that you're like, well, this is bad. I'd like to do something exactly like this, but I want to contextualize it in a creative way where it's bad on purpose, but the process is what I'm making the movie about. But like, I'm trying to find my own truth in a form that is irrelevant to me, or I'm trying to make a biopic, but like, you know, you're, we'll watch all these things. You guys have to, so you have no choice. You wonder why I make you do episodes about Marvel movies.

1:20:58I think Alex just summarized it very eloquently. Yeah. I mean, I do understand. Well, sort of. It's also because they are the most popular movie form. They were. They were. They no longer are. Now they are. What is now? Pavements. It's really exciting. Yeah. Wait, can we go back to something you just mentioned? Second highest per screen average of the weekend after Thunderbolts. No kidding. Really? Literally, yes. but with a massive, an asterisk that would put the one in Thunderbolts to shame. Such a huge asterisk, but our producer was like, it's very funny that they had like a 17 ,000 per screen average and we had 13 ,000 on one screen.

1:21:32It was 4 ,200 screens versus one, but you got something to be proud of. You did say though that, so the band said that they would want it to feel written, which I don't think I had heard you say before. Why was that? Do you know? I think Malcolmus felt that if you hired a documentary filmmaker, you'd get a documentary. And if you hired someone with a narrative approach, you would get something that was structured in a way that felt more like a piece. Okay. Like a piece of material. And that was just the first thing I was told. And I was like, I can approach this. I love writing. I love overwriting.

1:22:01And it was just a mysterious thing that the whole thing was just there. And I, but it's also like, this is a perfect thing for Sean. Like, you know, you use what you're supposed to do. You use your job, your opportunities to be like, I'm just going to like put all of my attention on this thing that I care about. Because I can. But no one else would let me do that. But I have created a world where I can do whatever I want. And I can be like, I'm putting my foot down and this is the thing we're all going to do. And for me, it's like, I love archival work. I love museum curation. I love thinking about the stories told through objects.

1:22:39Most people do. This is not an original thing of mine. But I love it so much I want to do it. And I was like, well, if I just create the conceit of a museum, I get to go through the archive. I get to wear white gloves and like touch priceless objects. And I get to fill in the gaps with a production designer, which I also love. And I would love to be like a pop-up curator. And it was so fun to make a pop-up exhibit and create a physical experience for people to come walk through a room, be together, look at things, take pictures, like figure out which corner we want to be like. That's our Instagram corner.

1:23:15Everyone's going to take pictures in front of this wall. Like, it was really fun to design a room that way as a physical space that is a movie set, but is also just, like, me getting to poke around the archives for six months. And I love musicals. I love theater. And I just have to create my own opportunity. Like, you know, no one's going to say, like, somebody saw your movie, they'd like you to make a musical. But I would like to do that, or I'd like to at least try it. Do you think someone will see this and be like, would you like to do a real musical? The only thing that's happened is people saying we want to bring the musical back and do it for real, which could be great.

1:23:52I want to ask about the performance in the musical, but maybe can you— You must like musicals. Well, it's interesting. I felt—I think that you and I probably have a similar—I appreciate them when they're well done, and I also see the absurdity in them, which seems to be your take on what's going on in the musical. But explain to people how you, where you wrote the musical portion of the movie. Yeah, before you do, I just want to say to me, this is the divining thing of the movie. This is the thing that makes this such a brilliant success. It's very special. The musical. The musical aspect of it, yes.

1:24:24Yeah. The idea is the way you think about the band, the way that you create documentary format, the way that you do, you know, the way that you replicate some of your previous experience as a narrative filmmaker. Like, those are all things that I knew you could do. And since I know you well, like, I know that you have an affinity for those things. The musical aspect is genuinely inspired and right on that incredible line that I find so many musicals are of like, this is glorious and terrible at the same time. And it feels like an active choice to make it that way. Yeah. Well, I'm a big fan of the medium.

1:24:58But not of like the contemporary version of the mixtape musical, the jukebox musical. Not because I don't like them. I don't think I've ever seen one. I've missed all the ones that are even vaguely relevant that everyone in this movie has been a part of I didn't go to the Sufjan Stevens musical that came out right after we made this but by all accounts it's identical but not done as a joke which you know is good for the people who made it but like I'm very inspired by that show's marketing material and we've replicated that marketing material with our own marketing material of just like these kind of ham-fisted shots of people like sitting there talking about finding the story like we've replicated it exactly because it's so silly and it cuts to these shots of like people dancing to Sufjan Stevens music holding like a lit up ball and I'm like this is just what we did but like we did it in eight weeks for fun and I like no one's gonna like give me a Tony for it but I would take one and like the thing about the band to me which you know like in declining order like Chris favorite Sean familiar with you you know presumably unfamiliar less familiar less familiar so it's like familiar but not It's a sliding scale, but to me, like, name a band that you're like, I could really lock in on a documentary about this band.

1:26:14Just like someone that you're like, this would be my shit. And like, if it was happening, I'd be like the expert with my arms crossed. The Strokes would be your answer. Yeah, okay. A perfect answer. If you were like, I'm going to ask a hundred Strokes fans, give me like five qualities, family feud style, that really speak to what you love about the band. Those answers would be very similar. this just like beautiful retro analog feel the style the kind of detachment this new york like everyone would give the same answers but pavement are the opposite of that if you ask 100 fans someone is like i love that malcolm is a brat he's a slacker he's funny doesn't take anything seriously the whole thing just feels totally ironic and then someone's like he's a poet you know yasi has his lyrics tattooed on her like this man has changed my life sincerity i cry when I listened to their music.

1:27:03They got me. And it's like, okay, so that's the same band. Yeah. The two completely opposed. The paradox is true, though, in his case. It is. That's part of what makes him so flexible. And that paradox was the paradox of structuring the movie with different segments, of smashing them together, and of creating one piece of the movie. And the biopic does this as well, where you're like, you're merging highbrow and lowbrow. You're merging irony and sincerity. You're merging real and fake as like a conceit of how we made it. and the musical is just that where I was like, A, as I say in the movie, as the character directing the musical, A, I think this will work.

1:27:40B, I think it will be good. C, I don't think you could do this with many other bands. And D, like, why not? Like, just because I feel like some of these things that exist, musicals, biopics, I really feel like the decision-making process stopped and ended it. Why not? Like, yeah. Oh, why not? Like, that'd be fine. People would come to that. and I just was like why not and it seemed like a great and originally when the movie wasn't Dunkirk when the movie was Mishima where I thought it'd be chapter one chapter two chapter three the musical would have been first and the musical would have been a sort of breezy Billy Elliot inspired small town working class story about kids who just want to get out of their small town through music okay and it would have been a way to give the first 30 minutes of the movie 30 straight minutes of music.

1:28:3145 songs. Just one after the other. Right. Performed in Broadway style. No, that would have been a movie. This was, of course, when we thought we raised three times as much as we did. Okay. And, but then it became theater as a way of differentiating it. And then it became less literally the story of the band. And then it became a sort of Greek chorus throughout the movie. So, like, the whole idea was there immediately, but everything changed up until the edit. And I just thought it'd be fun to, like, I love, I got to go to work in Times Square for two months. I will say I was very moved by your performance sitting at a folding table during rehearsals.

1:29:07That was like the, yeah. It's me and Banderas in Baby Girl sitting at the folding table doing theater rehearsals in like the canon of recent nonsense. And that movie really gets one thing wrong, which is after the show opens, he's still in the theater at the table. And I've learned like that would never happen. When the show's open, the director's retired and the stage manager runs the show. And that show opens. They go to opening night. And then like weeks later, he's still showing up and sitting at the lighting console, which is bogus. An expert like me has learned from doing this once as a joke.

1:29:36But I sat at the table. Yeah. And, you know, I contributed. But I wrote the musical, which is sung through. No dialogue. At my residency on Bergman Island, which was a great thing I did after seeing the film, which I assume you both. Yeah, of course. You probably liked the movie. Speaking of Bergman Island and Jukebox musicals, have you seen Mamma Mia? No, I've never seen it. Wow. Okay. Well, I just, you know, there's a climactic ABBA song used in both films. Very moving. Yeah. I feel like that maybe is your pavements. Like you should deconstruct Mamma Mia and then rebuild it through different mediums.

1:30:12And yeah, I'll say this of being on Bergman Island that we went, there's like, it's called Faro. People may not know what it is. You should explain like what it actually is. The actual island or the movie? Yeah, well, the island. Or people could just go watch the movie. So even where Bergman just moved to some island off the coast of an island called Visby, which is off the coast of Sweden. So it's an island off the coast of an island. I think the island of Foro is, like, maybe the size of Silver Lake. It's, like, preposterously small. And it feels like you've left the planet Earth. He filmed four or five movies there, notably Persona and Shame, parts of scenes from a marriage.

1:30:51Mia Hansen-Love makes the film Bergman Island. I saw it like on a Thursday, applied for the residency on a Monday, was there the following summer. And, you know, I had like, I was there for three weeks and you go to Bergman's house to work, which is seen in the film. Actually, there's an important thing coming here for you that you'll be excited by. And it's at the end of the movie when Vicky Creeps goes to like his house, which is presented as like this sanctum. And you just go to his house and work and his house is so quiet. I had to open a window because I was getting a migraine. It was so quiet.

1:31:22Like, I've just never been somewhere that's that hermetically removed from civilization. And it's on the beach, it's on the rocks. And I had to open a window so I could hear the ocean because I was like, I feel like I'm in a deprivation chamber. And that's where he worked. And there's no Wi-Fi, so I downloaded 40 Pavement songs and I crafted this structure based on the chronological working of their discography of the 40-ish songs I had chosen. And looking at the lyrics of like, oh, this lyrical passage suggests this guy's leaving a small town. They have a song called All My Friends. Everyone's going out tonight.

1:31:58Tonight, all my friends are strangers. And I'm like, that's a great song to show that this guy is moving away from the people he's come up with and he's leaving. There's not a second of that in the movie, but it was very crucial in like the story of the musical. And it just kind of got built from that. And this is all the way of saying like, this is 20 minutes of the movie. And like, I worked on it for a year. And that's insane. That's very silly. And you like did rehearsals and you filmed rehearsals and then built a set. Like the audition scene, A, like I wanted the chorus line, all that jazz, like New York, creaky wooden floors audition scene.

1:32:36You could script that scene and hire actors to do it. Or you could just like put out a casting call and hang up signs saying you're being filmed. And we got half of our cast from that open call. And we got a lot of people being like, is this a prank? what am I doing here? But it's a good scene. And I just wanted that scene in the movie. That's where I sit hard at that table. Yeah, it's really... But, you know, I had to pay attention. Pensive, yeah. I had to watch what everyone was doing. You're looking for something. You're not sure if you're going to find it. You're communicating all of that.

1:33:05Well, really, Angela Trimber, who was the choreographer and ultimately co-director, I was like, I'm not going to tell you who to cast. You cast who you can work with. We had Michael Esper, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Catherine Gallagher. so for the ensemble I was like you guys just need mercenary dancers cast whoever you want and it was fine and but yeah we did a lot of work for something that's like inscrutable in the movie but to me that's like isn't that part of the fun like isn't working more fun than having worked I mean if you're doing something yeah if you're doing it on your own terms and your own ideas yeah like it's not that I wanted the musical to be over said with sorrow in her voice Well, I don't know.

1:33:46I think not everyone, like, it's, you know, like, because you, as you said, you get to do exactly what you want to do. You are just making this crazy thing and everyone's going for it with you. Yes, it's create, I mean, the Synecdoche New York comparison comes up, a movie I abhor, but I respect the comparison. And that's the Alex I know is that that just popped out. That was not press tour Alex. I respect the comparison. Well, yeah, we're off the record now, I think. I respect the comparison, and I get it. And what I respect is what I wanted out of that movie. But anyway, so the Bergman thing, so I'm in his house, I'm writing the musical, and then we re-watched Bergman Island when we were there.

1:34:28We were staying in the house where the characters stayed, and the house where some scenes from scenes from Marriage were shot. That's a Russian nesting doll right there. In his house, the scene with her, and what's the guy's name? I think Anders Danielson. They're like in his living room and then they walk and then they're in his library. But they skip a room in the middle, which is Bergman's video room. Oh my God, your face. Where he has... Are his videos in there? I counted like 2 ,500 videotapes organized alphabetically and sort of by section because he has a lot of theater and there's like a theater section.

1:35:07And everyone... Alphabetically by title? Yeah. Oh, okay. And then within the theater section, that's alphabetical. And there seem to be like subsections of different countries. But then, you know, this legend, oh, he's so cold to his children and this and that. And behind the door is an entire shelf of children's movies. 20 Swedish Pippi Longstocking films. Okay. And I'm like, we couldn't have been that cold if he had like a hundred tapes for his grandchildren to come watch. Or as you know, maybe he was just trying to avoid spending time with them by putting something on the television. Yeah, but it's far away.

1:35:39Like, you don't bring your grandkids there and then... It's a good point. It's not like they stopped by. And there's nowhere else to go. It's the ends of the earth. Sure, but once you're there, you got to have 20 seconds. And, but, you know, so like the screening room, as seen in the film, was right in front of our house, which is not where his house was. It's like in front of his other house. Okay. Kind of like his office house. I don't think I knew that you had done that. I knew a lot of what was going on during the production of the film. But when I visited the museum, which is just, again, another ingenious stroke of the movie, I don't think I understood what was happening.

1:36:08I was like, I thought it was just a day's event. It was sort of a celebration oriented around the production of the film. Not that it was an intrinsic part of the design of the movie. Right. And did you even explain that? Maybe you did. I don't know. At the time, I wanted to get you on camera because I wanted to have like interviews with experts and have you talk about like music and movies. And we just ended up not doing that because there was too much going on. Yeah, it was intrinsic. and we didn't announce that on Saturday there'll be four bands playing and the guys will be there. We just, the reason there's 800 people in the room is because we all told our friends to come.

1:36:43The label brought 200 people. The band's families came. It was a scene. I remember it was a rainy day and it was a scene. We really stacked the room. But people who just happened to be like, oh, I'll go to that on Saturday, we're like, what on earth is going on? Like, why is the band here? Why are all these bands playing? But it was just filmmaking in public, which is interesting to me. Yeah. Because that is documentary filmmaking, but the entire conceit was like, I spent nine months curating this room and we spent a month production designing it. Custom building vitrines to hold zines and Xeroxes of zines that we couldn't find and like fakery on top of other stuff.

1:37:18And I noticed that pavement shirts were three, four,$500 on Depop and Grailed. So we just made an entire wall of fake t-shirts where it's, if they were real, that'd be like$10 ,000 worth of shirts. But instead that's like$1 ,000 worth of production design. And they were all aged to look very old. And it's authentic. Like, but that's, you know, if you take a picture in front of it and you have a good time, what does it matter that we made that last week and it's not from 1994? Like, that's not what it's about. But it was intrinsic. and because like another movie, a movie I would watch, a movie you might even executive produce, you have the ephemera, you just shoot it against black felt.

1:38:00That's fine. I'll look at that. And another movie would interview Sophie Allison from Soccer Mommy and have her talk about her love of the band. But that's the, I didn't want to do that. I wanted to take the ephemera and put it in front of everybody, have the band look at it on camera for the first time in decades and have the musicians not just speak, but just sing their three favorite songs. But in the movie, every one of these younger artists, they get two songs and you hear each one for 40 seconds. That doesn't mean we didn't fly these bands in from all over the country. There's an entire other song everyone played that I couldn't even tell you right now because I forget.

1:38:37This is not in the movie. I don't remember what the third song she played was. I don't know. I definitely stayed for Snail Mail and Bully, I think, when I was there. And it was just a good show. It looked fine. It was just a good show. Yeah, it was a good show. And some of the artists requested to play the song a second time, which obviously confused people who had no idea what was going on. And we filmed the ribbon cutting twice because we had the ribbons. The ribbon was a prop. And we filmed it once from the front and once from the back. And the same speech. And of course, everyone in the room was like, why are they doing this a second time?

1:39:05Steve really did it with gusto in the film, I got to say. One of his most spirited moments. He's having some fun. The shot of him lifting up the scissors was filmed by Joshua Weinstein, who made the film Menashe. He was there shooting for us that day. Nice. Had a real murderer's row of like fiction, nonfiction people there. So the people who just show up are like, what's going on? Don't really know that we have a film. And the musical. So they show up for the audition. Once they're cast. Yeah. So yeah, explain that. And then there is a climactic performance of the musical with an audience. We performed it for an audience three times.

1:39:45Okay, wow. Oh. And privately just for cameras once. Okay. Or sort of once with like, we need to do that one again. Like, people got cast in the show. None of the ensemble had heard of the band. One girl, a girl, Sophie, long brown hair is like a real indie rock fan. She knew the band. No one else had ever heard them or heard of them. And ultimately, we caught all the scenes of me explaining the band to them. And, you know, just being like, this is the vibe. Like, imperfection is fine. Embrace it. But sloppiness is a virtue. You can, you know, musical theater owners don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear it doesn't have to be perfect.

1:40:20That's not what they love. You're just giving these people a shot. These people who go to an open audition and then suddenly they get cast in a role that's an official Actors' Equity stamped production on a stage in New York. Like, that's legit. It's like being an actor who just wanders in and ends up like being a corpse on Law and Order. Like, that's what you want. That's what you move to New York for. So they're having a blast and they're giving it their all. They don't care about the cameras. Like, I learned very quickly, these people, these performers, these eight members of the cast, and ultimately even Zoe, Michael, and Catherine as the leads, they're excited to be in a movie.

1:40:53And they know we're filming, but they don't really care. Because keeping in mind, like, that was three years ago. Like, I couldn't explain the movie. I could just be like, it's this tapestry of a bunch of bullshit. Of an artist you have no context for. That means nothing to you. And this is going to be interwoven. and everyone's like, I stopped listening to you while you were explaining this because we're on the clock and I need to like do my routine. I need to work on these bizarre lyrics. I need to figure out this choreography. Film us all you want. Like I genuinely don't know or care. And certainly once we're on the stage because we then did a week at our theater of building the sets, doing tech rehearsal.

1:41:36Certainly when we're in there, they're like, I so don't care that you're filming. Like the filming is so immature. to my creative process of doing this. And that's really nice to have your performers in a movie be like, I don't even want to think about the movie that you're making. Instead of like, I'm hyper fixated on the movie that you're making. I only care about the shot, the image, my line. Can I try that again? It's amazing to be like, I've scripted all of this. You're all in this bubble, this Bergman-esque bubble of performance and reality. And you just don't care. like you're just living in like then when i saw something like zone of interest and i was like why is this movie filmed this way like what do these shots look like and it's like oh they just had cameras all over the house and the actors didn't know and i'm like see that's incredible like that's just an idea of someone being like what if yeah we surveilled this family what if like what if i just did this thing that's incredibly obvious i'm not inventing technology i'm not like you know remaking the wheel but it's just like what if we just did it this way make a virtue of deficiencies, as Malcolm says in the movie, like, just do something.

1:42:43We don't have the money to do so much. So why don't we just use... We don't have the money to... You see a scene in a movie where someone goes to see a play. And if something's got to give, for example. Sure, yeah. You know, you have to pay all those people to sit in the room until AI replaces the work of SAG actors, as is obviously threatened by the special effects industry. But we have people pay us to be in the movie because we put on a show for them. They bought a ticket. They were cheap. So yeah, how are you publicizing it? It was Payment's Instagram and Matters Instagram and it sold out in 10 minutes.

1:43:15Wow. There was just like two workshop performances, Friday and Saturday,$30, come on. And people were like, what is this? I'm going. And that was it. And they were in the movie and the reality of what was happening was very vague to people. We have cameras everywhere, which is either relevant or not. Some people were like, something's up. some people were like I recognize that guy he's a filmmaker he's like running around like moving like talking about the cameras there must be something going on here but we did the museum and the musical without announcing that there was a movie so there's no reason to be like what's up right it's more just like like people walked into the museum who I vaguely knew and I was just sitting at a table because we had three very easy days at the museum and then one very complicated day and the other days I was at a table tea laptop people would walk in and be like, what are you doing?

1:44:05Like, oh, we're making a movie right now. It's like, what do you mean? It's like, oh, well, that guy over there talking to those people, that's my friend. He's an actor. He's playing a curator. And that other guy is filming them. And they're all mic'd and there's signs up. And they're like, what are you doing? And I'm like, nothing. I just hired him to play this character. He's over there doing his own thing. None of that ended up in the thing. But this guy, Jay, who plays Peter Delfino, the curator of the museum, is a diehard fan. And we were like, yeah, just come six hours a day, walk around, same costume same wardrobe and just everyone who comes in introduce yourself as peter delfino curator just talk just talk to people and just like get their stories their stories about the band and then he's the one presenting the ribbon cutting and i'm like i mean this is i'm directing the movie but i'm like mostly just kind of focused on the cup of tea and you know i mean i left the museum to go record the big picture it's not like i had to work that hard i just left for a couple of hours and then came back.

1:45:00So it's not like I was, you know, actually doing anything. But I had done work for months and months. And that's like kind of an amazing way to work. Yeah. Like you could just hit record and leave. How did you afford to get Griffin Newman in the movie? That's a great question. Blackmail. Yeah. Severe blackmail. Very effective. The good Griffin story is like, we wrapped the movie, the biopic, which features Joe Keery as Malcolm S, Nat Wolfe as Spiral Stairs, Fred Hechinger as Bob, Logan Miller as Mark Ibold, and then Griffin as Steve West, the drummer. And Steve West now is like a burly man, big guy, beard, he's a mason.

1:45:38But at the time, he was like kind of a scrawny, gingery guy. We all went out for pizza when we wrapped. I left to go get something or go to the bathroom, and I come back, and Griffin's sitting there with the whole cast. And as I sit down, he's going. So the way Warren Beatty renews the rights to Dick Tracy every 10 years is by making these bizarre little pieces of ephemera in order to... He was blank checking at the table? He just like, somehow in the five minutes I was gone, he just immediately was like, I need to lock these guys in on the right situation of Dick Tracy. So he's true to himself and you know...

1:46:07That's beautiful. Griffin fans will be happy to know he was, as our producer said, the latest... He's like, this guy's the latest one every day. He's your friend. Why is he the only one who's not on time? It's like, Joe's on time. Heidecker's on time. Schwartzman's on time. This guy's your buddy. why is he the only one we're waiting for and I was like it's the scorpion and the frog like he just has to he just has to go down but but he he was he was a very welcome presence one last thing about the movie so this is like a very daring exercise feels as much as like a creative expulsion of something as it is like a intellectual exercise is any part of it like an audition for a kind of thing you would like to do in the future because it is so many different kinds of things.

1:46:50Yeah, what could that even be? I don't know. You look like you, I mean, Ty West, he said, no, you're not going to come back from Venice and have somebody say, congratulations on your experimental documentary. Here's a job. And he was right. Yeah, you're getting great press though. And I think that this band resonates with so many people who potentially have power to help you make something. No. No? The band does? Just people who are fans of the band. No. No? Gen X has no power and no money. Oh, interesting. Explore that. We learned while fundraising this movie for two years. It's tough. This is why we have so much Baby Boomer content.

1:47:24They have the money. What about Elder Millennials? Are we more powerful? That is why the Sufjan musical was on Broadway and the Pavement musical was a joke. That's tough. It's great. It's great for us. What do we do together? How do we leverage this moment? We don't. We skip Gen X. That's fine. It's our time. No, it's not. That's what Minecraft tells us. It's our time. Is this true? I think so. I'm dead serious. This is my big theory. Go on. Yeah, but we're using it for Sufjan. That's the problem. I always, always, always point to Seth Rogen. I'm like, Seth Rogen is the one who shows us the way.

1:47:52He was the one who was like, he got taught by one Gen X guy, Judd Apatow, how to make your own industry. And now he like has a tremendous amount of power. He has his own weed business. He produces television shows and movies. Makes ceramics. He's younger than us. Like, and he has a kind of, he's younger than me. He has an entrepreneurial state of mind. I don't know how old he is. I think he's 41. So he's in between. He's in between, yeah. I see. and I and I want you know I had my famous like meltdown slash celebration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated movie where I was like what the fuck is this shit like they just they're repeating me at 9 years old to me at 41 years old but it worked yeah so what can we do together how can we make make hay of this there's no hay okay we tried to raise money for this movie for a year but this movie's about guys in their 50s so I'm talking about what about our 40s that's the thing I'm pointing to but who is that the strokes well yeah I don't think there's capital But you're only thinking of music.

1:48:44I'm like, what else? What in the world at large? You know, you're saying like, what is the ultimate millennial drama that Alex Ross Perry can author? I don't even I don't even know what those words mean. The millennial drama. Think about it. But what is that? How can you be the Bergman of your time? Yeah. How can you reflect? But nobody wants that anymore. I wonder. The seriousness of that kind of storytelling is so not interesting to people of a certain age. That's true. That's true. And I know this because the Broadway show I did see around this time was Stereophonic, which was wonderful. And I love Fleetwood Mac.

1:49:15Like, this is a band I like. And I know the story as well as anybody. And this is Baby Boomer Crack, this show. And I was so into it. It was so beautiful. The staging, I think it's coming here. If it comes here, you should 100 % see it. Well, Sean doesn't like Fleetwood Mac. No, that's not true. I just think they're overrated. Yeah. Okay. I mean, you know, this is not literally Fleetwood Mac. Right. But you like that era. Yeah, I do. You could hang for a three-hour play about a band. I mean, almost famous. Like you would watch this play for three hours and it is remarkable. But that's, again, I was like saying to the inter, during the intermission, I'm like, it's just so funny.

1:49:51Like this baby boomer shit just will never go away. And this guy turns around like big white beard, like a tie-dyed bucket hat. And he was like, ah, did you just say like, it's funny, I just, I was thinking about this show during the first half, like baby boomer art. Like, yeah, that's really what this is. And I was like, dude, look at yourself. I just blew your mind with that. Like, what are we talking? Like, this is so obvious to me, like why you would be here, like grooving on these like 70s music narratives for, you know, the 50th straight year. But stuff like that isn't, like we just, the fan base of the band, they're not putting the money into the culture.

1:50:27That whole generation is hamstrung by the fact that the baby boomers still have the power to tell their own stories. And the money and the, yeah. Can I pitch a theory that I just shared with somebody on another podcast? Oh, great. We love your secondhand theories. I don't know if this will be used, but it occurred to me kind of in mid-conversation and it's related to what we're talking about, which is we were talking through like why the rep theater culture is doing so well, like at least in big cities in America right now and how a lot of younger people are showing up for older movies and they're building these relationships to like Heat and Thief and movies that came out 20, 30, 40 years ago.

1:51:01And to me, I started paralleling it to sitting in the car with my dad and the onset of classic rock radio. Like classic rock radio becoming a format and arguably like a key format in the sustainability of FM radio through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. And how that music just got bled into our personal cultural lifestyle as adolescents. And then we came to accept the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac. These bands mattered to us even though they had all broken up by the time we were born, basically. Well, except for those of us that made our own choice and realized Kiss was the ultimate from that era.

1:51:34Well, but that's your version of that. But the fact that that music was sustainable, Whereas like Perry Como was not sustainable to my dad, even though his parents love Perry Como. So my dad worked his whole career for classic rock radio. 1029 Philadelphia's. See, it did come up. Philadelphia's Magic. And their TV commercials were Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, all that stuff. And that was it growing up. And this was 1993. You know, that music was 20 years old at the time. And it was classic rock to me. It was classic rock to that generation. And the problem is that like, to get analytical here, I agree that this movie culture thing is happening.

1:52:14The weird thing is that my movie culture of what I was hooked on when I was going to the movies seven days a week, when I was 20 through 30, that was all about discovery. All we cared about, all that was being given to us was things you've never seen before. You mean like going to film forum? Yes. I would go to film forum and see 35 different Otto Preminger films. because that was a full retrospective and I had seen four and I needed to see every single one. That is not what programming is anymore. It's not. And if that happens, it doesn't have the numbers you're describing. There are strains of it in Los Angeles.

1:52:51Like the Cinematheque, the American Cinematheque will do a month-long sustained program. And this happens in New York as well. And people do go. But what you're describing, the boom is not like people are showing up for Daisy Kenyon and it's sold out. it's more like people are showing up for Thief and it's like well to me that's just watching cable like I don't need to go to the movies to see the movie I've seen I always wanted to go to be like but it's not passive oh no I know it's not definitely not passive it's a huge activity to me though there's a split in the demographics because there are always somewhere between 30 and 50 % of the audience is like just looks like Chris and they're just so pumped to see Thief for the 300th time but the other half has never seen it and I know because when I go to Vidiots all the time, Maggie always asks people, raise your hand if you've never been to Vidiots or seen this movie before.

1:53:42And half the people raise their hands. And then they just haven't seen Thief. So they are discovering it. It's just not at that sustained, cinephilic, academic approach to movies. It is more like an eventized emotional exploration. Which I'm all in favor of. I'm all in favor of it seeming less exclusive. Yeah. But to this point, what's one of the most consistently screened movies? Probably doesn't go two weeks without screening in New York, LA. Possession. But back in the day, it was the complete Zulowski. Yeah. We were seeing Shaman and On the Silver Globe. And, you know, what's the other one with the great long title?

1:54:16Like, I don't know. Color, like, love is the most beautiful thing, love. It's like, it wasn't about possession. That was the least relevant part of the Zulowski series. It was about these ones that had never played. The prince didn't have subtitles. And it's just different. I mean, it doesn't matter. It's like it's going pop. It is. Which is good. Which is the same thing that we're talking about with the legacy. If this movie is like about one thing other than a band, to me, it's like, it's about the way that these legacies, histories, consumption, media, narratives change, get codified, get packaged, get sold.

1:54:48That's what the entire biopic portion of this movie is about, which we've not really talked about, even though that's where we throw in a headline of you guys doing an episode on Joe Curie. which is plausible in that if an actor was being tipped for like this is his moment you would be like we need to talk about this because this is a thing. But in an ironic unironic post meta point of view when I was watching the movie again yesterday I was like Joe Curio is phenomenal in this movie. He's really. Like really beautifully walks that line between I know that I'm satirizing but I'm also emotionally connected to this performance and so you kind of did do the thing that you were making one of midstream.

1:55:31He's completely the real deal. I mean I know you love Free Guy which I guess he's in I've never seen it. It's a piece of garbage but I'm glad he did well. I only know he's in it because he's in the trailer. He works at the video game company I believe. Sure. Yeah. In the trailer there's a shot where he has his feet up on a desk and he goes like this. Okay. That's all I know about his performance in the movie. I mean all respect to him Free Guy sucks. Yeah I don't know he's never mentioned it except in passing when he mentioned knowing Jodie Comer. Free Guy is my synagoguery in New York, actually.

1:56:00I get what it was trying to do and I respect that, but it's terrible. Yeah. But that kind of like, you know, cultural snake eating its own tail is just interesting to me. And as I'm sure we prepare, I realized this last night, you know, wrapping up with you and Chris, but like, Amanda, what would you say the odds are that six months from now, Sean and Chris admit that they cried during the Bruce Springsteen biopic? Like two to one? I was pretty sus of it when I saw the trailer. This is the thing is that Sean's heart is like too protected, which is like his own version of, you know, like this moment is coming for him and he doesn't know.

1:56:34The most fascinating podcast of 2024, in my opinion, was Sean, Chris and Mallory talking about a complete unknown and parsing through your feelings. And like, which in many ways is the movie that you're parodying in pavements like big time. I mean, there are like multiple Timmy with a guitar just being like, oh my God, now he's watching like, now he's writing Blow It in the Wind after banging Joan Bias. But also, sorry. We haven't seen it. We haven't seen the movie. It was a good scene. In Complete Unknown, it was a good scene, you're saying. Well. You like that scene. I like that scene. Yeah.

1:57:11Last night during the Q &A, you were making fun of, you know, that scene. And I think you do a perfect setup of it. That scene in every movie. The musician sits down and writes. But I can be honest about it. And I think the problem with Sean is like, maybe he can't be honest about it. It's not true. Or there's something like, it's so stupid. It's not how creativity works. It's so stupid. And but when they do it right, and I'm like, oh, my God, they're playing, you know, they're responding to is hearing something that you know that touches you. But that's not cinematic. You had that watching the Bob Dylan movie, and you'll have it during the Springsteen movie.

1:57:46and then you're gonna, you know. The Bruce Springsteen movie is a tough one because I'm honestly not, I don't dislike Bruce Springsteen, but I'm not like a Bruce Springsteen disciple. He's not a person that influenced my adolescence the way that Bob Dylan did. So I don't come to the table with as much on the line for that one. So maybe the odds are like four to one that you and Chris are gonna be like, look man, I'm not a disciple, but not only will Chris cry, Nebraska is Chris's favorite album. So the movie is about the writing and production. I'm just picturing the two of you watching that movie and it's like the last scene of We Own the Night and you guys are Joaquin and Wahlberg just holding each other being like they're just crying and you're just like I love you man it's like I love you too no that was us at the end of Nosferatu yeah that's depressing it's possibly the saddest thing I've heard in a long time I just feel like that's coming for us like I watched the entire Bob Marley movie on someone else's seat on a plane last year yeah and it seemed like the same thing but it's like what was the press around that movie that I saw in the New York Times.

1:58:47Here's how they made the wig. Mm-hmm. Like, is that the most, like, here's the press around pavements in the New York Times. Here's how they made the movie. And it's like, don't we love stuff enough to be like, I don't care about the wig. I don't care how long this guy learned how to play the harmonica to play famous troubadour Bob Dylan. Like, how's the movie? What is the movie about? Like, and I reread the New York Times article from 15 years ago about I'm Not There. It's such a good article. Fascinating stuff. New Yorker, the New Yorker? No, it was the New York Times. It must have been like a Sunday magazine.

1:59:18It was such a long article. It was a long Todd Haynes piece. I thought it was the New Yorker. This was a New York Times article where his discussion of being told to approach Dylan was exactly the same as how I was told to approach Malcolmus. Don't use the word genius. Don't use this. Don't say that. And I'm just like, this is what I love about the project of what you guys are always doing is like, what do we want to talk about? Do we want to talk about the thing? or do we want to talk about like the the facetious quality of what this thing is made for and if you guys were just like analyzing box office and marketing that would be boring but what i like is like can't we talk about the thing like isn't the thing isn't the creative process more valuable than the set dressing of the dreadlocks or of the the prosthetics isn't there more to this than that i always think that stuff is worthy of an aside and so in this format that it's easy for us to say for one minute we can talk about the costumes, but we don't need to hyper-focus.

2:00:19And that's like also about the erosion of the media economy around culture, which is a much longer conversation. And that's what the movies, that's what the range life stuff is about. It's about the erosion of all that. And obviously it's, you know, Joe looks enough like Malcolmus that there is no wig needed. There is no, he's a great musician. There is no training needed, but like. Were the clothes really on loan? That was a joke. Oh, from the mud clothes? Was that a joke? Well, not the mud clothes, but throughout the wardrobe. Oh, no, no. The thing that Steve West says about the mud clothes is that the ones at the museum that are still dirty.

2:00:49And one of my biggest regrets is that I wrote on the placard, on loan from the band members. And the day I printed it, I was like, I should say on loan from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And I was pretty bummed at my failure on that one. You're still thinking of gags from the movie. Yeah, I know. There's a couple other things that I thought of subsequently. And some of which, including you guys, could be fixed in the edit. But no, none of that. I mean, could they get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? You tell me. I'm a voter. Yeah, you're a voter. Have they ever been on the ballot? No. Were they not?

2:01:22There's no way. I feel like recently they might have been. Let me ask this. Has an independent band ever been on the ballot? Now, that's a very interesting question. Literally a band that is not affiliated with a major label at all. I don't know, but Matador is so close. I mean, Matador is the A24 of independent labels. You know, it is like, it is so. Is or was? at least was in Paveman's heyday for sure so I I don't have my phone or we'd just pull up your Instagram and look at the ballots I know it just seems like one of those things they do it differently if they do it online now they no longer give you the paper ballot seems like one of those things that much like the way movies are you know awards are bought and sold and you're told by Sean's return from Telluride here's the movies you have to deal with for the next four months it just seems like one of those things that you're like actually like to even get towards the ballot requires like a corporate investment.

2:02:12It doesn't feel that way. I don't know people on the committee, so I'm not sure. Are there ever that level of critics' favorite bands that are numerically irrelevant in the ecosystem of music history? Well, there's sort of like the old timers list, though, that people like 30, 40 years after their original contention for the Hall of Fame, they then get re-added. They'll be like, oh, we forgot the Shirelles, so now we've got to add the Shirelles. MC5, maybe. MC5's a good example of that, yeah. So I could see them getting in once all of the baby boomers have died and Gen X is in their 70s. Okay.

2:02:43And then... What a day. And what a day that will be. People are like, one day until then the Gen X The last World War II veteran is gone. I'm like, I'm just waiting for the last baby boomer to go. I mean, I would welcome a list of what 90s bands are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Nirvana, obviously. I would welcome... Yeah. Did Beastie Boys make it? You're the voter. Did Tribe Called Quest? I mean, yeah. I should have put them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the movie is what we're saying. Yeah. I think they could get there. Anyhow, we got to wrap up soon but before we do it, you are an observer of movie culture in addition to being a filmmaker.

2:03:17You always have takes on the business. Sure. What's the takes? What are you holding on to? We text the takes. I mean, we could just read the text thread. We do. The epic news and deals. Nothing publicly viable. I mean, it just kind of feels, I feel bad saying this to you guys. This is like telling a kid there's no Santa Claus but it's just like it feels like it's over. It just feels, it just feels oppressive. It feels bad because creativity is not valued in the ecosystem in the way that I think it should be. I don't really know what I'm saying with that, but it just feels like when you spiral, I'm like, finally some truth.

2:03:52And then a week later, you're like, just kidding. We're back. No, like someone put something in Sean's water. He's like all happy again. I just feel like the studio stuff is just like, it just feels over. Obviously, there's beacons of hope. Such as? Well, like when something cool is successful. okay like sean i mean i don't think i go 24 hours without getting a text from sean about sinners box office okay yeah yeah you really are it's just like guys have you seen these wednesday numbers it's insane you reveal too much amanda doesn't have to hear about those things anymore because i can just share them with you and yeah and david you still text them yeah you said some of them yeah not as much but i get no response from you and i know i can get some engagement over here well it's when you send it to me and chris and i'm like well chris can deal with this like a contextless screenshot of the top 10 Netflix movies that you sent me at like Wednesday at 8 p.m.?

2:04:43Sean does the work when he's never off the clock. Well, you don't send those to me either. You just send me memes. Yeah, I tell you. I do, but they're good memes. So whenever I make a Sean meme on the group chat, I send it to you with no context. Yes, exactly. So you don't understand what led up. But I have the context of having lived through the event that inspired the meme so I can kind of get it. But like with no understanding of what we were talking about. I feel like to answer the question somewhat seriously, like what worries me as a vaguely impartial participant is like, it's becoming the same problem with American politics where there's two parties and nobody thinks that they actually represent the best of what people want.

2:05:23And the problem is that like the so-called independent hope of the last decade seems like all those companies are upgrading themselves and getting out of the business of what they've built, which is obviously a huge problem because it creates a hole in the ecosystem. This movie is being released by Utopia, a company I think does a lot of good work. After A24 and Neon, I don't know what people would say is third in the ecosystem of independent film distribution in the way that there is no third in political parties. And everybody in America knows that's a fucking disaster. It's a huge disaster to be like, there's bad and there's less bad.

2:06:04And then there's 45 % of nothing. And then there's like some other options you can use. And if the parties get too big and they don't speak to the interests of the people that supported them, I'm talking about movies now. If the companies get too big and they don't speak to the interests of people who supported them, then who's left? Because they've now, they've ruined the ecosystem. It's possible that it can't be rebuilt and I don't mean to be like a mouthpiece for studio executives, but the impression that I've gotten in the last two years or so is that they realized that they kind of fucked it And that they're trying in some ways to DIP and to become less reliant on the thing that got everybody so fat over the previous 25 years.

2:06:42Whether or not they can actually accomplish it, I don't know. I do think whatever is happening at Warner Brothers and Universal, those are two companies that are trying to basically turn back to 1990s, 80s, 70s. Where it's like it's filmmaker focused. It's original stuff. I don't know if that's actually going to be sustainable at the scale that we're used to. and they're not going to stop making IP movies. That's not what I'm suggesting. But there's at least an awareness that the bloat of 2002 through 2019 was never sustainable and the international money was never sustainable. So whether or not studio system can be fixed, I don't know.

2:07:20You're right though that A24 and Neon are like, we could and probably will try to get bigger. And that takes a lot of independent movies off the board. What was like, maybe focus, at one of those companies that the movies just got bigger and bigger and then they just kind of toppled and went away. Those companies just end up getting too big for their britches. And they realize they're out spending their resources and they're not meeting market demands. Speaking of this movie, we all just want it to be 1997. Right? We want it to... The thing that just doesn't exist, and this minted all of your heroes, Virgin Suicides to Lost in Translation, Bottle Rocket to Rushmore to Royal Tenenbaums Heartache to Boogie what we don't have is like nobody saw your movie it's kind of a disaster critics liked it here's 15 times the amount of money try again and then everyone's like generational masterpiece like not a lot of money you're right that is the exact kind of searing insight that you always bring all the things I just said you know those are modest swings and the success the dividends on those movies will last 100 years.

2:08:31Because it was just like, I mean, what does Rushmore cost? $10 million? What's Royal Tenenbaums? 20? Like, these movies will last until the end of time. There are some, like Emma Seligman is somebody who I feel like is on a more traditional trajectory. She made a super small movie with a friend and she made a slightly bigger movie for a studio. It didn't perform maybe as well as they wanted it to, but she's somebody who like, in theory, could keep building at the right scale. Right, but that's a scale. That's a different scale because all the things I listed, like those first movies were studio movies.

2:08:59Those weren't produced and then acquired. Somebody let Wes make Bottle Rocket at Columbia. That's someone who was James L. Brooks. Right, right. It was a disaster. Yeah. And then within two years it was like, what's your next dream? Forget about the disaster. And this just doesn't happen anymore. And that, that was the thing that made all of our heroes. Yeah. Everyone we love from our lifetime. There was a loose change division in studio filmmaking that doesn't really exist anymore. Yeah. And, you know, There's just too much money at stake to be like, go make Rushmore for$10 million. Or go make this for a little bit of money.

2:09:35Oh, Oscar nomination? Now what do you want to do? And as I always like to complain, she's a great example. I'm a great example. Listen up, Philip Sundance 2014. If that was 2004, by two years later, I would have made a$10 million movie of my complete desire. That just doesn't exist anymore. We just missed the boat on like, let's nurture, let's build up because it just becomes like what job do you want to get? And spending four years making something as deranged as this is like, look, I can like do my own thing. This is creatively fulfilling which ultimately is what matters. It's not financially rewarding at all but we never made the movie for more than like seven days at a time so I didn't really have to miss too much family time.

2:10:21Obviously the musical took weeks and weeks but every day of rehearsals I left in time for dinner because again I was doing very little. and then I was like alright on it's the week of the show I will not be home for dinner this week and that's that and the week of the range life shoot with Joe and the guys it's like I will not be home this week but every week of prep I was home for pickup for dinner because I wasn't working that hard and that's the inspiration of Milkmas it's like I have a thousand complex ideas that might approach brilliance or insanity I'm just going to work at them like 70 % and then like when I need to I'm going to go above and beyond and for him that's when he's on stage and for me i'm like all right this is my week to like actually lock in and i'm just going to like give it 50 for another month and then i'm gonna like really lock in again yeah and he's very 50 of the time is sending uh memes of me yeah well this was pre that but now now now my life is much richer because of the meme because of the meme work but i don't know it just feels like that's a big problem and something like you're saying what does this lead to it's like historically big things now like nothing leads to anything like i left the asian i'd been with since listen up philip was at sundance specifically because there's no path into like you want to work on a hollywood movie you want to work on a studio film and i was just like i want to get off this treadmill i can't do this anymore like this is no interest as a writer yes that's all I do as a director who cares like this is what I want to direct right like yeah stupid stuff where I'm making films in public with audiences that pay to be in my movie I want to like break the rules and break the form I don't want to make like pablum and like you know nobody wants to do that everyone who grew up my age wanted to be all these heroes and some people get to do that but I'm just nervous that the system is not going to continue to be even remotely supportive of something that gives anybody the chance, right?

2:12:11Like just because money is getting harder to unlock. Like no one's working. No one's making anything. I have so many friends, producers, five, six projects. They can't get anything. They have actors attached. They have locations. They just can't get the money. No one's giving the money. This is unfortunate. And I say to people, what's your advice? Well, who do you want to release your movie? They say, send them the script and see if they want to make it now. I did. They passed on it. Don't make the movie. Like, I'm sorry to say it, but like you, you will lose your money. Don't make the movie now.

2:12:44If the company who you want to release it won't make it, they're not going to buy it later, but they could just buy it now. Or if they do, they're going to buy it for a third or a quarter or a fifth of what you spent on it. And that's bad business. And bad business doesn't lead to more business. So like a sinner, that's an anomaly. We love anomalies. Independent anomalies. It's like, I mean, you do the math, like two years of Sundance, like 75 narrative films, documentaries, 100, like five sales, 10 sales. People aren't talking about that enough. That's very bad. Not for those movies. That's just bad for business.

2:13:21And like to have a very strange music film documentary you know there's dozens of these hundreds a year maybe premiere venice where of course amanda has a great time and i had a less great yeah it's okay um just very very hot and um a lot of issues there but logistically it can be complicated yeah um but now you know what to do with your kids and i told you about the camp there yeah oh they're not coming well there's a camp for them oh okay i told you there's a camp i know but we didn't you didn't tell me which island it's on the Lido oh you drop them off you walk to where the movies are it's literally down the street from the movies alright you know that's very validating to be like music documentaries don't go there they don't play at the New York Film Festival they don't even get released in theaters we don't get like maybe one screen and so it's an absurd privilege to have finished this thing exactly as we wanted for half the money we needed yeah you're really turning the boat around you were ending this episode in a really down note so please have some gratitude for your greatness well talk about the industry negative talk about myself.

2:14:23I feel very, I feel very, very fortunate because the thing's being released, like, and because of the film forum in New York, like it's an exclusive eight or 10 week theatrical because film forum still requires that. So we get to have screenings like last night and throughout the next couple of weeks throughout the country. And that's a privilege for any movie, but for a music documentary that was made not to be a music documentary, but to be like, this is a film. This is a film created as a film, not as like a piece of promotional content for the brand for the back catalog is a real privilege.

2:14:55But, um, you know, like maybe I earned it by having done this for 15 years. Maybe I earned it by riding the coattails of an iconic band, but regardless, like this didn't create a sustainable model for anything. Like, I hope no one's inspired by this movie because it will lead them to, you need, you just said it's important to be inspired by dumb shit. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I hope someone hates it and they get inspired to make something. Um, but yeah, people are like, man, like they, really just not the pavement movie I wanted. It's like, well, then make your own pavement movie to the naysayers.

2:15:26I'm not sure there will be another pavement movie after this movie. Well, no, because we put all five of them in once, right? Yes, you can. You did it all. Alex, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thank you for having me. Lovely to see you both, as always. And happy to be here for my sixth physical in-person space. What number are we on, though? Is this nine? Of episodes? Twelve? I'm not prepared to answer. I'm not either. Anyway, thanks, Alex. Go see Pavements.

2:15:56Thanks to Alex Ross Perry. Thanks to Bobby Wagner. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders. We'll be back later this week with the next entry in our 25 for 25 series. Any hints you want to provide? I'm so excited. I was like, I would say that my excitement is like maybe doesn't, no, it does correspond. So you have revisited it. Oh, yeah. I did it. I'm revisiting it right after this. And I was just like, this is, I like, I, I was just like, I love us. I love that we're doing this. I really, this makes me so happy, which is when you guys find out what movie is, is awesome. What a great tease. We'll see you then.