Dumpuary Is Dead. These Movies Killed It. Plus: The Best Movies at Sundance and the Catherine O’Hara Hall of Fame.

25:50Yeah. And she's stuck with John Candy and his musician troupe. And they have this like touching moment. And that's two people who have been friends since they were kids when they first started together in Canada. and she has these like long running relationships with all of these key figures in comedy. So Beetlejuice, Home Alone. I mean, after hours, she's only in 10 minutes, but she's absolutely hilarious. And the thing that she does to Griffin Dunn in that movie where he's trying to remember a phone number and she keeps saying like seven, nine, four, six, two, four, three, six. Trying to throw him off is amazing.

26:23There's a small movie that Steve Martin wrote called A Simple Twist of Fate about a single father with a little girl that she plays sort of like the best friend slash surrogate mother character. That's a really good performance. It's a movie that's a little bit forgotten. I thought I would shout out. She's very funny. Speaking of the John Candy documentary, which is stars Colin Hanks. No, it's directed by Colin Hanks, but he's one of the stars of Orange County. And she's very funny in that movie as well. And then go down the list of all the Christopher Guest movies. Right? Mighty Wind, Free Consideration, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman, right?

26:55Yes, I would demand that Best in Show be on the list. That's definitely in there. So yeah, I mean an incredible career. Really sad. Very sad. It seems like a surprise. It didn't seem like she was sick or that anything was wrong so it's devastating. Okay. Let's talk about Sundance quickly. Okay. Go for it. We were not in Park City. We did not go to Park City. It was the last Park City. I actually saw some people over the weekend who were there for the last Park City. The reports are pretty similar around the board which was that it was neither the best slate nor the happiest vibe because this was the last year of Park City.

27:33So it was a little dour. A lot of people remembering their experiences over the decades going. We just went the one time, you and I. Yeah. And we had fun when we went. Yeah. No, I went again last year for 18 hours. You were there very briefly. That's right. So I saw the closure of Main Street, you know, when Chase Sapphire just took everything over. Yeah. Which, you know, is the vibe. And this year, it seems like there were not a ton of great movies. I saw one great movie. Okay. And I watched it on Thursday night. Eileen and I watched it together because I did virtual Sundance. And the next day, it won the Grand Jury Prize and also the Audience Award for a drama.

28:14And that movie is called Josephine. It stars Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan, and in an amazing debut, Mason Reeves, a young actress, eight years old. it's about a little girl who goes for a walk early one morning with her father to go play soccer they are separated very briefly on this walk and she witnesses a sexual assault and it is about everything that happens to this little girl in the aftermath of witnessing this horrifying event about learning how the world works learning how her parents react to this news learning how the justice system operates, learning about a little kid's psychology. The movie is very purposefully manipulative, but honestly shattering.

29:02The phrase that kept rattling in my head while I was watching it, and it's not about the actual premise of the movie, but maybe more about how I think about life is that this is hard to accept. It's a movie. It's made up. But the filmmaker, Beth De Arajo, does an amazing job of putting you in the perspective of the little girl and it also puts you in the perspective of two parents who don't know what they're doing and make a lot of mistakes and disagree in front of her about what to do about this situation and I honestly felt like I just got beat up by Mike Tyson at the end of the movie. I found it very, very hard.

29:38Great. Can't wait. Yeah. It's devastating. Obviously, it won both awards so it was immediately identified as like the Sundance movie. I think we'll be talking about it throughout the year. It will certainly be an awards conversation. Yeah. But then the other thought I had was, the first thought I had was, oh, great. I will see this and I don't think it'll be pleasant, even if it will be revelatory. And then the second was, this seems like movie adolescence. Yeah, I mean, it's the flip side, right? It's a young girl instead of a young boy. Right. But similar themes. and I felt like there was more that both of those films deploy filmmaking tools you know in adolescence the oners and the idea of kind of never breaking from the perspective of the small room that you're in with these characters in this movie the young girl continues to see like a vision of the man who assaults the woman okay all around her in her life and that's sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't work as well everything else about the movie feels very constructed but real.

30:47And that's the one thing that is sort of like almost phantasmagoric, the way he kind of like haunts her. And so those are two like, they're not tricks per se, but they're techniques that I think have some similarities between them. It's just, you know, I'm probably gonna have to watch this movie again. I don't look forward to it. There's one scene in particular that I just kind of lost it completely. And I think it's because I tend to think of myself as like a tough movie watcher. Yeah, but increasingly you're not. Really not at all with kid stuff. I do wonder whether this is going to have a little bit of the Hamnet phenomenon this year.

31:23And now I'm finding as people become aware of if I had legs, I'd kick you. Where I've spoken with a lot of people who are like, no thanks, I don't want to watch that. No, like I just, and you and I will for our work. But it is interesting. Hamnet has had both like a very rapturous response and a lot of people who are like, okay, but this seems really upsetting. Do I have to do it? Yeah. You know, Beth De Araujo also had a film in 2022 called Soft and Quiet, which was about a group of young female white supremacists who kind of come together for like a meeting group. Okay. And then some crazy events that happen after that.

32:00That movie has a kind of similarly harrowing tension that this movie does, but that movie at times kind of felt a bit ridiculous to me. Not that it couldn't happen when transpires in the movie, but it just felt like it was trying to be a horror movie. This new movie, Josephine, uses the tools of a horror movie but creates something that feels very real and it'll be interesting. I mean, I mentioned that Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award thing because this doesn't happen very often and when it does, it usually means you're probably headed to the Academy Awards. I mean, the movies that have had this recently include Coda, which won, of course, and then Minari and Whiplash and Precious.

32:38They all won those awards and then went on to Best Picture nominees. Birth of a Nation, the Nate Parker movie, which basically got kind of like scandal deleted, also won both awards. And Fruitvale Station did too, which did not get nominated for Best Picture, but obviously set a path for a very powerful filmmaker. So yeah, this movie is a big deal. And I didn't really feel - Does it have a release date yet? It doesn't even have a distributor. It has not even been acquired. Oh, interesting. I mean, it's a very difficult sell commercially, even though anybody who watches it, And, you know, I don't I feel stupid playing this card, but if you are a parent, it will it's going to hit very, very hard.

33:15Yeah. But, you know, it's just it's a very obvious. There's a whole you can see the next 14 months of the movie playing out in your head for a lot of going to Berlin. Going to. Oh, interesting. OK, so maybe it'll just do the festival run. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. To be totally candid with you, nothing came even close to this movie for me. at Sundance. I watched a lot of films over the last four days and some were good, some were not so good. I already mentioned Carousel last week on the show, the Chris Pine, Jenny Slate film, which I think has really good performances and is thoughtful and is like a nice movie about being 43 and being like, fuck, what happened to my life?

33:51Yeah. Did I do things right? Here we are. I have a kid. I don't know where I'm going. I see older people and I see how they're going to die soon and then I got to make sure that my life goes okay. It's a relatable concept. Best doc I saw is probably Nuisance Bear. it's about a polar bear. It's about a series of polar bears in Manitoba. It's effectively just a nature documentary that interweaves this sort of the Inuit perspective on how the bears live in the community. Very classical kind of Sundance stuff. This movie is produced by A24. I assume they're going to release it, though they don't really put out docs anymore.

34:25It would be a big hit in my home. Yes, although there's some kind of traumatic stuff where they're trying to trap and relocate the bears. Oh, no. That's tough. Where they go into these little tunnels and they close the gates on them. My older son has not, he's not logged on to the point where he can empathize with the human characters on the screen. But we watched Benji, the 1974 Benji recently. And when Benji was alone, not even in peril, just alone. Okay. Knox was like, absolutely not. Like, he needs to find a friend really fast. So you're correct that maybe the bears in peril would not be good for him.

35:04Yeah, I mean, there's not anything deeply violent against the Bears, but the whole time you're like, can you just leave these guys alone? He just wanted Benji to have a friend. I understand. I understand. And Benji's a pretty confident guy. Is he? I haven't seen Benji in some time. I think things, he's magnetic. You know, the other dogs want to hang out with Benji. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, he's got... And the kids. He has that swag, Benji. He does. Okay, Union County Quickly is another film that I thought was solid. but has a great performance by Will Poulter in the middle of it. It's about a young guy in Ohio who is in recovery and is in a county-mandated drug program.

35:44And it does feel also like a traditional Sundance film, like a very shot of location, serious, somber film about a man's journey through his struggles. However, the thing I like about it is that it uses a lot of real people from this drug program in this county and shows literally the process that people have to go through. to kind of get clear. Yeah. That was very effective. Really good journalism movie this year. I got to put Brian Curtis on this movie. I always tip him off to the journalism documentaries, but it's called Seized. Did you read the story about the Marion County record, which was the newspaper that was raided in Kansas a few years back?

36:25It made some national news. No, I was just following the shark attacks, you know, and other weird news. I don't read that news. I only read news about journalism. Assaults on the First Amendment. I try to block them out. I can't anymore, but I do my best. Yeah, well, they're happening more and more frequently. So the movie starts out as this kind of like the power of journalism and the power of this elder newspaper man who's kind of running this newspaper. And he brings in a Gen Z kid who's graduated from J school and really wants to learn his craft. And he can't get a job at the New York Times, but he can get a job at the Marion County Record.

36:57But then the movie kind of halfway through pivots to basically just like small town gossip. Oh, fun. And it's pretty entertaining and kind of zippy. And it seems like it's going to be this kind of stuffy, important film about, you know, how our rights are under threat. But that's not actually what it is. Which they are. They're totally under threat. Let's be clear. And in this town, they clearly were. But I like that movie because it had a nice balance of these strong ideas. Yeah, all news is local news, ultimately. Very much. Very much the theme of the movie. Quickly, Hot Sean, Shake Your Booty is probably the most crowd-pleasing movie that I saw.

37:31It stars Rinko Kikuchi as a woman who is really in a ballroom dancing. And she loses her partner and then she finds a new partner. And she falls in love. This movie is heavily, literally and figuratively indebted to Dirty Dancing. I would recommend it to you. Great. I'm excited. Would love to see it. Paralyzed by Hope is the Maria Bamford documentary. Fairly standard. I really like Maria Bamford's comedy. I liked learning about her. I liked learning that she lives in Altadena. I liked learning about where all of the voices that she does in her comedy come from, which is almost entirely real people, especially her mother.

38:03Was it filmed before or after the Altadena fires? Both. Oh, interesting. Both, and they were affected. Yeah. So that's captured in the film as well near the end. Really, I thought like for, there are a lot of movies like this now about comedians and their struggles, but I thought this was a particularly good one. Night Nurse, probably the most fucked up movie that I saw. Great. It's about a young woman who gets a job as a night nurse in a care facility, retirement community. And she begins a bizarre psychosexual codependency affair with one of the elder men living in the facility. Okay. And they make a lot of prank calls together.

38:45And they have orgies and they get into a lot of trouble. All right. And Semri Paksoy and Bruce McKenzie are the nurse and the guy in the facility. fascinating performances a genuinely odd vibe to this movie it's not scary it's not sexy it is I mean upsetting the premise sounds strange it is very strange Georgia Bernstein wrote and directed it not seen anything like it everybody's got their own kink I guess they do two more quick ones The Incomer which is a Scottish movie that stars Donald Gleeson about a guy who comes to remove two kooky siblings from a very small Scottish island that they're no longer allowed to live on.

39:30I did not know that the actress Gail Rankin was Scottish. If you see her face, you'll know exactly who I'm talking about. She shows up in a lot of horror movies and TV shows, but she is in fact Scottish. You know her? Yeah. Yeah. She's a really good actor and she's in this movie. This is written and directed by Louis Paxton. I thought it was fun. It was like a quirky comedy. Okay. And then the last movie that I watched last night was Bedford Park, which has already been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. Flawed, but very good, I thought. Written and directed by a woman named Stephanie Ahn. It stars Moon Choi and San Suk-soo.

39:57it is about two Korean Americans who kind of find each other by accident and they both have a lot of demons and are very fucked up and then kind of fall in love but kind of don't and are kind of using each other but also they learn things about each other in this kind of tenuous union that they have the movie's like a little too long but really really good performances by two actors that I was not familiar with and I think this will probably end up coming out later this year and maybe get some attention. I'm curious to see if people dig it or not. But yeah, so that was Bedford Park. So that's 10 movies.

40:33What about the documentary you texted me and Chris about in the middle afternoon on Saturday? Well, the most fun I had was The Best Summer, which is the new movie from Tamara Davis, who Real Ones Know directed CB4 and Billy Madison and was married to Mike D from Beastie Boys for the longest time. They're no longer together, but they were together in 1995, 96 when Beastie Boys, Pavement, Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, basically like all the coolest bands in the world all went on a tour together in Australia. And she just took a whole movies and they all just hung out and she filmed performances of these bands when they were like 27 and just asked them what their favorite color was and what kind of food they like to eat.

41:18And it's probably the best movie I've ever seen.

41:23It has no narrative shape whatsoever. It has no tension. Yeah. There's not an arc. Sometimes we just want to see the things that we love. Nope. I was just like, that is Ad-Rock, hanging out and being cool. I mean, this was also my review of the Sofia Coppola, Mark Jacobs documentary. She's just like, oh, it's those people. This is my stuff, you know, just all my stuff together hanging out, you know, just Kim Gordon just sitting on a couch, just being fun. So yeah, I would recommend that to anybody who is... Who knows what any of those proper nouns are. Do you know who those people are? You will enjoy this film.

41:55Yes or no. Yes, definitely. Okay. Thank you, Jack. Thanks for making us feel seen. You know, I don't even know if that movie's going to get released. I don't even know what you do with a movie like that. Okay. It's just home movies lightly edited together, but then there's also like performance of Sonic Youth Doing Bull and the Heather in 1996. You know, it's like you... It's what you want. Okay. That's... This concludes the portion of me just talking at you. Thank you for rolling with it. That was a long time of you just talking at me. I watched so many movies. I wish I saw more good ones. I really do.

42:27Can I ask you, so are you like, you're blocking off Cal time over the weekend? Yeah. And then Eileen and Alice are out in the world? No, it was mostly Thursday and Friday. Oh, okay. I was pretty much with Alice all day yesterday. So I didn't watch much. Look at you, dad of the year. Oh, no, we had a good time. We watched The Three Musketeers, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy yesterday. Oh, cute. That was fun. At the playground for like roughly 12 hours. Yeah. No. But yeah, during the day, Thursday and Friday, I watched a lot of stuff. Saturday, I saw you. We also saw a movie together. We did. We saw K-pop Demon Hunters at Vidiots with our families.

43:05That movie plays. It was really great in the movie theater. We'll talk about that maybe a little bit later on on this show. But let's talk about people we meet on vacation. There's a new film that's on Netflix, a Netflix original. Yeah. It's directed by Brett Haley, who's made a handful of YA-ish dramas in the last few years. An important data point to discuss this film. This is based on the title of a novel of the same name by Emily Henry, who's not a writer I was familiar with, though it sounds like you are. Yes, a phenomenon. Not quite in the Colleen Hoover level of him, but sells books. I believe that her most popular book is called Beach Read.

43:50Smart. Yes. Love that meta. Another one, the book that I have read is Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation. There is something about the titling and packaging of the Emily Henry books that is very savvy. Okay. And has led to major sales. Okay. So I guess you could say this is a very anticipated movie. It stars Emily Bader, who I'd not seen before. Yeah. Tom Blythe, who we did see in the previous Hunger Games film. We did. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Yes. He played Commander Snow. Oh, right. Young Snow. Yeah, young Donald Sutherland in that film. It also stars Sarah Catherine Hook, Jamila Jamil, Molly Shannon, Alan Ruck.

44:31It is not what it sounds like. And I know that you were wrong-footed by this movie. It features two young people, Poppy and Alex, who... Poppy wants to explore the world. Alex prefers to stay at home with a good book, but somehow they are the best of friends. The way in which they are the best of friends is interesting. They live far apart, but for a decade they make this deal that they'll spend one week of vacation together over this period of time. So the film kind of bounces back and forth from the present day, which is the lead up to a wedding of a person in their lives, and then bounces back to these various vacations that they have taken or not taken together over time.

45:08What did you think of People We Meet on Vacation? You mentioned my expectations and how I was wrong footed by this. And I will say that people we meet on vacation is sort of my Dune part one, which for those of you not following along, Sean did not know that the film Dune was going to be split up until until the movie ended. There was like five minutes left and I was like, oh, no.

45:35so you either missed the part one that was shown on the title card and or they added it after you saw it and so I really thought this was going to be about a movie about people meeting on vacation and then going on vacation together yes and you know they can make it work on vacation but not in real life looking for like polyamory here like what was it that you wanted out of this situation Well, I wanted a good rom-com for one and with the stakes and structure that makes sense to me. I wanted travel. I wanted outside locations. I wanted a production budget higher and closer to what the word vacation means to me on film.

46:18And this is more, as you said, in the YA film budget and filming realm. I feel like it gets like 40 % there. that we need to go outside. We need, we need movies to go outside. There's a big, we're getting bogged down. We're getting bogged down. Let's stay on the surface to start. And I, so I was, I was taken aback and disappointed by the, the premise or what the movie turned out to be about. Because you hate love. And then I was taken out of the film by a very, not even direct homage, but, uh, failed a recreation of a When Harry Met Sally scene. Yeah. And so the film just never lived up to what I expected to be.

47:07It was always lesser than, not as well-written, not as well-filmed, not as well-budgeted. I liked the performances. Emily Bader was a revelation to me. Listen, Paula Abdul forever, and I would like to talk about that. I enjoyed that, yeah. But yeah, so I've been thinking a lot about this because I think my reaction is kind of unfair. No, you're the category expert. Well, yeah. Well, but so this is the thing is that we need to be clear about what category this is. And this is not like a classic romantic comedy. This is an adaptation of a bestselling book. This is closer to Nicholas Sparks and all the YA movies than it is to Nora Ephron and Richard Curtis and Nancy Meyers and all the people that I esteem.

47:52and you know because it has that scene where they actually the the two main characters meet they're set up to drive home from college together which is insane I mean that is like quite literally what happens it is the same thing so you're thinking about it and like grown-up rom-com territory but this is a this is a movie adaptation of a beloved book it is doing fan service. It is trying to stick very carefully to the source material. It's more Nicholas Parks. That's okay. I mean, you know, that has sometimes worked and that has sometimes not worked. But I think when we talk about it, we need to know that that is like, we need to understand what we're talking about.

48:35And that's the goal. Yeah. So I kind of wanted to forgive this. This is going to be strained. Yeah. In comic book storytelling, a lot of times what happens is you get a writer or illustrator who comes in to do a new run on a comic. And what they want to do is they want to pay homage to the past, but they want to reinvent the characters. They want it to feel familiar but different, right? Yeah. Brian Michael Bendis, who's probably the single writer most responsible for what the comic book movies are like now. Like most of what the MCU and Spider-Man are doing is kind of pulling from, like he created Miles Morales, for example.

49:09Like he is one of the godfathers of 21st century comic book storytelling. he would give you something that you know and then he would shift it a little bit and i was when i when this movie first started i was like oh this is going to use when harry met sally as a launch pad right to give us a new version of this kind of a story now there's a danger there obviously because it raises your expectations you're like if you're gonna recreate this or remind me of this you gotta be you what you're doing has to be really good yeah it really has to be good. And this just isn't. Right. And the challenge to me is like, the movie's not funny at all.

49:46Like, not even really a little bit. And I think Emily Bader is very charming. And very pretty. Beautiful. Yeah. She reminds me a lot of... And the movie does achieve that where I'm watching, I'm just like, oh, she's really pretty, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Which is an intentional part of this type of movie. I was captivated by her. I had never seen her before. I as soon as the movie was over I immediately logged on Letterboxd and was like season tickets for this person I'm super interested in whatever they do because she also has not she's not so beautiful she has real charisma and she's trying really hard in this movie she's kind of giving it her all Tom Blythe I thought was like a zero just incredibly dull and not interesting and you don't really understand their connection but I think I don't know if the movie cares about being funny you know like it's not so it's odd to set you up for something because Billy Crystal obviously is a joke machine in When Harry Met Sally.

50:39He basically invents the show Seinfeld in that movie. The When Harry Met Sally thing is such a failure because it's such a bad idea because you can't live up to When Harry Met Sally, but it's also not trying to be that kind of movie. It's not. It is trying to be an adaptation of this book, which is... It's a YA into A novel. Yeah, and I've read a different Emily Henry novel, but they are pretty unspecific, and they're not super writerly in the way that all of the romantic comedies that we love or that I love and that are discussed as kind of like the great examples of the genre are. The other thing about all of the really great romantic comedies is that they're original.

51:25Or if they're iterating, they're iterating on a structure that is contrived in either previous like romantic comedies in film or their adaptations. You know, You've Got Mail is a remake of The Shop Around the Corner. Or they're like inspired by Shakespeare and Jane Austen. You know, like people who got structured down and some basic setups. The classics, yeah. But they're not tethered to remaking like every single specific detail of the source material. Like I read some article about like the big change that the movie version of People We Meet on Vacation makes from the book that Emily Henry feels really good about.

52:06And it's that the Tom Blythe's character's ex-girlfriend becomes a flight attendant instead of something else. And so they have a moment at like the airport. And I was just, it was so, it was such a boring, insignificant change, but being presented as something so important to the original text. and what does this teach us about what we're learning? That I was like, this is silly. So that's actually why I brought up the comic book comparison. Because when you have this kind of lore baked around source material, then people get kind of like, they get more invested, but they also get finicky and it creates a kind of like a stand culture around things that is really complicated.

52:47I don't know if this movie has gotten quite that far, but the reason we're talking about it on the show three weeks after it was released on Netflix is it's really popular. Like a lot of, I would venture to guess it is the most watched movie of 2026 so far. Probably, yeah. Fair to say, right? Just given, I mean, maybe you would say like Avatar, Fire, and Ash or something or Zootopia 2. But aside from that, millions of people have probably watched this movie on Netflix right now. And it's not really much of anything ultimately. Like it is not awful. It's very watchable. It isn't funny. It isn't really revelatory.

53:20I found the kind of middle part to be the most interesting where they're trying to figure out like the nature of their relationship. And so you bounce back to year four and then to year six and you're going on these various vacations with them. But the present day drama was sort of like where the most obvious they're getting back together set up in the history of movies. And I know that that's what these movies are meant to deliver on. So you want it satisfied. But no, the art of it is in creating the tension and the and the impediments to them being together, like being believable. and you are not supposed to sit there watching the screen and be like, just fucking figure it out, guys.

53:58Yes, exactly. The whole time. You need to be invested in the, oh, they can't really, like this is complicated and are we going to resolve this? And I wanted to know how they figured it out, but I was impatient the whole time. Like, this is so obvious. Just figure it out, guys. I also just felt like it wasn't dramatic enough to be or melodramatic enough to be appropriate YA, but not funny enough to be rom-com. So then it's just stuck in this middle of like, this is just a movie about like pretty 29 year olds. Yeah. You know, we can do better. And it's the world that it builds is not particularly believable or again, specific or recognizable.

54:36We haven't mentioned that she's a travel writer. Right. She's a travel writer for a website that gives her just unlimited budgets to travel the world and write about whatever. Did you ever consider travel writer as a vocation? Well, by the time I got there, it was dead. This is the thing. So it doesn't exist now. But did you consider it? Well, no, I don't think so. Do you like to travel? I do. Like now I'm available to be a hotel influencer for anyone who wants to, you know. Great. But again, that's what it looks like. There's no one. And Jamila Jamila is her boss. And then so she funds all of the vacations.

55:11I don't know what he does. Nothing interesting. He owns a home in Ohio. Yeah. A small town home. He's rebuilding that home, renovating that home. and then he's tall they go yeah he's professionally tall they go places but they don't really the only place they actually go is New Orleans and they are on Bourbon Street that's like your one exterior shot I think they're part of the movie and everything else is in sets meant to recreate Airbnbs or hotel rooms and they're not even done particularly well in my opinion the casting below the line leaves something to be desired in my opinion, when Lucien Laviscount, who shows up as one of her paramours, he is famously from Emily in Paris.

55:58I don't know if you know about that. I'm up to date on Emily in Paris. I haven't seen it. But so it feels like some real, and he's a very, very attractive individual. And it's not like a big part, but when it's just, you know, like Netflix intercasting, I'm just like, oh, this guy was available for two scenes standing outside an Airbnb that sort of looks like it's in Tuscany. Did you happen to recognize who Tom Blythe's girlfriend, fiance was? I didn't, but then I Googled it afterwards, was like, oh, and I have since forgotten. The actress's name is Sarah Catherine Hook, and she was the young woman on the most recent season of The White Lotus who was getting interested in joining the Buddhist temple.

56:37Oh, sure. But she had blonde hair in this movie. Okay. So you might not have recognized her. She's from the wealthy North Carolina family. Okay. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, look, every generation gets their milquetoast romantic drama for young people, right? And you mentioned Nicholas Sparks. He's come up a lot because of Colleen Hoover. We're in a real era of this, which is between the Colleen Hoover and the Emily Henrys and just the romance genre, Heated Rivalry being another of these books that are very, very popular, kind of in non-traditional publishing formats. and then being adapted.

57:19What do you mean when you say that? Well, I think like Heated Rivalry started as fanfic, I believe, or is somehow related to fanfic. Colleen Hoover was publishing independently before she, you know, all of these people. I think Emily Henry is the most traditional model that I know of. And this goes back to Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey and all those books that sort of like were born of the internet writing, you know, that kind of took on a life of their own. So, you know, and this is a thing that happens where there are best-selling novelists who aren't necessarily being reviewed in the literary pages of the New York Times, but sell a lot of books, and then they make movie versions of them that are not as high-budget as other films and don't star A-list actors always.

58:04Or, you know, the Nicholas Sparks, you have some notebooks and you have some, you know, One Wish or whatever. What was the Wikipedia entry that we read live on a podcast? I don't remember. Genuinely don't remember. Maybe we'll watch that. No, no, no. I've seen Dear John. Well, maybe it was Dear John. That's Amanda Seyfried. We have to do a Sparks episode. We have to. But this is a thing that's happening. Might be the least listened to episode we ever do, but we have to do it. That's fine. But I do think that people we meet on vacation is part of that genre. of the it's like the book to movie adaptation as opposed to like a renaissance of romantic comedies yeah this genre of film will forever be known now as sparks notes and oh good and there you go we did it so the one thing i do want to mention though is that i do think that this is a streaming movie and i don't mean that pejoratively i think that this actually makes sense to be a streaming movie because of its budget number because of the star power that it has which is not very high but could be high it is a springboard for somebody like emily bader where you can be like oh i remember her from blank now the thing she's going to do next which eileen my wife immediately clocked is she's playing mia ham the soccer player in the 99ers which is a now forthcoming netflix movie that i think is coming out next year maybe later this year mia ham to my wife is michael jordan times 10 yeah she is the you know she's not only widely considered, you know, maybe not as much now, but certainly when we were in our teens and 20s, the greatest female soccer player of all time.

59:40But there's a there's a very there's an amazing photo. Right. A very famous photo of her ripping off her shirt. No, that's Brandi Chastain. Oh, that is? Different player. Yeah. Different player. Which one is the Mia Hamm? Mia Hamm. I don't know. Where she's like sliding then with the knee. That's not her. That's all. I believe that's Brandi Chastain. Mia Hamm photo. Mia Hamm is sort of like she got started a little bit before that generation of players. but no the photo I was referring to is of my wife and Mia Hamm when Eileen was like 10 years old and she met Mia Hamm on the set of a commercial because she like participated in the commercial because she was like I think that's the one that I'm thinking of where she's on her head oh yes you're right yes the maze where she's like and yeah yes that is but it doesn't isn't Brandi Chastain also sliding on her knees in the photo where she rips her shirt off Brandi Chastain let's see something soccer players tend to do pretty often it is true you're right it is Brandi Chastain they both have that that pose anyhow Now, Emily Bader is playing Mia Hamm, which is...

1:00:34That's great. You know, when they made the movie Air, they didn't show us the guy playing Michael Jordan. So you really got to live up. Now, Emily Bader doesn't look like Mia Hamm. She looks a lot like Mia Hamm, honestly. You know who Mia Hamm married? I don't. No Mark Garciaparra? You know, does that name ring about? Yes. Yeah. Sure. Baseball player? Red Sox? Yeah, Red Sox. Yeah, I remember that era. When we were talking about this, Aileen was like, I need to know what sports their children play. They should be the greatest athletes of all time. I didn't really get an answer on that. Okay. But you know, this movie's not great.

1:01:03It's really not. I really think if we spent a little more money. Like, here's the thing, is that I know that this is a streaming movie and... There's more to it than that. Well, but there's... There is more to it than that. And you need a good script, obviously, and an original idea. And as long as you're tied down in fan service in this way. To fan service that... Thank you. something that is successful because it's broad. that's going to be difficult to reverse engineer it. But I really do think we just need to spend more money. I think that we're missing a major part of what makes these movies.

1:01:40The clothes, the locations, the sense of place. If you can watch, if you can get vacation content and people being beautiful content for free on Instagram that looks better than this, then at some point it just doesn't really compete. Do you think that they're at risk of killing the golden goose with these movies now? Because we have reminders of him coming next month. Yeah. Then Verity over the summer. They're going to keep coming out, these adaptations. Because this is a rare pathway to getting women to go to the movie theater and to engage with these streaming services. Like, this could burn out pretty quick.

1:02:20I have high hopes for Verity. Because that is a slightly more elevated version of it. you know, Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, our beloved, Michael Showalter directing it. So it's people trying elevated trash. And elevated trash can be exciting. Agree. And that's also movie theater. There are a lot of movies like this that get put on streaming services all the time that you and I just don't cover. It's true. So I don't think we're at risk of, you know, over-indexing yet. The original, wait, let's talk about Paul Abdul really quickly. Yeah. So is it Forever Your Girl? Is that the song?

1:02:59It is Forever Your Girl, yeah. So, you know, when you and I were young, Paul Abdul was a massive pop star, I think for the generation right below us or the half generation below us. She obviously was one of the first judges on American Idol and kind of reestablished herself as a famous person. You know, Emily Bader, is she even 30 years old? Like, I don't know how old is she and how old is her character supposed to be? When does the film take place? I'm trying to figure out why she's so into Paul Abdul. I mean, some classics live forever. I guess that's true, but to have a whole choreographed dance routine.

1:03:31Where are you on Paula Abdul? I know who she is and couldn't tell you a single song she wrote. Okay. I mean, that is, you have something to look forward to, is how I'll put it. So Emily Bader was born in 1996 and Forever Your Girl was released in 1988. So, you know, it's like, I don't, listen. I don't want to put Paula, Abdul, and Madonna in the same sentence. You better not. And I am not putting them in the same sentence. I have respect for them individually. But Madonna is an example of someone whose pop stardom and influence and music can be handed down across generations. So a good song is forever is all I'm saying.

1:04:16Also, Paula Abdul made a video with an animated cat. So listen, it was Gene Kelly and then it was Paula Abdul. First of all, his name is MC Scat Cat. Listen, you don't lecture me about Paula Abdul. I'm just giving you information. I'm not lecturing you. The song is called Opposites Attract. If you don't think that I had a modern dance, I guess this was probably more a jazz. I had a, as we know, I studied dance. And I had one teacher who really kept us up to date on the classics. So like a lot of work to Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. Sure. And opposites attract formative. I don't remember the choreography, but that would be my song in the rom-com.

1:05:02So interesting you mentioned that. First of all, I have a sister, my sister Cara, who is literally your age and was in all the same dance classes as you. Not literally, but figuratively was obsessed with Paula Abdul. The Paula Abdul song that really jumps into my mind that I recall quite vividly as a kid is called Rush Rush. Do you remember Rush Rush? No. Okay. Rush Rush was like kind of her ballad. And it had a very memorable video that I believe was inspired by Rebel Without a Cause and starred none other than Keanu Reeves. Wow. And. Listen. Here's the thing about Paula Abdul. She can't sing.

1:05:39She can't sing at all. It's okay. She was one of the biggest pop stars in America for like three and a half years. She was an amazing dancer. She was a Lakers cheerleader. I think that's how she got her start. She's Britney Spears before Britney, but also - But she kind of lacked Britney's like charisma dynamism, you know? Well, I mean, but she's doing okay now. So there's also, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But her fame was kind of fascinating because it was right when, you know, we were like six, seven, eight, nine years old. Yeah. And so she was on MTV constantly. But there was this like tacit understanding even then to 10-year-old me that I was like, this isn't good but it's working you know it's like you're kind of developing critical faculties it was poptimism yeah rearing its ugly head in 1991 um okay enough Paula Abdul speaking of pop stars it's been going very hard in my house the Paula yeah Paula Abdul Duran Duran uh you love music the K-pop Demon Hunter soundtrack yeah and uh Bizet's Carmen so we really you know interesting oft used in films as well sure But the intersection of music and film, we'll talk about momentarily with the moment.

1:06:43Yeah. Now, first of all, the impetus for this whole episode was like, January is good? Like really good maybe even? I think just Bone Temple and Send Help, you could say. This has been a very, very good January. If those two movies are not in my top 25 of the year, I'll be surprised. Then you've got like basically streaming stuff that is either good. We both thought The Rip was pretty good. I didn't think People We Meet on Vacation was very good per se, but a lot of people are engaging with it. We had this iron lung moment that just happened and we had Sundance and now we have The Moment. So The Moment is only in limited release.

1:07:19It's only in four theaters in America. So if you do not want to hear about the new Charlie XCX movie, just fast forward like 15 minutes. You can get into my conversation with Jack Fisk. It'll be good. We did see The Moment

1:07:32and I'll set it up before we get into our feelings about it. So this is directed by Aiden Zamiri. It's written by Zamirian Bertie Brandes, but it's based on an idea by Charlie XCX. It's a mockumentary. It is a fake documentary about a very specific few weeks in Charlie XCX's life as Bratt is taking off and she is preparing to mount her world tour supporting the album. And it stars Charlie, Roseanne Arquette, Kate Perlant, Jamie Dimitri, Hayley Benton Gates, Alexander Skarsgård. What did you think of the moment? Yeah, I absolutely loved this. This is also perhaps the most Amanda movie ever made.

1:08:11When you get down, when it is Charlie XCX, it's about celebrity. And it's very smart, very funny, very knowing, uses Alexander Skarsgård perfectly, is a two-hour subtweet of Taylor Swift, and ends, spoiler alert, I'll just say with a tribute to Cruel Intentions that I didn't see coming. I felt seen. I felt supported. I felt understood. And it's very cool. I like that this is what Charlie decided to do with the entire experience. There is, you know, it's based on, I think, an idea and even like a document that she was keeping during Brat Summer, which I watched from afar because I was far too pregnant to participate.

1:09:02right um but the only thing that is not so amanda about this movie is that just everyone's on cocaine right exactly you don't i guess you do see some of it but yeah you do see it yes i actually genuinely appreciated that the movie does not skirt the fact that everybody's just doing coke all the time like at one point they're talking about the the tour and whether it's like family friendly and everyone's like she's literally singing about cocaine yeah um but you know if people we meet on vacation is very broad and unspecific. This is like deeply like written, observed. All the details are so funny.

1:09:38It is like it feels very of the person and the person commenting on this very weird experience in like a creative knowing way. I really dug it. Yeah. So I'm kind of fascinated by this. We had joked last year quite a bit or even the year before that as Brad was really taking off that we were like, we also represent Charlie. Like we were there in 2012 when she was first starting out, you know, she is millennial. She's not Gen Z. Yeah. But I do think that this movie requires some. I just remember the line of being like, yeah, it was really, this song was very famous in a movie about kids who get cancer.

1:10:13So it's just, that is true. She did fault in our stars. She did. Was that Boom Clap? Yeah. Boom Clap. Now soundtracks say fast food Chinese that's in airports. Boom, clap, fire, chicken. Yeah, Panda Express commercial. Nice, good for her, good for Charlie. Panda Express, I'll eat it. I think that it's very helpful and borderline necessary to have an awareness of not just Charlie XCX's music and her character, but also to understand the kind of world that she operates in. for this movie to really work for you. And like it opened in four theaters and it did incredible gangbusters per screen average.

1:10:57Right. Because the super fans threw themselves at this movie and they probably loved it. I found it very amusing. I think it's like way more accomplished than I was expecting. I thought it was going to be like a weird, messy, like kind of junky pop star movie. Yeah. And it's not that. It's way closer in kind of like style to the Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon movie, The Trip or like In the Loop. I know that Charlie has been saying like Spinal Tap is really kind of like the bedrock of this movie, but I didn't really feel Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap is like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. This movie is like kind of like dead air satire, you know?

1:11:30Like it's just kind of like almost like curvier enthusiasm at times. There is a lot of like the like Jim from the office reaction shots of everyone just, and most of them by Caperland. Yes, yes. A lot of people like turning to camera and being like, can you fucking believe this? but the reason I say that you need to know the world is it took me a while for it to dawn on me like what a savage takedown of Taylor Swift this movie really is because I don't know as much about her and like you turned to me at one point and you were like this is the song that's about Taylor Swift yes and like I didn't the more you start to watch the movie and the movie washes over you which is effectively a portrait of a person who has been at this thing that they're doing for a very long time and has been successful enough but is reaching a kind of a new stage of critical pop star success where you go from here with a competent, successful career to here where you can sell out a stadium.

1:12:22And that is obviously a shocking and overwhelming moment for any artist's life when they get this extraordinary amount of fame and wealth. And then what do you do with it? And like that is when compromise really comes in hard, where they start saying like, you need to have your own credit card. You need to be making, you know, songs that are specifically for different sects of the world. You need to be, You know, like you need to turn your tour into an all ages affair and go away from what is in the spirit of what your music is about. And the whole way through, I was like, this is very much about like the path that Taylor Swift took versus the path that Charli XCX is not likely to take just given what she's interested in, what kind of art she makes.

1:13:02And that's a very funny choice. Yeah. It's so literalized. you sent me an article about the director of the Eras tour. Sam Wrench. Who, once you have seen a picture of this person, you understand that Alexander Skarsgård's character, who is so funny and is the tour director who's brought in with, or no, he's documenting the film. Yes. He's the concert film director. Yes. Bailey Ben Gates plays the tour director, the creative director of the tour. But so the film director has different ideas about what the film and what the tour should be and who they're trying to reach and, you know, has relationships with the labels and with other people and is so dumb and creepy and funny.

1:13:56and even, you know, the process of giving notes, the process of communication, the wardrobe... Yes. ...is genuinely, it's very, very mean, very funny, and clearly like a one-to-one. I mean, it's not. We don't know what his personality is. We don't know what his personality is and we don't know what his directing style is, but they are, just the visuals are meant to make you think of this other person. Yeah. And then it's clearly that the director is, you know, amalgamating like every single corporate, you know, feedback. meeting that you've ever been in your entire life. He's weaponizing like woke verbiage in an effort to seem like an ally in conversations with female artists when in fact he just wants to bulldoze them and make the most commercially viable thing possible.

1:14:40The Sam Wrench details are interesting because like if you look at his CV, he's just made a lot of concert films with other artists and they all have this kind of similarly antiseptic, safe, you know, like faux empowering vision of the artist that is at the center of the stories. and that's the kind of language too that the Skarsgård character is using. He's like, we need to make you like this and she's kind of naturally resistant to it because being kind of as punk as you can be while still a pop star, which is part of Charlie's aesthetic, right? She's like very sex positive, sex forward, drug positive, drug forward.

1:15:14You know, I smoke cigarettes and I'm a dirt bag and I go to clubs and I party. Like that's my whole thing and that is inherently not for seven-year-old girls or it is appealing to seven-year-old girls and they want to get interested in it, but it's like illicit. Right. You know, it's the R-rated movie of pop stardom. And that is obviously in conflict with big, massive corporations wanting to partner with you to make your thing even bigger. And it is, to me, it's just like a really fertile territory for mocking the system that we have for what creative people get involved in. There's also a fair amount of like self-hatred in it, which I thought was very interesting.

1:15:49I mean, she does portray the effect that it has on personal and professional personal relationships. The Hayley Ben Gates character that you mentioned, who is the creative manager and slowly they have a partnership and you watch the Charlie character kind of turn on that. There's a great cameo from Mel Ottenberg, the interview editor-in-chief as her tour stylist. And Mel Ottenberg has famously been the tour stylist for Rihanna, among other people. He's awesome and he's great in this movie, but his character has to keep delaying his honeymoon to like work with Charlie. Yeah. And it's, you know, and, and, and that character is both expecting him.

1:16:30The Charlie character is expecting him to do it and also feels a little guilty, but like not guilty enough to say, don't do this. So it's very knowing, not just about the system around the pop culture, like the pop stardom, but also how success and fame and growth or, you know overnight explosions affect what the person itself is doing and the relationship between the celebrity like the forward facing person and the person who's been working for however long and has relationships and and a life and uh just wants to get a facial but is too ugly inside that just incredibly funny um there's a facialist who is left facialist to the stars and just all of the, you know, Maha nonsense that surrounds all of these people is like spouted right at Charlie.

1:17:28And then she's like not good enough for it. I laughed a lot. It's really funny. There's also a very funny moment where she's in a car with a driver who's taking her to an event and he asks her what she does. And she says, oh, I'm a pop singer. And he asked her to describe her music. And she kind of like awkwardly describes what she thinks she does. just like put to words what her style and genre is. And then he starts looking her up and talking about other pop music that he likes. And it's this great little snapshot of even if you feel like you're the biggest star in the universe and you're having a brat moment, nobody knows who you are.

1:18:00You know what I mean? Like even the highest level of celebrity is still micro. Movie's like pretty well observed when it comes to that stuff. I've seen some pretty mixed reviews of this movie and I'm surprised. Like relative to what something like this can accomplish, it's a pretty high-end version of it, I thought, and pretty clever. And they're also, to the point about people we meet on vacation not being very funny. Like, this movie is pretty funny. And it helps more if you do know who Mel Ottenberg is. It's true. And if you're like, if you think all of the Rachel Sennett stuff is funny, it's like the cameos, Alexander Skarsgård being like the most famous person arguably in this is still fairly niche.

1:18:37Yes, it is. And I guess there is a larger question of is most of America like the driver who just has no idea who Charlie XCX is? You know, it's possible. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's funny. We're talking immediately after the Grammys last night. Right. And, you know, was Charlie like the 28th most famous person there? You know, she's not, she's, or the 17th. Like, I don't really know what the hierarchy of power is. Yeah. But part of, you know, the movie isn't just about Taylor Swift, too. I think it's also a little bit about just like the pop girlies moment of the last 10 years, too, and her as this kind of like rejoinder, like she's in, but she's not in with that crew of people.

1:19:15And she represents like a contrast to that style of fame and success. Anyway, pretty fun movie. I loved it. Really good movie about celebrity. And like, again, I think that it is, it's not, it is a mockumentary, obviously, but it is also autobiographical. And when you think about all the other movies about celebrity, they are third person, you know, like they are observing whether it's like Sunset Boulevard or King of Comedy or, So I think it's cool. Yeah, it's subjective. And insightful in a way that I haven't really seen before. Also, Kylie Jenner. Who knew? Legitimately good. Like actually really funny.

1:19:55And I was trying to explain to people, like the movie kind of hinges on her performance. Yeah, a bit. Like pretty, I mean, it sort of does. It's a turning point of the film. Yeah. And I'm like, if she's bad, it's not, if she's bad, then I guess it like pivots in a different way. Yeah. But no, she was genuinely very good.

1:20:39Any other closing thoughts? Uh, I, if you like Charlie XCX, you should go see this. Is Dump You already dead? Mm, I don't know because we are still trying to figure out what to do on Thursday that has nothing to do with the release category. What's up with February? That's my new question for you. So do we think people are just clearing out for the Super Bowl this weekend? Well, what sense does that make? It doesn't. It's like most people are going to go see movies Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So they're just not going to release new movies on February 6th? Is it like, is it like a marketing thing?

1:21:10Is it a, we want our attention. We want all of the movie attention to be like on the trailers that we're spending a lot of money to launch. I whinged about this a lot last year. I was like, why are there all these open weekends? If you put more movies in theaters, people will go to the movies. The Iron Lung thing to me, I'm like, just put the fucking movie in the movie theater and people will go see it. I don't know. It's a very odd one. You know, the 13th is obviously a robust weekend because we have Weathering Heights. We have Crime 101. There's one other big release that I think I've seen that I can't remember.

1:21:37Finally. Pillion, Goat, the Steph Curry animated Goat basketball movie. Oh, sure. There's a bunch of movies on the 13th. Could Goat not have been released on February 6th? Would that not have worked? You'd think so. And I think Pillion is actually limited. It is. And it starts. So, you know, I guess some of it is just nobody wants to go wide. I guess so. What a month for Skarsgård. Listen, it's every month is a month for Skarsgård in my house. Dynamite SNL performance. Oh, I didn't see. He was on this weekend. Oh, yes. I saw that he had his dad out there too, right? Oh, it was amazing. I got to watch that.

1:22:10Yeah. Okay, well, we'll keep our fingers crossed on the 2008 movie swap. That seems like our best outcome for Friday's episode. Let's now go to my conversation with Jack Fisk.

1:22:24Really an honor to be joined by Jack Fisk. I'm here to talk to him about Marty Supreme and an incredible career and body of work. I wanted to start by asking you, at this stage of your career in life, how do you decide to work on a film? Because I imagine you get called frequently. You know, I look for films that scare me a little bit. Like there's maybe too much to do or too grand because it'll keep me awake and get me excited. And it seems like you put the same amount of energy into a film if it's little or more, but it's better if that more goes into sets rather than to figure out what to do with your time.

1:23:02Interesting. So when did Josh Safdie call you about this? Josh, he called me about three years before the film started, and he was enthusiastic about it. I was in Oklahoma working with Martin Scorsese on the film, and he goes, I'm going to make this film about a ping pong player. And I suddenly go, oh. It didn't seem so challenging, but he talked about it and got me excited. And then I went up and looked who Josh Softey was, and then I saw Uncut Gems. And it was really his passion and enthusiasm. But he called me three years later and said, okay, I got the money. I got Timothee Chalamet. Let's go.

1:23:38And he really reminded me of the directors I was working with in the 70s. You know, it's that enthusiasm, excitement and complete control because he was also a producer on the film. He'd written a script with Ronnie. So it wasn't material he was trying to adopt. It was stuff he knew from his inner core. Did he tell you what he wanted the world to look like? What is a call like that when you talk to a filmmaker? Are they telling you, here's what I see, or what can you bring to it? What's in the material discussion? Well, Josh was born in the 80s. I was born in the 40s. I lived in New York on the Lower East Side in the 60s when I was going to school there.

1:24:17And so I had some ideas. He had some ideas. We started looking at pictures together from street photographers at the time. he found a beautiful documentary film of Orchard Street from 1954. Okay. And a combination of that and talking about it and wanting to make it very real. So it works out that I love to do documentaries. You know, it's like when I was doing The New World, I really wanted to make a documentary about Pocahontas, But sometimes you're not allowed to do that because she was nine years old, naked. Right. The truth of it is not quite adaptable. Yes. They won't let you do a lot of stuff.

1:25:00But Josh was open to everything. Okay. And Darius Kanji, our cinematographer, he approached it. And we really, Adam Willis, the decorator, and I tried to recreate the 1950s New York so that it was more like a documentary than a theatrical film. Since I've grown up in the business, a lot of times when I look at period films, I go, well, this looks like a period film. You know, everybody's got the right clothes at the right time and it's perfectly designed, but real life is not that perfect. So in order to do a documentary, we looked sort of between the lines on photographs and stuff and found out really how grody it was.

1:25:46I mean, I lived in New York in the 60s on the Lower East Side. And it was so dirty because they burned coal. So coal dust was coming down all the time on the buildings, on the ground. Everything had a layer of black on it. and the people that were just teeming. And there was not a lot of other excitement to do except be on the streets with your friends. So people were playing stickball on the streets. They were shopping, they were bundled up, it's freezing cold. And the block that I lived on was Ukrainian. So it was like all these seemingly Russian type people, great restaurants, you know, for$1.25, you have a big plate of whatever they eat, beef and potatoes and borscht and stuff.

1:26:33And I couldn't even finish a$1.25 plate back then. Subway was 15 cents. So you could go anywhere on Manhattan, 15 cents. And you could transfer and go to Brooklyn and whatever. And I remember at the time thinking, this is a bargain living in New York. So poor people could live in New York very successfully. And there was an excitement about it. It's changed now. In the 70s, they kind of started to clean it up. Now the buildings are washed. that i don't think they heat with coal anymore no and uh and it's expensive and it's expensive and people are more refined and the little shops that were you could get stuff for bargains are now expensive in the you know um you know a handbag 250 dollars you know it's like crazy and that was my shock when i first went to new york on this film because i remembered it from the 60s and we went down to orchard street with the location people had found a location there that I thought might work.

1:27:30We went down to look at it. And all along the Lower East Side was graffiti on all the buildings that didn't exist in the 50s. They put like garage doors that rolled down so they could seal them up at night so nobody would steal anything. The signs had all been modernized. And at that time, because of COVID, they'd built restaurants out onto the street and they still existed. So the streets were blocked with restaurants. or additions like rooms about the size of a train car. So I said, oh, it was even more work than I thought. So I was really getting scared. And that got me more excited about the film.

1:28:10It's so interesting. I lived on Orchard Street in 2005. And at that exact moment, it was really being built up quite a bit. I lived across the street from an empty lot. And by the time I returned to it a year after I'd moved away, there was a hotel there. And I feel like that neighborhood, even in the 21st century, has transformed so much. And it seems like, so how do you do specifically what you do when you encounter a restaurant on Orchard Street and you say, well, we need to make this look like a pet shop or like a shoe store in 1953. Where do you start? How do you actually disassemble and rebuild that space?

1:28:52You know, it's all different, but you start analyzing period photographs in film and you see what the core of it was on orchard street and the next block up was the tenement house museum and they have a tenement house there preserved from 1938 i believe and it was so helpful seeing that because it was a step older than the one i lived in in the 60s but in the 50s they didn't have steel fire doors they didn't have all these safety regulations and and fluorescent lighting in the hallways and stuff that make them so different. The windows on all the buildings had been changed. They've been now their double pane, you know, aluminum windows, and they were wood and, you know, hard to get up.

1:29:41But everything was, to me, was more interesting because I love the human texture, the element. And it had gotten kind of cold. But we would look at, we went to that museum. I took the whole art department there, and we spent a day, and it was so much fun. and we realized sort of the work was ahead of us. We had to build the apartments because the buildings had been changed so much. The exteriors, and looking at them, I remember what the original buildings were all the same. I think the lots were 50 feet, and this was 25 feet and 25 feet, and then take out for the corridor in between the apartments.

1:30:14And there'd be like eight to 12 apartments in a building. On the first floor was usually a store. um so i knew we what i got this idea of building modular system because you can't rent a street and sort of take it over for more than a day it would cost you a fortune so we built a modular system of the front walk it would take you into the hallway into the you know the mailboxes and stuff in the staircase and then uh on the side there would be stores we built the frames of the store. So we had one story of a real building and we were able to like, we did many of these, but we were able to walk them in and set them on the sidewalk.

1:30:58We didn't have to touch the building. Adam Willis, our decorator, decorated the window so they looked right for the period. We had old glass whenever we could. We got extras, you know, beautifully dressed by Miyako and, and, um, and our scenic department and our graphics department recreated signs in Yiddish and English that from the period. And we painted and aged those and they were, we were able to use them to hide things that we couldn't take down or couldn't cover. And slowly it just, we started getting all these layers and elements that transformed that block. Now, people would say, well, why did you shoot down there?

1:31:39You could have shot on a street that wasn't as busy and stuff. But there's a certain essence in that street that I loved. It emanates from the ground up. The street's the right width. The buildings are the right height. And there's a history there that it would have been harder to replicate. I can make the buildings look right, but I can't make the spirit right. and it affected everybody on the film and it affected the people shooting there just knowing, hey, we're right in the area where the story took place. This is real. And it looked like this, you know? So it was an excitement. Next to the shoe store where we shot was a brand new hotel.

1:32:21No one had even moved in yet, but it was, you know, it certainly didn't look like the Lower East Side that I knew. And that's when we developed that modular system because they wouldn't let us touch the building. uh they would let us shoot there you know they take it over for a day they would even though they weren't open they were losing a lot of money they said so um we were able to build facades of the whole street overnight and uh and dress them and then shoot in the afternoon and it gave uh josh a lot of freedom we'd look at locations i said oh we can make this blocker right? He says, yeah, but I want to see you down there too.

1:33:00So then we would hang signs from the balconies and stuff. And when he got to shoot, he shot it like a documentary. It was tight lens. He wasn't worried about showing off the set, which is, I love in a way. Sometimes when you make a film, the cinematographer, a director will want to shoot every centimeter of that set. And you know, So somehow you feel it, okay, that's all they got. Right, right. But with Josh, he was shooting with long lenses and rushing through. And you always knew there was more. If the camera bounced up a little bit, you would see more or down or backwards or forwards. So is that a conflicting feeling for you, though, because you've built this entire world and you know you're moving through it so quickly and not seeing all of it?

1:33:45It is and it isn't. And afterthought, you know, at first you go, oh, they didn't see that sign. We spent two weeks building the sign for Norkins. It's not even in the film. But, you know, the first time I saw the film, I felt that conflict. But then I started hearing people's responses and going, whoa, it was like I was dropped into the 1950s. And I realized that it was working. And ultimately, that's what you want to do is, or at least I want to do is make a documentary feel where you felt like you were in New York and you weren't in a replica of New York, which is completely different. It looks different and feels different.

1:34:22I see it in so many, well, I think designers are becoming more sophisticated, more natural every year. But I remember when I was growing up, when I would see a period film, you know, the costumes were sort of overdone and everybody was throwing a car from that year. And it was just, it was just, it was not what I wanted to do. Well, one of the things that I was thinking about with regard to Marty is in a lot of period films, it feels like the costumes and even the furniture in people's homes are fresh out of the box, that they're unlived in. And you mentioned that, you know, in New York at that time, the coal, the city was sort of covered in soot in a way.

1:35:02And that there was like a kind of dinginess to New York that you capture. And then you mentioned that you age things. So like, this might seem like a pedantic question, but how do you make something that you've just made look old? when you're building a film that's set in the 1950s? It's kind of like a pair of Levi's that you buy today. It has holes in it. It's faded. They're faded. We do the same thing. I mean, we might put fabric on the walls, but we stress it and tear it and rip it and paint it and rub it and, you know, drag it through the dirt and put it back on like people used to do with their Levi's to make them look old before China started doing it for us.

1:35:44We age everything. In paint, we have a system, a technique called roping, where they mix the paint with, I believe, plaster or something. It looks like you do one layer and it looks like you've got 10 layers of paint. And then you can chip it through and let the colors come back. What I would do normally when I go to locations is I'll start investigating behind light switches and molding or anything I can sort of cabinet or take it away and see what's under it. And I find out the period wallpaper, the colors that they used back then. These tenement houses, a lot of times they would paint things bright color because it was so dingy.

1:36:22So that's what, you know, introduced like the lime green in Timothy's room. You know, it's just a chance to add some kind of light and joy to your environment where you're living in a building with 12 other people and sharing a bathroom down the hall with everybody on that floor. It's fun. You know, my wife's an actress, so I think about what you have to do as an actor to put yourself into a role. and I think as a designer or at least the way my approach to have things more natural is I try to get into the life of the people whatever time it is. I read a lot of journals if I can find them or stories that written by people at the time that have a sort of honest description.

1:37:08Look at paintings that were done at the time and if it's new enough if it's after 1860 I can look at photographs a lot of times. Now it used to be people dressed up for photographs or brought all the furniture out of their house to have the photograph taken so they could show all they had. But by the 50s, it was so natural. You know, people were being photographed unawares, you know, by street photographers. And cameras were ubiquitous. They were everywhere. And you just start investigating those like you're a detective. So, you know, I know you mentioned that Josh had discovered this documentary, but you're famed in your work for, you know, inspiration from a painter like Hopper.

1:37:49Were there any artists who you looked at from this period of time for Marty Supreme, or was it entirely this documentary approach? No, there were artists, some of them unknown because they're unimportant. I got a note from a fellow production designer who said, I was at the Met and saw a George Bellows photograph in the ring, and I know you used that for inspiration. I said, well, I didn't, you know. But then the next week, an article came out in American cinematographer, where Darius Kanji, a cinematographer, said, and I looked at the film with George Bellows. Oh, interesting. The production designer was right, but I was telling you the truth because I don't, you know, it gets to a point in research, you know, whatever time they give you, It could be two weeks or two months, depending on your lead time.

1:38:44You try and bombard yourself with images, and you don't even know what they are. I mean, I would just spend all day looking at stuff. I'd pin stuff up that I liked. But then you have to leave it because you're not recreating photographs. You're not recreating paintings. You're dealing with the story and what the director wants. So then you have to work out of your gut. And that's exciting when you make that transfer. And you make decisions, and sometimes you don't even know why you make them, but you make them, and then later they resonate. You find out. And I mentioned to you once before that I try to avoid designing stuff.

1:39:24I mean, Manuel Lebesky, my favorite cinematographer I've ever worked with, would say, if we do our job right, nobody will see it. And that's true. You know, it's the same way I like to work is that I don't want it to look like, oh, that's beautifully designed. You know, I want it to be like, whoa, 1952. Yes, we're in the place and the time. Well, you know, you mentioned Darius and you and Darius have both had really seasoned careers. Josh is a younger filmmaker too. And I think this is your first time working with Darius as well, is it? Yes. What is that relationship like? because filmmaking is such a practical art and there must be things that you're confronted with that you feel like can't be accomplished or that Darius is confronted with that Josh's imagination wants to happen.

1:40:12How do you, is it like a trilogy of ideas that are collaborating? How does that relationship work? Well, we would all visit locations together when we're shooting locations or look at models of sets. Josh, Josh is a very exciting director. I mean, he's passionate. He also wrote, you know, with Ronnie, he wrote the script. So that's my favorite type of person to work with. And we were like kids planning. And you don't think about age. I mean, he says, well, you're the youngest person I know. He tells me, he says, I told somebody the other day you were eight. And I said, well, you got to add a zero to that.

1:40:49But Josh is also very young and excited. And I don't ever remember thinking of age except, yeah, except maybe going up a six floor walk up or something. But it's that excitement. And Darius went to all his locations. I mean, I was so—Darius was afraid that maybe when Joshua said, I want to see down three blocks, and Darius would say, I don't think we need to see that far. And we probably didn't. But I never wanted to say no to a director. And Darius wanted to protect me. He didn't want me to have to dress three blocks or be Adam dressed three blocks. But I would go, no, Darius, no problem. And I found out that there was one time we were shooting a scene with the Harlem Globetrotters, and we built a basketball goal.

1:41:43And I'd done it from research, pictures of the Harlem Globetrotters. And we had these, it was really like scaffolding with knuckles and stuff on it. And I noticed that Darius was always trying to avoid it in shots. And I said to Darius in his gaffer, well, why are you avoiding that? And he goes, well, it's not right for the period. So I had to come out and show him pictures of a Harlem Globetrotters booklet from that time. I said, look, it's right here. Just relax. So I found Darius, who's one of the loveliest people I know, wanting to protect me all the time and wanting to make my job easier.

1:42:16I don't want my job easier. I want more challenges. and I never, only time I ever said no to Josh was when he asked me to paint Marty's Room white or off-white because he was reflecting to a Kubrick film and I said, I can't do that. It's not right for the period. You'd have to get somebody else. Interesting. And I don't think I've ever said no to a director before but Josh jokes about it. I mean, I'm not telling tales out of school We laugh about it. But that was, otherwise I'm going to give him whatever world we need to tell the story he wants to tell. And, you know, that's what we do. We build worlds.

1:43:03But we don't build them. We don't just make them up and build them. It has to do with the script. It has to do with the film the director wants to make. And it has to do with, you know, what we're given. You know, sometimes it's budget. Sometimes it's location. Sometimes it's the amount of time. That's our biggest fight is time and budget, you know. And this was a big scope film in that we were shooting in New York City, which is not easy, you know, to get across town or uptown or to build stuff. Or, you know, if you go to Home Depot there, they sell pieces. They sell wood, but it's four feet long.

1:43:38Well, I can't build a house with that. Well, we can't fit anymore in Manhattan. So tell me a little bit about the bowling alley. Because I know this seemed like an unusual set piece for the movie. The bowling alley. Well, we were looking around for a bowling alley. The automatic pin setters didn't take effect until 1954. Okay. So that's two years after our film. So that, you know, any bowling alley at that time would have had people back there setting. And it was kind of part of the experience. we found a bowling alley and three hours from New York City that was the closest possible on the East Coast that I mean we checked out everything a lot of them were moldy and you know rotten and we'd be repairing ceilings and all this was a still in use in a small town I've forgotten the name of it now but it was uh the guy that owned it inherited from his parents and the only people playing there were kids from the high school in the small town it seemed like maybe a thousand people or less and uh he was game for us to come in and kind of make it look like it used to he even had pictures black and white pictures from the you know when his parents built it in 49 or when they opened it so we went in and stripped out a lot of the stuff that had been added and we went back and simple you know put things in that were right for the period and we repainted it so it was fresher paint.

1:45:08And Josh wanted ping pong tables in there because he needed them for the story, but there was never a space provided for ping pong tables. I said, well, I think we can put one right here. And he goes, I need six. I said, you need six ping pong tables. So we ended up extending the floor of the lobby toward the bowling alley, you know, about six feet so we could get six ping pong tables in there and i remember a few weeks ago i was in i only saw one ping pong table no no there's six i saw i don't remember seeing six in the shot either but then when i looked at it you see little fits in corners you see people doing stuff down the way and it was more important that it was josh's world you know it was more important for the film and like we put in linoleum floor and i remember the people from you know the producer do you really need to put linoleum you know it was like into outdoor carpeting or something and josh said yeah you'll feel it he was right and then i actually saw some of it when i watched the film the third time you know yeah when i stopped worrying about all my stuff i'd start enjoying the film i could see so it's subtle it's some of subliminal but it's important and it makes a difference.

1:46:26And what we did, because we were going three hours to the thing, we built the gas station close by so we could shoot one day at the bowling alley, one day at the gas station and go back to New York and be done with it. And that was fun building the gas station. And it was the guy who had the property liked it so much he wanted us to leave everything. Really? Yeah. That's a kind of monument to that moment. That seldom happens. He was in the film business at one time. I think he might have worked for Netflix or somebody, but I don't know. But he, yeah, he enjoyed the whole process. And I had such a great team of scenic artists, the painters that aged everything.

1:47:07I mean, we had the best graphics artists, the best painters. The painters refer to themselves as legends. But they lived up to it. and they worked hard and and uh alex kratosky was our head scenic and he's just lovable you know i i uh when i first started working on the film i said i said i told the the supervising actor i said okay i want to you know i want to meet alex you know and so he said alex well bring your portfolio Now, Alex is a famous, he works with Nathan Crawley and everybody in New York. He was so insulted.

1:47:53And Doug, who'd see the supervising art director, said, well, he was really insulted. I said, I want to meet him anyway because I want to look into his eyes. I don't care about the portfolio. And he came and we met at a table about the size of this one. And he says, would you like to see my portfolio? I said, I don't need to see your portfolio. I just wanted to see you. And he was a little suspicious, you know. And then slowly during the conversation, he would be like, well, look at this. I said, I don't need to see that. Well, what were you checking for? Like, what did you just, you wanted to see if you could connect with him?

1:48:29Yeah. You know, in that book, Blink, where he talks about like in a tenth of a second, you size somebody up and you know what they're like. I knew he'd done all these great films, so I didn't really need to see a portfolio. I didn't even want to see a portfolio. I wanted to meet him. But when I met him, he's an old Russian, you know, and he's just, he's confident. I knew he was talented. And I remember at the end of the meeting, I stood up and I gave him a big bear hug. And he was like, whoa, I never had a production designer give me a bear hug at a job audition. And we hired him instantly, you know.

1:49:09And I never regret it. And we became best friends. I mean, the first time I saw Marty, I said, come with me to see it. And he's really become a dear friend. But I knew it within a blink of the eye. Yeah. So when you walked into our office today, you were looking around and curious about the structure and what it looked like. And when I met you, you'd been kind of examining this space. And it seems like you have an unbelievable sensitivity to environments. Like personally, I walk into a building and I don't think about it. I don't look at the lights. I don't look, I just, I'm kind of moving about my day.

1:49:47But, you know, in real life, Jack Fisk was in here kind of examining this space that we come to every day. Like where does that come from for you as a person? I come, I think, well, I've always been interested in architecture. I've always been interested in spaces. I used, when I was 11 years old, inspired by our gang comedies, Little Rascals, I used to build forts. So I think about spaces. When I was a kid, I'd move my room around every week or so. I'd change the, put the bed here. After a while, you have to switch rooms because you've done everything you can. But I love spaces. And then I think I was, what if I get a film two months from now that says, build a Spotify office.

1:50:31I wonder what they look like. And sometimes when they don't look like what you expect, it's even more exciting. because you're, you know, I think when people see stuff that is not exactly what they think it's going to be, they think, oh, that must be real. You know, it's not what my mind put together. It must be real. That's like a confirmation of the reality. I learned a lot from Terrence Malick. And, you know, he loved putting his films back in time a little bit because you suspend that scrutiny you have of present day. And I also like to make them universal so it's not a specific country, time, place.

1:51:17And it works well for period films because you're doing a range. Like if you go in somebody's backyard, you might see a swing set from when they were a kid that's now 14 years old, you know, or a grill that they bought two years ago that didn't work. But it looks new, but it's defunct, you know, something that the old Christmas tree that they threw out. three months ago that they meant to take to the dump. They just hadn't done it yet. And, you know, our life is filled. I mean, we're all like hoarders. And that's different than the old days when no one had anything. You know, closets would hold two dresses and a pair of shoes.

1:51:55And people would wear the same clothes, you know, five days a week or six days a week and then dress up on Sunday. They take a bath on Saturday. I read books about the cleanliness of people. I read about clothing and what people had and how much they did themselves. I mean, you never see women darning socks anymore. You just call Amazon and get another three pair delivered. Our lives have changed so drastically. And I always think that in a film, it's my one chance to sort of write history. And I'm continually frustrated because you can't always do that. You know, it's like I was talking about Pocahontas.

1:52:32We can't make her nine years old. You know, we can't do this. but it it's like the last time and i'm you know it i don't mind sets being torn up when we're finished but i hate it when i have to compromise in the visual telling of the story because it's also a script is written it's just words uh telling a story but it's words but they don't a whole another element is physically what's around those people and it helps the actors It informs the actors about their character. And I just saw Hamlet. And I was so moved when that wonderful actress, Buckley, I believe. Jessie Buckley, yeah. She had her hands in the garden and her fingernails were cracked and dark and stuff.

1:53:19And, you know, it's when I see teeth and hands and actors in the dirt and their clothing is worn. It just, I'm transported. Mm-hmm. I love the magic of building a set and then setting in it and trying to go back however many years it is and see if it feels right or what it feels like. I was working on a film, The Revenant, and I was building this fort, but they were having financial problems. And I was afraid they were going to shut it down. And I remember thinking, I talked to the movie guy and I said, I just want to see it finished. And so we worked like crazy to get finished before the film shut down.

1:54:06The film never shut down. Alejandro is a genius and passionate artist and was able to get the money we needed. But I'm building these things so that I can enjoy going back in time. It's like time travel for a production designer. Well, it's funny. I was going to ask you specifically when you look back. One, you have this incredible body of work and many of the filmmakers that you've worked with, their best films are on films that you worked on or among their best films. And they're all about America. And it does seem like maybe inadvertently you achieved your goal of kind of rebuilding America over centuries in all of these films.

1:54:44I mean, this is basically your first big New York film, right? Extended New York piece. You hadn't done something like this. And, you know, you've done Texas. You've done California. You've done Oklahoma. You know, you've moved through this whole country, rebuilding it over decades of time. Like, how does that feel? You know, America is something that I've always been curious about. I moved around a lot as a child. I started out in Illinois, then went to Michigan, then to Virginia, then to Pakistan, then back to Illinois, then back to Virginia, then Philadelphia, then LA, and now I'm back in Virginia.

1:55:21But it's a country that I've driven across. It's a country I've lived in. It's a country I've read about. And it's a country where I've been offered jobs. So the last thing is probably the main reason that most of my stuff is about America. I feel comfortable here. I love it. I worry about it.

1:55:49and I remember the book, I read two books in, I can't remember the authors right now. One is Lies My Teacher Told Me. Oh, I know, well. And the other one is The America by, Alejandro recommended it to me, and I read it. People's History of the United States? Yeah, People's History of the United States. Yeah, sure. Just a wonderful book. I read those books, and you know like Woodrow Wilson was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan in the White House and you start reading all these books about reality and you think of what's happening in America today it's like seems so unusual and foreign but we've actually had these struggles before it's repeating and people can take so much but we've also had a civil war in this country which is just horrendous I live in Virginia in amongst the battlegrounds.

1:56:43I mean, Robert E. Lee camped on our farm and stood on a hill where our farm manager lives, looking at his troops in the valley, right opposite Miss Smith's general store. I mean, it's all just so close and familiar. I had a friend come over with his little metal detector, and he was finding bullets and buttons and all this stuff. So we live in this history and it was such a horrible thing. Americans fighting against Americans, brothers against brothers. And it's, you know, it's been enough years and there's been enough false history that it's like, it seemed like a fairy tale. But the reality is people were being killed and dying, you know, in their homeland.

1:57:35it's you know i i just uh i think we all have to keep aware and we need to know history and that's one thing about history excites me because if you understand it you're less likely to repeat it but we forget it and we're on purpose you know we're taught to forget stuff and it's uh i think it's really frightening but i see things moving to a stage right now in iran they're revolting because they have no money. And when America gets to the point where they have no money, that they have children that need food, they have children that need healthcare, they have an elderly person that needs care, and they can't get that, they don't have any option.

1:58:20It's a revolt or die. And if enough people get in that position at the same time, you're going to have a revolution. And I've never thought about that. But now I start to see people getting upset in mass. And now it's a much smaller scale than Iran.

1:58:44But there's so much power in the world for all the different militaries. And people, their only power is mass. You know, that there's enough of them getting excited at the same time. And... I find it, you know, we could be on the precipice of something horrendous that we have never imagined and can't conceive sitting in this nice room drinking, you know, coffee and talking.

1:59:12But it creates a tension and it's going to be a tension in a lot of people. And suddenly when you can't take care of your children, something's got to give. Yeah, all bets are off. you know you're you're renowned for these long-term collaborations with your friend david lynch terence malick but the last three films have been first time works with martin scorsese lila nugebauer and now josh and now you mentioned to me that you're working on something with ang lee one i'm curious about this desire to kind of forge new partnerships at this stage of your career and also i'd love to just hear a little bit about what you're working on now Okay.

1:59:53You know, I met Terry Malick in 1972 or 71, 72. We started Badlands. And my wife was reminding me last night that he told her, he was telling her about me, that I'd come in to meet him on his film and I'd already done all this research. And he hired me instantly because he was starting his first feature. And Terry and I just became best friends. I mean, I was seeing an artist making a film. I wasn't seeing, you know, I'd been working with Roger Corman and Gene Corman. Although, you know, there were some good filmmakers. They weren't really artists like Terry is. Terry is a philosopher, artist.

2:00:38He had written the screenplay. And now he was down. So he knew the story from his inner core. It meant something to him. And I responded to that. And that's when I decided that I wanted to do film forever. I mean, Badlands changed my life. And also, he introduced me to Sissy Spacek, who I married and we've been together for 55 years.

2:01:05he was a great teacher. I learned so much from working with Terry. And we're almost the same age. So it's like, it was crazy, but he's a genius. And he treats everybody like they're just as smart as he is. But nobody is. And Terry, my work with Terry gave me an entree to people like Alejandro. You know, I met Chivo. Manuel Lubezki came in at the time of the New World. and then we became good friends and then he introduced me to uh alejandro and uh uh i got a call from paul thomas anderson you know out of the blue but because of terry you know he'd seen my work with terry and paul also is i instantly went with we did a couple films together but uh two brilliant movies your work on those movies i love those movies i love those movies i love paul and he's one of the exciting American filmmakers.

2:02:10You know, I work with Brian De Palma on two films, but then there was a point in there where I wanted to direct. So I said, well, I got to stop taking production design jobs or no one will think I really want to direct. It ends up that I didn't really want to direct, but my wife was encouraging me. Can I just tell you, I just saw Violets Are Blue for the first time and thought it was beautiful. I've not seen it before. And it's such an interesting movie. And really unlike, movies are not like that anymore. It struck me. The tone and the style of that movie, totally non-judgmental about those characters.

2:02:44I think it's a very good film that people should check out. Yeah. Also, if you ever see Raggedy Man. I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was my first film directing. But I decided after I did some films in television, I said, I really want to build worlds. I really want to be a production designer. I don't want to be a director. Because in directing, you have to deal with studios. They'll say, well, we don't like that cast. And my friend, David Lynch, we went to high school together. We moved to California together. We were so close that we would kind of purposely take opposite jobs so we wouldn't, you know, didn't want to get too crazy.

2:03:26But he called me on Straight Story. I think Straight Story came first and said his editor at the time had written the script and they were in love. And she wanted to make it a family affair. So he cast Sissy and I came and did that. And we had so much fun. Made very little money. But he said, oh, we're coming to this commercial in Paris. I made more money on the commercial in Paris in three days than I did on the whole film Straight Story. Great film, though. Yeah. And then he called me about Mulholland Drive. and I was excited to be working with David and it was being done as a TV show, but ABC saw it and I think David described it, the guy was brushing his teeth in the morning watching it on the television and didn't want it and said, no, we don't want it.

2:04:16And it just broke the top because you put so much energy into a film and it means so much and he was doing his TV series so it was an ongoing thing. We built the sets to be reconstructed for when they start shooting the series. And they just said, no, one guy, no. And that was it. And Canal Plus, the French have always loved David. He said, David, do you have any scripts you want to do? We want to make a film with you. He said, well, I just finished Mallon Drive and it was so disappointing and stuff. And they said, well, what about making that into a film? So he took two weeks, maybe a month. He started writing and he came up with an idea how to take the footage from this TV series and make it into a feature, but we'd have to shoot another couple of weeks.

2:05:00So those sets that we'd built to reconstruct, we reconstructed on a different stage. Canal Plus bought it from ABC. At least that's my understanding. I don't get in that part of it. And made a feature film. And it was such a great movie. And even today, it's always like voted like best film of the 2000s stuff. And I realized films don't have to make money to be great. You know, a lot of great films never made a nickel. And a lot of films that were blockbusters, you never see after 10 years or five years. When you're working on one, though, do you know that it's going to be great? Do you have that?

2:05:34You've been on a lot of really great, a lot of films that are really canonized. I mean, 10, 15 of the films that you've worked on are considered the greatest American films ever made. Do you know that when you're there? You know, I didn't know not to know it. You know, I like film because it was being recorded, knowing that you could see it later. I liked it that I didn't have to carry the sets around with me. We could just destroy them and I'd be free. It's like when I first started as a sculptor painter, I was, you know, we changed apartments or houses. I was like lugging everything. And suddenly on film, there was a great freedom.

2:06:09Plus you weren't in the studio all day by yourself. You were here with a group of people making a show. It was like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Let's put on a show. And that working with other people that were artisans was exciting. But lately, with Martin, Martin has so many projects he's doing. A lot of them are in New York and different places. I started working last year with Ang Lee. Now, I was always curious about Ang Lee. And he's made so many wonderful movies about people. And then recently he's gotten distracted with 3D, high film rates and all that stuff. Technology, yeah. Yeah, and he came to me with a story I think it's called Gold Mountain.

2:06:53I don't remember the name of the book, but it's a wonderful book about a Chinese family that was put together in the new world. And I started studying about the Chinese and got so excited. I mean, they probably are responsible that we got to be able to train to go across country 15 years ahead of time because they worked so hard and did so much. And they were not appreciated for that effort later. They were killed. They were run out of town. They spoke horribly. And we're making a film about a family that the father grew up in the United States. He's Chinese, but he grew up raised by Native Americans.

2:07:40The mother is straight over from China. and then they have two children that are Chinese that don't want to be Chinese. They want to be American. You know, so it's kind of a thing you see today in the world is people that are split within a family. And I just, I love studying about them. And also for the sets, I love showing how meager their life was, how little they had, and how they functioned. and it's got me really excited about the film. And it's not the kind of film that people want to put money into to make. So we've struggled. We started shooting, or we didn't start, we were building sets and we had to shut down.

2:08:26Now California has given some money to the film and we're hoping to start up this spring. Which is so rare these days to get that. Yeah. Yeah, California finally has started supporting the industry that put them on the map. You know, it's strange that, you know, we had the best filmmakers in the world here, but suddenly they were having to move to Atlanta or Canada to make films. When I was in Canada shooting Days of Heaven, there was no film industry. I mean, they made a few documentaries, you know, like PBS type films, but there was no prop shops. There was no crew. I brought six carpenters up from L.A.

2:09:09to help me build the set. We brought set dressing up in the U-Haul truck. We had to tell the Canadian authorities that my friend was moving here. And we put a$200 bond on the furniture saying we wouldn't sell it in Canada because he didn't want us to be selling antiques in Canada. And it was that kind of excitement of working on a film in a foreign land, you know, in the middle of nowhere, literally, and trying to get it done. And we only had four weeks of prep once we picked that location. So everything about it was impossible. And that's what excited me, I think, scared me and excited me. And we pulled it off.

2:09:51You know, I would have done it differently if I'd had money. But what you made and what you got, it could not be better. All we had was two by fours and plywood to build a house. I mean, everything was built out of plywood. And, you know, we set up on telephone poles. It was, but we didn't have any choice. If Terry was going to make his film, we had to do it. And we had to do it in four weeks because they were going to harvest the wheat in six weeks. And he needed to shoot the house with the wheat field in front of it. He said, I need two weeks before they cut the wheat. And then when he cut the wheat, we had him cut it in rows of 50 foot sections so we could do this fire, which I just love.

2:10:36It's the best fire I've ever seen in movies. And it looks really dangerous, but I don't think it was dangerous. We had it kind of figured out. And I remember going home to the hotel in Lethbridge every night smelling like diesel fuel because we couldn't get the wheat to burn. So we had to pump diesel fuel on it. You could never do that today. You'd be arrested and sent to another country. But we did a lot of things in those days. On the Corman films, if we need a black smoke, we just set a tire on fire.

2:11:13In Paul Thomas Anderson's film, There Will Be Blood, we would big pans and put diesel fuel in it and light it on fire because it would burn black. But now they do it all with CGI and it's all changing. But I'm glad I got to get into the beginning of that. I hope you didn't get at the end. That's my concern is that we won't have that kind of physical production. anymore because that is something that is really a part of your legacy is having built worlds that people remember that they don't forget even if those sets are deconstructed yeah it's kind of like vinyl records i think you know i hope you're right i'm so glad that i got in when i did because in the 1970s after easy rider the studios didn't know what people wanted because they would have never made easy rider it was done independently you know everybody was like a shareholder in the film they got their money later and it just took the country you know suddenly and that gave an entree to all the young filmmakers were suddenly getting a chance and roger corman and his brother gene had a studio where they were making films for you know seventy thousand dollars and fifty thousand dollars and you know they were never expensive but it gave a lot of people a chance i mean ron howard did his first film there yeah grand theft auto right yeah yeah he directed that And, you know, everybody was given a chance.

2:12:35And I was fortunate because I wanted to be in the art department. Nobody else did. So I had some job security. Jack, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen. Have you seen any movies recently that you've enjoyed? Oh, let me think. A lot of more documentaries. That's fine if there's a doc you like. You know, as a, I would like to say one film, I think it was called Moonlighting. And it was about, you know, black actors in a world. And I loved it because I would never have been, I would never, there was no way I could be in that world. Moonlight, you mean the film?

2:13:22Moonlight, the film. I think it won an Academy Award. It did, yes. And that film, I remember when I watched it, I was just so thankful that I was able to see this world that I would never see. And I always hoped that on films that, you know, that I'll be introduced to something that seems more real and that it's unattainable, you know, in my position in life to be, you know, seeing. Another film I like for its imagination was Anna Karenina. Sarah Greenwood designed it. That's the Joe Wright film. Yeah, Joe Wright, who's a genius. Those sets are extraordinary in that movie. And they had no money.

2:14:02And that's why they were like that. They had no money. And so they had to pack everything into one theater. And they had trains and horse races. And my mind sort of exploded when I saw that. And I've become friends with Joe Wright. And Sarah Greenwood is just one of our great designers. There is an amazing exhibit of her work at the Academy Museum right now, including of that film. I hope to see it. Yeah. Yeah. But I've seen that film a couple of times and it blew my mind. And Joe Wright is such a kind. He grew up in a puppet theater in London.

2:14:37And, you know, I've had a couple of chances to work with him. It just hasn't worked out, you know, because of conflicts and stuff. But I think he's sort of a, he's one of our great filmmakers. It's not fully appreciated for his talents. Yeah, I agree. I don't understand it. Yeah, I feel like he's one film away from being recognized in that way. Yeah. That happens. Look at Paul Thomas Anderson. He's been working for recognition that he's now getting from one battle for another, but his other films were all excellent and often better than the films they were in competition with, if you believe in competition.

2:15:15I don't really, I wish that our award system was, let's say five films that we really enjoyed this year and award them all. You know, they would be different, but unless you're making the same film with the same budget, there's no way to judge better or worse. you know it's I kind of dreamed that Academy Awards would have no television that you would show up at a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and toast and then they would present somebody the prize it did used to be that way I know it did I just think it would be a great way to keep it more within the industry there's too much money on the line now Jack that's the problem I know you can start an award show and suddenly pay yourself a salary.

2:16:01It's very true. Yeah. Well, this was a great honor and thanks so much for coming on the show.

2:16:10Thank you to Jack Fisk. Thank you to Jack Sanders for his production work on this episode later this week. You picked it, so we'll do it. It's our first listener's choice episode. We think it's going to be the 2008 movie swap. If it isn't, if it is Demon Slayer and Gabby's Dollhouse, what are you going to do? I'll watch the films. Will you watch all of the episodes of Demon Slayer that preceded that film? No, I won't. I will come to it. This is a film podcast, so I will watch the cinematic output. Quick question about the movie Candy Taste Test. Now, you suggested we put that on YouTube. Yeah.

2:16:50If it doesn't win, it's not going to win, I don't think. It could even be episodic. It could be short form. Oh. That's what I was thinking is that we would try different things. I honestly thought that we should just start do a recurring bit, which is every time one of us goes to the movie theater, we buy the weirdest or grossest thing that's there and bring it to the other person. And if it has to age three days, so be it. I thought that I could not love that. And then it'll just keep going. Yeah, that sounds incredible. That does make me feel and I know we're at the end of this episode. Yeah, but that does make me.

2:17:22I had a I had sour airheads bites last night okay at Iron Lung yeah never had them before okay but I was like I'm fucking I'm winging it and I felt like violently ill afterwards yeah and not to cast aspersions on the fine folks who make airheads I've been eating them since I was six years old was it a variety pack of flavors of airhead flavors it was but it was so dark and I couldn't see what I was popping on my mouth and I'd be like is that like lime is that grape I couldn't anyway Anyway, I'm bringing this up to say that I no longer have the iron constitution of a man of 26 who could just eat anything and feel fine.

2:17:59Yes. And I'll like wake up the next day and be like, what did I eat? I mean, I do think that that is a little bit specific to housing a whole thing of airhead chewables or whatever. But yes, that is part of the undertaking. Okay. Well, it's a great idea. Okay. We'll see you later this week. Hopefully not eating candy.