The Best Movies About Filmmakers, and ‘Boorman and the Devil’

22:41And so right after Heaven's Gate, which we acknowledge is kind of the end of New Hollywood, all of that starts getting pulled back, and it really becomes the time of the executive and of the studio. And as far as I'm concerned, It's why 80s and 90s filmmaking, studio filmmaking starts to go in the shitter. Because you can watch some of those movies from that period and go, that's not a filmmaker making that decision. That's a studio note. That's why that movie is ending that way in a way that doesn't make any sense. That's just a studio note. Right. Because I think you're right. I think they weren't paying attention to what Borman was doing.

23:17Because I think they thought, we've got the sequel to The Exorcist. It's directed by an acknowledged master. We've got Richard Burton. We've got the little girl from the first movie. We've got Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher.

23:33Sean Fennessey:Yeah, Max von Sydow's back. Max von Sydow's back. James Earl Jones, Oscar nominee. James Earl Jones, take your hands off the wheel. He's got it. Yeah. But you would think somebody is like looking at the dailies going. Well, I bring this up with Amanda all the time on the show where I'm like, it's very easy to mock studio executives and say that these people don't know shit about art and they're ruining everything all the time sometimes you do need a person with a little bit of critical distance and so there are good executives and bad executives just like there are good directors and bad directors and Cali is one of those people I keep saying his name because he is widely seen as one of the good guys of the Hollywood story for the most part I'm sure some people had bad experiences with him but he had taste he always brought on a lot of interesting projects.

24:17Sean Fennessey:He was in a seat of power during a glory period for Hollywood filmmaking. And this just kind of seems like negligence to me. And it's really interesting because sometimes there's something wonderful about letting an artist just go full bore on something and spend the money and pursue their dreams. And I think that's ultimately what's at the heart of this documentary is this is a person with a singular point of view and he somehow, right time, right place, right work ethic, right collaborators, created this huge body of work that is so unusual. Borman in general, do you consider yourself a big fan of his work?

24:51Sean Fennessey:Do you feel like... Oh, yeah. I really do. I mean, I think there's the top... Let's talk British filmmakers for a second. Sure. There's the foundational directors, Hitchcock, Michael Powell, David Lean, Chaplin. I mean, I suppose Chaplin and Kubrick. We're always going to have a... Even Hitchcock, we're always going to have a discussion. American English. Yeah, or not. American. Carol Reed. There's a few more. Carol Reed. Yeah. Those are the real foundational names. And then there's, I think, a second tier of just acknowledged great British directors. Mike Lee, Borman, Peter, who am I thinking of?

25:38Give me a last name. Peter. Peter Yates. We've talked about him on this. Peter Yates.

25:44Sean Fennessey:Peter Yates there's also like Borman is coming right in the aftermath of the Tony Richardson Carol Rice kitchen sink group of filmmakers and he's right behind them but he comes in in that Dave Clark 5 movie grafting off of Beatlemania and he's a little bit more of a fine artist and that movie is really interesting because it's basically a satire of what it is. You know, it's about how a band can kind of get sucked into the corporate machine, the media machine, and become kind of a parody of itself. So he's always got, there's always a little extra spit, I would say, on every movie that he makes.

26:30Sean Fennessey:But his filmography is all over the place. Like, I'm still a little incomplete on his movies. I haven't seen everything he's ever made. I haven't either. But if it were just point blank and deliverance, I mean, he's in that second tier. That alone puts him in that second tier. Agreed. Because those are, I mean, Deliverance is a five-star freaking masterpiece, man. That's an unbelievable movie. I showed it to the nanny who, you know, again, I've mentioned her on this show. She's, what, 35 years old, and she's an artist. She's an actor. She'd never seen it, never heard of it. Wow. Didn't know anything about it.

27:07Sean Fennessey:I do feel that it is a little, the last 15 years, it has fallen away a little bit as an acknowledged all-time classic. It doesn't mean it's like lost its power in any way, but it doesn't feel like when I was a kid, it was one of those movies that was like, you have to see this movie if you want to have a complete understanding of the American cinema. I don't know why it's fallen away a little bit, but what did she make of it? She was blown away. She was like, why do I not know about this movie? This is, it's an extraordinary film. uh i heard uh mr tarantino talking about it recently feeling that uh the ending was fucked up that uh uh had they not cast james dickey the author of the book uh on which it's based as the sheriff uh they they might have had a more suspenseful third act as the sheriff is trying to investigate what happened on the river but i actually i i disagree with mr tarantino on this I think Borman is going for bigger game than that.

28:08I think that Borman and Dickie together are trying to talk about bigger things than just the suspense story, but rather masculinity and myth, right? They're getting into all of that mythic stuff. And there's a shot in that movie where John Voight, after what's happened on the river, and he's re-entering civilization. And he's going into this dinner, this extraordinary dinner, played with clearly some non-actors and Ned Beatty around a table. And it seems to me like Voight passes through three different screens to get from outside to inside, to re-enter into civilized society. It's like the shot is set up in a way that you keep seeing him walking through these screen doors.

28:54It's remarkable.

28:55Sean Fennessey:Such a big visual idea to communicate. Yeah. How he has to go, how to find his way back to where he was based on what he had experienced. Yeah. Deliverance, if you haven't seen Deliverance, people, if you haven't seen, please see Deliverance. Deliverance is great. Well, it's interesting you bring up Voight because Voight was the actor that he wanted, that Borman wanted for the Burton part. It's a much better movie. Probably works a lot better. And the whole thing is that Burton's character being older, this is cited in the documentary. It's absolutely true. It just makes less sense. His struggle with faith at that time is just less logical than it would be if he were 30 years old, as Voight was at the time.

29:37Sean Fennessey:Also, Voight, people forget that Voight was unbelievable. That he was maybe the best actor in the world for about three years there. He's helped us forget. I know. I know. He did get that bill passed, though, didn't he? Didn't he get that Trump bill passed? That was the one thing he's done. He was an extraordinary actor, and he's extraordinary in Deliverance. Burt Reynolds' best performance. Yes. Both Ned Beatty and Ronnie Cox, discovered by Borman, working in the theater in Washington, D.C., making their film debuts in Deliverance. It's remarkable. And Ned Beatty then immediately becomes a really important part of New Hollywood, right?

30:14Some of the movies he makes during that time, All the Presidents, Men, Network, it just goes on and on.

30:20Sean Fennessey:Yeah, it's funny. I read Conclusions, which is one of Borman's books. He wrote two books. Conclusions is more of his memoir slash a series of kind of personal essays about his time making movies. And he had some really interesting ideas about Reynolds because he said that there are actors who want to go inside and there are actors who want to stay outside and that Burt never wanted to go inside. Right. That he was very comfortable staying on the surface, which if you look at his filmography, you can kind of tell that. And that Deliverance is one of the very few movies that asks him to really struggle with the self and that Void is obviously the opposite.

31:00Sean Fennessey:That Void in the 70s was the ultimate internal explorer. But he's like lamenting Reynolds' version of stardom. and so it is interesting that the movies that he makes in the aftermath of that I would say they're thematically strong but I don't know that he asks his actors to do quite the same thing. Yeah. You know like Zardoz and The Heretic and then Excalibur which is his kind of great return to form after The Heretic fails. Those are big genre movies and so I think I'm always a little bit confused by his filmography because like I failed to mention Hell in the Pacific which is also a really interesting movie he made, which is also a kind of war between men, Toshira Mifune and Lee Marvin, that he makes immediately after Point Blank.

31:49Which is, it's great, by the way, and it's also great now in our world of widescreen TVs, as well as physical media, that we can finally see Hell in the Pacific the way it was meant to be seen. You know, when I grew up, Hell in the Pacific was always shown in pan and scan versions in which Toshira Mifune and Lee Marvin are placed on opposite sides of the screen. on purpose, right? They're on the opposite side of this Panavision screen. And so the pan and scan is deciding which one of them you're going to look at as opposed to seeing them opposite each other. You're never seeing them together.

32:20Sean Fennessey:Yeah, yeah. That kind of breaks the whole idea of the movie, right? It exactly does. And it's a really fine movie. It's really good. Yeah. And even his work in the 80s and 90s is quite fascinating. Speaking of Tarantino, when he and Roger Avery were on the show years ago now, we did a 1987 draft. and Avery took hope and glory, his film, which is a very personal autobiographical film that Borman made about his youth growing up in England. And Avery went on at length about how much Borman matters to him and how he's his single favorite filmmaker. His thoughts are really interesting. And that might have been the time when I think it turned over in my head that I should dig into his work a little bit more.

33:00But The Heretic,

33:01Sean Fennessey:it sticks out in this filmography. It feels like it shouldn't have happened. It's just such a... And the movie kind of circles that idea. Right. But he doesn't regret it. I think he's happy with the film, right? Is that where we basically get to? I don't know that he's happy with the film. And I don't want to say that he's blaming the audience. What he seems to suggest is that he simply misjudged expectations. And again, there is some hubris in that. Like, well, I decided not to do the first Exorcist. and it's a massive hit, like an unbelievable hit. And yet he also didn't like the movie, but did he really not like the movie or did he just, was it sour grapes?

33:49I mean, and is that why he decides to take on Exorcist 2? Is there some hubris in that? I'll show him how it's done. So I don't know if he likes the film or not. I do think, and we'll probably talk about this with Hackman too, I do think that artists should be judged on their successes and not their failures. Okay. What makes you say that?

34:12Sean Fennessey:That's interesting. Well, sometimes it takes a failure to get to a success. You know, we don't... Spoken like an artist who doesn't want to be judged on their failures. We don't say about Rod Carew. You know, he made outs 0.66 times at bat. You know, we talk about the amazing Rod Carew because how often he hit the ball. Yes. It's hard to make a good movie. It's hard to make good movies. It's hard to make good anything. It's hard to make a good meal. It's hard to make a good piece of art by yourself. It's certainly hard to make a good piece of art in collaboration with a lot of other people. It's very difficult.

34:55Sean Fennessey:Do you feel that filmmakers should be judged in the same way that we judge baseball players in terms of success? No, I don't. But, you know, come on. We're on the Ringer podcast network. We talk like, I'm wearing my Cubs hat. Three out of ten films, though, I think is not a terrible batting average. I don't either. If you've got a hit. Look, I don't think one out of ten is, if you make one great movie and you make nine, so it took you nine bad movies to get to the one great one. Yeah. One of the things that's wonderful about the documentary is, you know, Louise Fletcher spoke for the film. Linda Blair speaks during the film.

35:32Sean Fennessey:A lot of his collaborators, a lot of people who worked behind the scenes on the film, Rospo Pallenberger, his co-conspirator and a curious figure in movie history, speaks for the film. Most people working on this movie seem to think this is not going well. That this is not what I'd hoped it would be. there's some regret and confusion about the approach. When you're on a movie and the movie is not working, does everyone know? Do you know? No, I don't. I mean, maybe others do. And I've never been in anything like Exorcist 2. Okay. So I don't, but I can't necessarily tell. You know, some of the movies we'll talk about, not just Exorcist 2, but some of these other examples.

36:22I mean, shit is going down, right? People are going to the hospital or, you know, days, they're falling behind days or actors aren't coming to the set. Brando doesn't know his lines or Burton is drunk. I mean, there's shit going down. I haven't seen a lot of that. So maybe if I were in a movie where shit was going down like that, I'd say, well, this thing doesn't seem to be going well. But again, you never know. sometime, I mean, Apocalypse Now is a freaking masterpiece. So just because it's not going well doesn't mean you're not making a great thing. It's absolutely true. So do you disagree with the idea that artists should only be judged by their successes?

37:05I do disagree with it. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Meaning you think they should be, uh, I think all their work should be explored. I'm not saying it shouldn't be explored.

37:15Sean Fennessey:I just, I think generally speaking, I think people who listen to the show know that I don't like to spend too much time on films that don't work. And that I'm one of those people that truly believes pulling off a movie is borderline miraculous because of how challenging it is, especially now.

37:35Sean Fennessey:But, and I do think what you said is true, which is that the failures tend to inform the successes, but the failures are meaningful, especially when it comes to high level filmmakers and high-level actors, which is what we spend a lot of time talking about on this show. Because they have agency. They have the ability to make choices. And sometimes those choices lead them to very bad work. And we should talk about why the work doesn't work. I'm not saying you shouldn't. Do I think you should be judged on it? I do. I do think you should be judged on it. I don't have to judge you harshly, but I'm not going to put you in that and send you to The Hague.

38:12Sean Fennessey:But yeah, I think it's important to understand. I'm trying to think about what's a good example. This has been a year of Steven Spielberg for me. You know, I've spent a little bit of time with him on the show, and I'm thinking about his work a lot. And I look at a movie like The BFG, and I'm just like, why? What, what, how, we should understand, like, that, why that movie doesn't work and why he chose it at that time. And was it a mixture of fascination and cynicism and what informed some of those things? I think that's valuable to the discussion of people's work. We'll talk about it with Hackman.

38:42Sean Fennessey:I mean, he took movies for money, you know, and those movies he talks about in the press. I knew I did the wrong thing because I took it for money. So I do think that kind of matters. And I think what it helps to do is it helps unflatten the history of movies. If everything is only the great work, then we don't understand why things don't work. So my answer is yes. I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't pay attention to the bad movies. We shouldn't discuss them. We shouldn't discuss why an artist fucked up by making something bad or what was going on with that person. I just mean in the sort of final estimation of John Borman, I'm going to, you know, when I give the eulogy at John Borman's funeral, I'm not going to talk about Exorcist II.

39:28Will you be invited? Almost. I'm going to have my own service at my house.

39:36Sean Fennessey:Borman is still with us. Yeah. He's 93 years young. I think he stopped working finally or stopped trying to work. Yes. I think he's done. It does seem like the last few years has been a significant slowdown for him. And this film, I believe he was filmed a few years ago for this documentary, which has been in the works for a very long time. That's an interesting question that you're posing there. And I think maybe part of my bucking against it is that I already know that what you said is true, which is that when the obituary comes out, forget about the funeral. When the obituary comes out, there'll be hardly any time spent on the things that didn't work.

40:13Sean Fennessey:But actually, it's the job of movie podcasters to talk about some of the things that don't work. There'll be a paragraph saying, and his career did hit a couple of bumps with Exorcist 2, considered one of the worst movies ever made or whatever the hell. But ultimately, what they're going to do is they're going to celebrate point blank, which we haven't really talked about. I mean, Parker adaptations have come up a few times as we've talked, because we talked about it on the Duval podcast. We're going to talk about it again. Just saw a new one. Pac-Man podcast. One of the best things I watched for that episode.

40:43So, you know, but Point Blank is an absolute great crime movie and a game changer of a crime movie. It's sort of prismatic view of Los Angeles. Oh, man, it's a great L.A. movie. It is. It's a great L.A. movie.

41:03Sean Fennessey:Yeah, just that image of him moving through the airport, which is still extant. Every time I walk through that airport, I think about Point Blank. It makes you feel like an Angeleno to be in that space. Yeah, I think he's obviously a great artist. I still have to see, I haven't seen many of these films from the 2000s. I haven't seen In My Country or The Tiger's Tale. You know, he was working all the way up until 2014 making movies. Right. Have you seen Taylor of Panama? I have, yes. Which I quite like. Pretty good. I think it's pretty good. That's Jeffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan. And Jamie Lee Curtis.

41:33Yes. It's a John Le Carré adaptation. and I think it's a really good spy movie. I think they changed the ending in the 11th hour. No, I think they shot a different ending. Oh. And in fact, you can even see it on the special feature of Taylor of Panama. No kidding. There's a character, well, spoiler alert, Taylor of Panama, the Jeffrey Rush character kills Pierce Brosnan, and they changed that ending.

42:08Sean Fennessey:Speaking of your studio notes for happier endings. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, the credited screenwriters on that film are John le Carré, Andrew Davies, and John Borman. So maybe that tells you a little something. But it's a really terrific movie, and Hope and Glory is a great... is kind of an essential part of his filmography, I think in that he, he suddenly goes in a whole new direction to, to, to make something so autobiographical and self-reflective and warm. It's a very warm film. It's not overly nostalgic. It is nostalgic, but I don't think overly so not too sentimental, a really beautiful movie.

42:58So there's great work throughout the film.

43:00Sean Fennessey:I'm quite fond of the general as well, which is the Irish crime movie that he made with Brendan Gleeson in a reunion with Jon Voight in the late 90s about Martin Cahill, who's this kind of infamous Irish figure who found himself at kind of the epicenter of a lot of the struggles throughout that country in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. So, yeah, he's got a ton of great movies. The doc in general I think is pretty cool. The one thing that I wanted to – and I would recommend anybody who just likes podcasts like this. I mean the documentary is just like catnip. Well, that's the exact word I was going to use.

43:32I mean, if you're a baggage handler or you're a rodeo clown or you're a detective, maybe you're not going to enjoy that movie. But if you're a film dork, you have to see Borman and the Devil. It is made for dudes like us.

43:48Sean Fennessey:Yes, yes. And I'm just so delighted. Do you subscribe at all to the so bad it's good theory of movies? No. I don't either. I think that's total bullshit. If it's bad, it's... This is why we're friends. Before we talk about some other documentaries about directors, of which there are a great many, I was hoping you could demythologize the director for us. This is a very auteur-focused kind of show. Most of the guests on the show are filmmakers. I tend to see movie history through the prism of the driving artist. Not all of it, obviously. All films are collaborative, but that's my interest set. but that's not always the case and i'm i'm wondering how you think about your life working in movies and specifically like what the directors tell me what the director's job is well again with duval duval and hackman who had pretty contentious relationships with a lot of directors they came from a world where both of them sort of i mean first of all their theater roots, but then a lot of TV before they started making films.

44:59And I think that they just came from a world where the director's job was to know where to put the camera and to stage the action. And then everything else was up to the actor. And they were going to give the director their best take first time out. And then everything else was just a technical adjustment. But this business of a director coming in and saying, okay, now why don't we try one where you've got a lot of variations for the editing room or getting into the psychology of the character? Those dudes didn't have much patience for that. Now, I grew up in the theater where psychological realism is our bread and butter.

45:43And I very much want to have a conversation with a director. I ask for notes. I want notes. I want to have that dialogue with the director. So directors, they work in different ways. They're not all cut from the same cloth and they all have different interests, different skill sets, different mindset about their approach to the work. I'm always fascinated by directors. And in fact, the hardest thing about working in TV is that if you're working on a series, multiple directors come in to direct the series. And that dialogue I have with the director has to change from one director to another is the hardest thing about TV for me, because I want to be involved in that dialogue.

46:30Director's job is to make the movie, is to get the movie made and to get their vision on the screen. And as an actor, I just feel like I'm there to help them facilitate that. What's the best way to tell the story?

46:41Sean Fennessey:Have you ever been on a movie where the director didn't speak to the actors or wasn't good at speaking to the actors? Yeah, I've been on movies where the director was not good at speaking to actors. In fact, we just did a panel at Telluride where they asked for, we were talking primarily about the difference between acting for stage and acting for film. And they said, what advice would you give young? I said, well, if you're a young director, my advice would be to take an acting class or do a play or, you know, just get some experience about what an actor's job is. Because a lot of times you're dealing with guys, men and women who have come up through the business thinking purely visually and technically about how to get their pictures on the screen.

47:28but they don't necessarily know how to communicate their ideas to an actor. Some are better than others.

47:33Sean Fennessey:Does a director need to be charismatic? No. Are they frequently? Yeah. But they don't need to be. Can there be a good film without a good director? Well, that's a good question in that I suppose you could have a bad director with a really good script. I don't know that I've seen that. I don't know that I could point to a movie where I thought, well, that director was terrible, but that movie turned out all right. I don't know that I have a lot of those experiences. Do you think the way that the directorial POV is valorized in places like this and elsewhere is right, should be done? Yeah. I think the director is the author of the – I believe in the auteur theory, and I believe in the theory.

48:26I believe that the director is responsible for the film, ultimately. And some of these failures that we'll talk about, you guys talked about some on your Bombs podcast. I mean, the director has to answer for those. I think, ultimately, that a movie like Boorman and the Devil, as well as The Ghosts of Peter Sellers, This is a movie we can talk about in terms of these other documentaries. This is a movie about the director, Peter Medak, who directed after the huge success of The Ruling Class, which is an absolute great film starring Peter Sellers, starring Peter O'Toole. He then got a chance to work with Peter Sellers on a pirate comedy.

49:22And it was just a debacle. And there's, Medak himself has gone back to make a documentary about what that experience meant to him. And I think one of the things that Medak confronts in that documentary, and one of the things that Borman is confronting in just in this conversation is maybe they have more responsibility for the failure than they ever, maybe the initial impulse of an artist is to say, well, that went wrong and that went wrong and that person fucked that up. and these are the things as opposed to saying, maybe it was me. Maybe I just fucked some things up. Maybe it wasn't the fact that Peter Sellers was a goddamn madman or that Richard Burton was drunk.

50:04Do you think that's where Medak gets to at the end of the movie? He should. I do think so. I do think he's owning some responsibility for it.

50:12Sean Fennessey:Well, it's weird because a lot of the behavior that Sellers is accused of in the film is something that you hear about Sellers on many movies. And yet he's a part of many beloved classics in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So it's one of those things where sometimes if you can't rise to the occasion of a difficult star or a difficult circumstance, like, you know, one of the, you've already mentioned Apocalypse Now. I think Apocalypse Now, Hearts of Darkness, and Burden of Dreams are probably the two, the alpha and the omega of the onset, everything is going wrong crisis documentary. Yeah. And those two great films.

50:54Sean Fennessey:You know, I like Apocalypse Now more than Fitzcarraldo, but Fitzcarraldo, great film. Yeah. We're just talking about Herzog because he's got a movie going into the Criterion Collection. And those are two movies where the filmmakers at the center of it, it feels as though there's a madness inside of them, obviously, but it does feel like they do feel the burden, the weight, the sense of impending failure that is coming at them. Yeah. and I guess they're able to withstand it or transcend it or whatever but it makes those movies so compelling because you know on the other side there's something good you know it's not whereas there are other movies that explore this idea where things are not so good do you have a preference in terms of which kind of story like this you want to see well let me say first of all if you want to be a director you know that the buck stops with you ultimately ultimately so for both Herzog and Coppola and let's let me just be clear about what we're talking about so Francis Ford Coppola made Apocalypse Now and there's a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now that his wife Eleanor Coppola made called Hearts of Darkness and Werner Herzog made the movie Fitzcarraldo and there's a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo called Burden of Dreams Burden of Dreams directed by Les Blanc Les Blanc directed the burden of dreams.

52:14You know, those are both guys who they knew what the job was. They took that on. They said from the beginning, yeah, the buck stops with me. I want to be a movie director. You know that that's the gig. You want to be the one who's ultimately responsible. So when shit is going wrong, yeah, you take it on. You can't just sit there pointing your fingers at everybody else and saying, it's all your fault that this thing is fucked up. And you hear a lot of Coppola on the Hearts of Darkness documentary saying, no, it's me. I'm a failure. I'm failing. Yeah. Pretty compelling.

52:47Sean Fennessey:Yeah. There is this rise in covering proper failures, I'd say. That wasn't as common in the 60s and 70s and 80s with these documentaries. But now you do see more movies that are akin to... Well, there's a very interesting one about a movie that was never made called Jodorowsky's Dune, which is about Alejandro Jodorowsky attempting to adapt Dune. I haven't seen the doc. I love the movie. It's all about the kind of, not unlike Borman's ideas about the heretic, this kind of fantasia of concepts that he wants to bring from the Frank Herbert novel to the screen, which if he were to pull it off, would have been, could have been magical, but are also impossible.

53:31Sean Fennessey:And like speak to the inability to actually realize a dream. but then you know like there's a movie that i really enjoy it isn't so much a making of so much as it is about the cult of movies which is called best worst movie have you ever seen the movie troll 2 no troll 2 when i was a kid was on hbo all the time it was a frequently on television when i would get home from school and it's meant to be sequel to a horror film called troll i I remember the video covers in the video store. Only, as far as I know, Troll 2 is not actually a sequel to Troll. It is a movie that I think was meant to be called Goblin.

54:12Sean Fennessey:And it's about goblins. And it takes place in a town called Nilbog, which is goblin spelled backwards. There's your first problem. Yeah. And the movie is just a, you know, it's a fiasco. It's a really, it's a terrible movie. But it's a very lovable movie. It's a very lovable failure. And it went on to build this huge cult. and this movie, Best Worst Movie, is about falling in love with something that doesn't work and appreciating what doesn't work about it. And I think that this is a movie that kind of shifted the axis of what we expect from these kinds of movies. It's a small documentary that not many people have seen, but I also think it kind of shifted our brain chemistry on what we should be expecting.

54:49Sean Fennessey:Because there are a great many movies. There are two different movies about Hayao Miyazaki and his career and his filmmaking style. One is called Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which is about Studio Ghibli. The other is Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron which came out when The Boy and the Heron came out a few years ago. There's, you know, Ingmar Bergman makes a movie which is about Winter Light. Then there's Lost in La Mancha which is Terry Gilliam fucking up a Don Quixote movie or Lost Souls, the Richard Stanley film about the making of Island of Dr. Moreau. Like, there's this cottage industry of this guy fucked up.

55:26Sean Fennessey:Here's how interesting that is. which I find to be an interesting turn in movie history. What do you make of that? Well, I mean, they're also kind of what-ifs, right? They're all sort of what if this had gone a little bit differently? What if Richard Stanley had been allowed to finish his movie? Would Island of Dr. Moreau have been any better? Probably not. Who decided that putting Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer in a movie together on an island was a good idea? I think Stanley was at least a part of that decision making. Again, he's an eager young filmmaker who's getting a chance to work with big movie stars, and that's the thing that's going to make his movie go.

56:06But nobody ever says to him, no, you're never going to get your movie made with these guys. These guys are maniacs, and it's just not going to happen. You can maybe deal with one maniac. You sure as hell can't deal with two.

56:18Sean Fennessey:Have you ever been in an environment where there were forces like that? that we're making things difficult to make it work? Not really. Okay. You know, I remember when we were making the post and I asked Meryl Streep, Meryl freaking Streep, the same questions. Like, have you ever seen this? And she was like, no, not really. It's not really common. That's probably why we make movies about it because it happens so uncommonly. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, see, I think that a lot of people, like, I think a lot of people listening to this would think that there's this shadow world of all this untold truth.

56:55Well, I don't know. You know, I was just working with Matt Johnson in Canada, working on his film, and he gave me a note about something we were doing. And I said, okay. And he looked at me strangely and started laughing. And I said, what? What is it? And he said, you just, you don't know how insecure most actors are. He said, you take that in stride. And Carrie and I always take this back to each other. I was like, are people really that badly behaved? If they are, we don't see it. That's not us. It's just not my experience. And as long as I'm bringing up Meryl Streep, as long as I'm dropping that name, I will tell you that she's just an actor working real hard, trying to remember her lines.

57:44She's deeply experienced and a great actress, obviously, but she's just, she's at work doing her job. There's nothing, there's no, it's not interesting in a way. There's nothing interesting about it. So there is no shadow world. There is a shadow world. I haven't experienced, there's a shadow world with Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando. I haven't experienced it. I do think a lot of times, right, our business can be self-policing. We start to go, ah, it's not worth it. It's not worth it to hire that guy. Is he good? Yeah, yeah, he's really good. He's really compelling. He's also a giant pain in the ass and he doesn't come to the set and he throws fits with the director.

58:23And so sometimes you go, is it worth it? Is it not worth it? Is it worth to get the performance out of them?

58:30Sean Fennessey:I don't know. What about if you're having a hard time? Is the director the first person that you go to? Yeah. Yeah. What do you say? Having a hard time. I don't understand this. Help me with this. Did they ever get defensive? If they do, it doesn't manifest as pure defensiveness. Normally, they see it as their job to help. And I'm not a guy who asks for help unless I need it. You've never asked me for help whilst potting. Oh, will you help me right now? No, you're doing great. You don't need my help. Would you rather watch a movie, a documentary about an individual film and a filmmaker making that film or a documentary about a filmmaker's entire body of work?

59:13That's a good question because, you know, in the physical media world, we have a lot of what we call special features.

59:22Sean Fennessey:Are we in the physical media world? This is sort of like the shadow world, but it exists. On our discs, our beloved Blu-rays and DVDs, there are often special features. That's right. And quite often those special features contain, well, a lot of it is propaganda about the making of the movie, right? It's publicity material. Yes. that we create while making a movie. And it's about the making of the movie. And it's all very... Polished. Very polished. And you would think there are no problems. Now, on a Criterion disc, I believe that Ingmar Bergman makes a movie is actually contained maybe in the trilogy and his...

1:00:04Sean Fennessey:Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and I can't remember what the third is. The Silence. The Silence, yeah. And I think he made Winter Light and The Silence. in the same year. Yeah. Oh, I don't want to get away from your original question. Continue your Bergman point, though. Well, the Bergman point is that that was a remarkable year for Ingmar Bergman. He made Winter Light and Silence. He directed, I believe, four plays at the National Theater, including Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the Swedish premiere. He was just in an incredibly fecund part of his life and career. And the documentary shows him in the making of Winter Light.

1:00:49He's not some mad monk. It's very workmanlike. He's very much just a guy who's accomplishing. He's in the flow. Famously always liked to be working Bergman. And he's clearly just in the flow, and he's able to answer questions pretty effectively. Again, I talked to Matt Johnson about this because I was just working with him. I said, seems like you're in the flow right now in your life, right? Seems like things are going well. And he's like, you get in these places as an artist where suddenly you're just kind of tapped in and you have access to a lot of things and things are flowing for you in a really good way.

1:01:27Yeah. How wonderful of you to compare Matt Johnson to Ingmar Bergman. You're welcome, Matt. Good luck, Matt. but anyway it's that documentary is a little dry it's not for everybody it's for hardcore

1:01:39Sean Fennessey:I think procedurally though it's very interesting because you get to see him literally doing his job and there's just not a lot of examples of that there are not a lot of there's a lot of EPKs and there are some good special features and special features for me probably more so commentaries than the actual making of documentaries but some making of documentaries were really portals of curiosity that got me I think to the place where I am with my film fandom. And listening to TTA talk about who he was stealing from on commentaries expanded my mind. And then seeing, is it that moment, the Magnolia making of documentary?

1:02:20Sean Fennessey:Which is, I don't know if you've ever seen that before, but it's about a 45 minute film and it shows a lot of very intimate moments, not quite on set, but in the surrounding moments while making a movie that I found to be really revelatory. But those are few and far between where you feel like the bonus material is an artistic act. Most of the time, it feels like it's something that is just made in support of a product. Right. But answer the question. Would you rather watch a documentary about a filmmaker and their work or a documentary about the making of one movie? Well, I'd rather watch a good documentary, regardless of the topic.

1:02:59You know, Borom and the Devil is catnip for us doing what we do. I don't know that it's a great documentary. You know, it's mostly heads and clips and— Some animated recreations. Some animated recreations to try to just like keep things moving and get out of the heads and clips.

1:03:18Sean Fennessey:I find it's a little faux zippy at times in a way that I didn't really think it needed to be. Right. But ultimately, where it lands, the idea that Worman himself supports the idea, and a couple of the talking heads do too, Karen Kusama and Bill Jabiri, they make the point in there and say, look, I'd rather see a big swing. Yes. Right? I'd rather see an artist taking a big swing and failing than just see commercial shit, right? Just cranking out more commercial shit. Lethal Weapon 4. Yeah. And I wholly support that idea, and I think the documentary supports that idea. It doesn't make Exorcist II any better in my mind.

1:04:01By the way, we didn't mention the Ennio Morricone score, which I think is a remarkable score. I mean, you talked about the fact that Exorcist II does have some—these are not—it's not Plan 9, right? That there are real artists making this thing. William Fraker writes the cinematographer, and Morricone with the score. I mean, there's stuff going on in the movie.

1:04:25Sean Fennessey:But the score is a really good example of a filmmaker making a decision, which is that Morconi turns in a score and Borman asks him to remove a component of the score so that it only gives you this incredible, erratic, unusual, upsetting feeling because he's removed something that is more melodic from the original score. That's a great choice. That's a great artistic choice that makes it very memorable. yeah and so again like even though the movie doesn't totally work it's kind of similar to your question about how should you grade an artist's career you know what should they be what standards should they be held to because I do think sometimes when you pull a movie apart and I find this with a lot of contemporary releases like a contemporary release will come out and you'll text me and you'll be like that movie wasn't good what are you talking about and I I am looking for things to appreciate or admire like I think in order to enjoy this job I actually can't go in with the expectation that everything is going to not be as good as The Exorcist.

1:05:22Sean Fennessey:That would make my life terrible. I admire that about you. And I told you, too, when we were in Telluride, I'm trying to get out of this thing of just like, we all have the same grading system for a movie. It's like, well, oh, well, that clearly didn't work because, you know, we all jump on them. Well, it's like, why don't we embrace a world wherein some things don't conform to the norm? That's you're a video podcaster now. You just crossed the threshold from audio to video. Well done. For those listening at home, I referenced my T-shirt, which is Bertolucci's The Conformist. Are there any full-life director documentaries that you like?

1:06:17Let me consult my maps and charts. Vamp for a second.

1:06:20Sean Fennessey:So, I mean, this is really kind of my favorite thing. You know, hanging out with my daughter, seeing a new movie I love for the first time, and then it's kind of this. There's just a two-hour movie, and it's just about a director's whole career. And it's just lots of smart people talking about their movies. Is it the most sophisticated work of art? No. Is it usually a great documentary? No. Does it show us? Is it truly revealing about the human soul and the act of creativity? Probably not. And yet, a very happy place for me is a movie like Hal, which is just two hours of people talking about Hal Ashby.

1:07:03Sean Fennessey:Who he was, what he did, the work he made, clips from his films. I just find that tremendously satisfying and I think some of it is because I obviously my favorite period in cinema history is a time when I was not alive and so I am always trying to get to a place that I never got to experience and I felt that very young watching the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies specials and learning about what my checklist ought to be and getting obsessed with this stuff and we're still not totally in the place where we're getting documentaries made about filmmakers whose movies I was seeing in movie theaters. But that's about to start.

1:07:45Yeah.

1:07:46Sean Fennessey:We are about to get to the place where, you know, Tarantino is very venerated, probably the most venerated from that generation. And there have been some things about him, but they're not quite on the level of what we're talking about here. But, you know, your Finchers and your Soderberghs and your PTAs and your Sofia Coppola's, like those people are all kind of entering their 50s and 60s when they start to to be, they're concretized as part of the canon. And when you get into the canon, you get a two hour documentary about you. But that's different. I mean, a lot of the time when we've talked about on drafts and done these halls of fame together, you're like, I saw this movie in theaters for a lot of these people.

1:08:20Sean Fennessey:Does that change your relationship to watching some of these docs? I'm sure it does. I'm sure it does. Certainly to get any sort of peek behind the curtain is always titillating, right? That's always exciting to see. But again, the quality of the doc goes a long way. The quality of the documentary itself and Hearts of Darkness, I mean, I think for me, the documentary has to be about something more than just the thing it's about, right? There has to be a bigger idea at play. American movie, which is just one of my favorite movies. Me too. Is not just about a failed B movie being made for no money.

1:09:12Z movie being made for no money in Wisconsin. It's got much bigger ideas at work. Directed by Chris Smith about the filmmaker Mark Borchardt from Wisconsin. and some big ideas about family and found family and friendship and arts, the American artist. I mean, there are a lot of big ideas at play. So do I enjoy watching things about the films and filmmakers that I love? Yeah, I love it. But give me a well-made documentary any day of the week if you haven't seen American movie. beautiful, heartbreaking, and hilarious. It's a great one.

1:09:57Sean Fennessey:I worked with Chris Smith a couple years ago and I was, I fanned out about an American movie. Filmmaker Docs, George Stevens, A Filmmaker's Journey. In the world of like heads and clips documentaries, this is a mighty good one. Available in 4K, Why do you think that happened? I don't know. When I saw that they made that, when Warner made that of 4K, I was like, of all the things to restore and upgrade? And this, which even the origins of that film, I'm like this, it's a very polished, shiny object. And is it directed by his son? I think it is directed by his son, George Stevens Jr. And I love George Stevens' films.

1:10:40Sean Fennessey:And, but I found that to be a bit strange that it was upgraded. But a very good movie that is a kind of, you know, an encomium of a great director's work and kind of shows you a little bit of kind of what the director does in that period in time in American movies. and I think answers a cool question, which is everyone's working in the studio system at the time that he is. There's not really an independent film scene, certainly in Hollywood, California in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. So why is he better than other people? That's a good question. I don't know that he is. And the movie kind of tries to explore that, but it's like, is it taste?

1:11:17Sean Fennessey:Does he understand something about the American character? Does he understand his body of work as telling a broader story? Yes and no? I guess. I mean, do you rank him as high as John Ford or Howard Hawks? I mean, he made significantly fewer films than those guys. Right. But his highs, right? I mean, he made Shane and Giant and these huge, epic, you know, classic American stories that I think are definitional to their genres. Yeah. So do I rank him as high? I don't know. No, but like John, there's still 20 John Ford movies I haven't seen. Have you seen the Bogdanovich documentary directed by John Ford?

1:12:00Sean Fennessey:I have. Yes, I own it on DVD. And I do love it because it is a portrait of an artist in resistance. Right. because Ford is at least performing disinterest than participating in a documentary with Bogdanovich. Which Bogdanovich clearly loves, right? He finds that idea very funny. But it's also notable for interviews with John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda. Very informal style interviews. Sort of you get the impression in their backyard. Yeah. I mean, they bothered to glue on their toupees, but not much more than that to go out in the backyard and record their two clears on today. No, that was why I'm wearing my Cubs.

1:12:52Do you do a Jimmy Stewart? You mean impersonation? Yeah. Just in my essence. I had, I had a director once tell me I was the next Jimmy Stewart. Turned out not to be true. No kidding. What year was that? Long time ago.

1:13:11Sean Fennessey:Turned out not to be true. Well, Well, I think at this stage in your life, you do combine that very specific effervescence of bemused curmudgeon. All right. I'll take that. That is a zone of Stuart that I quite like. You know, Stuart, when he is younger, he's very crabby. Yeah. And then he's older. He's like a little more slower, a little slower, a little more vuncular. Oh, you're doing a little Jimmy, Stuart? A little Jimmy, yeah. A little Jimmy, yeah. Anyway, that doc is very, wow, it's striking to see those guys just talk about Ford. I remember the Stewart interview. He's like on a lawn somewhere.

1:13:51Sean Fennessey:Is it on the studio lot or something? And it's very up close to him. Yeah. I haven't seen this movie in a long time. But going through my Bogdanovich obsession in the 2000s, I definitely went out and bought it. And unfortunately, Bogdanovich went in and kind of upgraded the movie, right? There's the movie he made in the early 70s. Oh, I don't know if I've seen. Maybe you've only seen the upgraded version. And then he went back into it in the 80s with some video interviews, which are not as on point as those people. So as a doc, I don't know that it's wholly successful, but I mean, just the clips from the Ford movies are pretty staggering.

1:14:24Sean Fennessey:Well, he's a really important figure, Bogdanovich, in this thing that we're describing because he is one of the people who I think turned directors into kind of like baseball trading cards. You know, the books that he wrote and the way that he wrote about these filmmakers in magazines and the way that he befriended them and sought them out and then cast them in his films and talked about their work in the press all the time and, you know, talked about Hawks and talked about Ford and talked about people like Alan Dwan, you know, like these films, Raoul Walsh, who, you know, who were yeoman filmmakers working in the studio system.

1:14:57Sean Fennessey:And then he created a kind of mythology around them, which I think leads to like the kind of brain that I have about some of this stuff, which is like completism and organization in the sense that, you know, Bogdanovich reviewed every movie he ever saw on an index card. And he saved those index cards. And some of those cards were converted into some of the books that he wrote. And there is something really interesting about him. You know, he really only made one filmmaker doc like that. He made a couple of other documentaries. He made one about Tom Petty that's quite good. But that movie, it's almost like he's racing to make a movie about Ford before he dies.

1:15:33Sean Fennessey:You know? And not a lot of filmmakers agree to do that. You know, Friedkin, we didn't talk about Friedkin's relationship to The Exorcist 2. He is featured in this documentary in a memorable little segment. He hated it. He hated it and he held Borman in some contempt for making it. Yes. I'm comfortable saying that. I don't feel like I'm betraying a trust because he's on the record saying it. And I really do feel that Billy just thought people were cashing in on the thing he had made. And I think he found that detestable. Hi there. I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney Play.

1:16:20It's been too long, cowboy. Woody, Buzz, and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part? It's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.

1:16:43Sean Fennessey:Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices. Every plan to just$15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months, $90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Who says Halloween only lasts one day?

1:17:16Sean Fennessey:With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger-than-life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house, Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Have you seen Freedkin' Uncut? I haven't seen it. I wasn't... they asked me to do an interview for it and I didn't do it. Was there a reason for that? I don't remember. Okay. There's not, I don't have a, is this a shadow world thing?

1:17:58It's not a shadow world. You can tell me. It's just us. I just, I don't know that I was, I don't know why I wasn't comfortable with it.

1:18:07Sean Fennessey:I wouldn't say it's the greatest documentary in the world, but it, it again just satisfies this thing where I just want to hear William Friedkin speaking for two hours and telling stories and being, ornery about things. And, you know, he's famously very ornery. He retells that story of the premiere screening of Exorcist 2, where people are watching the film and they're becoming increasingly unhappy with the movie and realizing it is not really a very good sequel to The Exorcist. And then some guy turns around and points to executives in the audience and says, these are the people responsible for this movie.

1:18:41Sean Fennessey:And Friedkin kind of relished that story. And he tells stories like that throughout Friedkin Uncut. But he also tells the story, right, of he was in a post-production lab, probably working on Sorcerer. And somebody said, hey, we've got Exorcist II in the room next door. Do you want to come over and see some of it? And he claims that as a bit of a lark, he went over and he sat down and he watched 10 minutes of it. And he found it incomprehensible and insulting. And he left. and I think that's probably one of the things that fuels Borman saying well The Exorcist was about a little girl being tortured you know I don't think there was any love lost directors are the most competitive people of any of the jobs I've encountered in the business they're very competitive and they don't want to give it up for each other that's interesting I'm quite fond of De Palma haven't seen it I think you should.

1:19:40Okay.

1:19:41Sean Fennessey:I'll tell you why. It's what I think every great director should be forced to do. I think if you decide to do this job, there should be a writ in the contract with the DGA to be a member of that union that says, when you reach 70 years old, you must sit down and you must speak one by one about each film you've made. Because that's what De Palma is. It's just, it's Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow with their cameras affixed onto Palma's face. No other interviews. Going movie by movie through his entire career. And it is, it's my nightlight. It's my greatest comfort. It's a big bowl of Oreos for me.

1:20:35Sean Fennessey:Really, really enjoyable piece of work. You're a De Palma fan, are you not? I mean, because I believe that we should judge an artist based on their successes and not their failures. Yes. Wow. What would you say is De Palma's greatest success? Carrie. How do you feel about Carrie being remade as a television series? I'm against it. No, I shouldn't say that. I should say I won't watch it. Okay. I think I'm going to have to watch it as a King completist. You are not a King completist. What do you mean? Come on. You haven't seen all the Stephen King things, have you? Have you seen all the Stephen King things?

1:21:18I think so. Have you seen both TV versions of The Stand or three versions? Oh, of course. Are you kidding me? One of my favorite novels of all time. And you've seen both TV adaptations. Oh, I touched the mic. Sorry.

1:21:30Sean Fennessey:Yes. Yes, I've seen both TV adaptations. I watched the second TV adaptation during COVID. It was just absolutely bereft, devastated. Did they remake The Shining as a TV thing? They did with Stephen Webber. Have you seen that? Of course I have. Stephen King is foundational for me as a person. It completely turned my light on. All right. His novels and then... I take it back. You are a Stephen King completist. Well, why are we talking about Stephen King? I can't even recall. Oh, Carrie. Yes, of course. That's my favorite diploma. Good one. Should it be another one? Am I forgetting something it should be?

1:22:06But you're, you know, you are intrigued by perversion.

1:22:11Sean Fennessey:And so I was expecting, fair to say? Who isn't? That's what I'd say. And I would, you know, I would have thought blowout or body double or, you know, dress to kill or. I like all those. I think I've given it to Carrie before. How do you feel about Scarface? Not as fond of it as the others. This has been good. What else did you watch for this? Well, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which is the documentary about Orson Welles. I think it's made for Netflix, actually. It is. About the making of The Other Side of the Wind in Orson Welles' last movie, incomplete at the time of his death and then completed many years later.

1:23:09Yes. Well, I am a Welles completist. And I think he's one of the few really great American, I mean, genius American artists. I shouldn't say few. I'm sure there are plenty. He's one of my faves. as maddening as he is and as frustrating as you might find him both as a viewer and apparently as collaborators found him as a person. He's also just, he's a genius, you know? So.

1:23:43Sean Fennessey:I haven't seen that movie in some years. I did have Morgan Neville on this show to talk about it. And can you remind me of how it's organized and like what is revealed? It's organized in a very chaotic way, I think, meant to reflect the kind of chaos of production beginning, production being canceled, going back to revisit a movie, something that's already been shot, going back to view Wells' history, heads and clips, all of that stuff is in there. but it's put together in a very chaotic way. It's a bit of a mosaic, which the picture starts to emerge of this artist. Whatever Wells is doing, whatever that mad world is and the people that he pulled into that world, including John Huston, right?

1:24:34Yeah. A big part of this, the lead in this movie, and Peter Bogdanovich, again.

1:24:40Sean Fennessey:Do you think it's important, I asked you if it's important for a director to be charismatic, Do you think it's important for a director to be charismatic, to be an interesting subject of one of these movies? Well, yeah. I don't want to see a movie about some boring technician putting together a film. I don't know that I would find that interesting. But I have to say most directors, not all directors are charismatic. A lot of them I've worked with are. James Mangold, who I adore, is a very charismatic guy. you know he chomps a big cigar and he screams on the set and he gets into big fights old school movie maker feels very old school and really gives the impression of a guy who's like come up through the ranks like he used to be a gaffer and then he got a job as an ad and that's not his background at all his dad was an important visual artist from upstate new york and he went school at cal arts and was uh alexander mckendrick was his mentor yes uh so he's a he's an art school dude, but he's, he is that, he is a larger than life character and very charismatic on the set and very exacting.

1:25:51The good ones are pretty exacting about what they're getting.

1:25:56Sean Fennessey:There are a number of other movies like this that I really enjoy that I'll briefly cite. And most of them are of the talking head director speaks variety. For example, Billy Wilder speaks as an example of this, which I think is very entertaining by Sidney Lumet is one we talked about when we did a Lumet episode a few years ago. There's one about John Milius. There's one about Nora Ephron. The Beaches of Agnes is sort of this kind of a movie with Agnes Varda. I just watched a bit last night of Lightning Over Water. Have you seen that before? The Vim Vendors Nicholas Ray movie where Nicholas Ray at the end of his life, Vim Vendors comes to stay with him and they have a kind of, uh, kind of a, kind of a pot to do about whether or not Nick Ray can make one more movie before Vin Vendors goes off to make Hammett.

1:26:45Um, there's a really

1:26:47Sean Fennessey:interesting. Cause Nicholas Ray is in American friend, is he not? So is it documentary made around that time? Around that. I think it's just shortly after that. Um, that's a very interesting movie that I think reveals a director near the end of their life, but is not showing them doing the work really, but still like it shows the engine inside of Ray's mind of wanting to continue, wanting to work no matter what. I don't know this at all. I should watch it. Very, very good films on the Criterion channel right now that I would recommend people check out. Okay. Before we move on to scripted films.

1:27:19Before we move on, two more to talk about. Hitchcock Truffaut. If you're, there are documentaries about Orson Welles. There are documentaries about Alfred Hitchcock. You talked about documentaries about whole careers. They're out there. Magician is the one about Orson Welles. Are they good? They're comprehensive, but a little dry. Yeah. Hitchcock Truffaut is about a very specific moment. But a book. Ken Jones made the documentary. That's definitely worth seeing.

1:27:52Sean Fennessey:One of my favorite things about that film is that Ken Jones has enlisted five or six of the best working filmmakers to talk about the impact that book and conversation and Hitchcock's work had on them. And if you watch it, you can see the ways in which the Finchers and James Grays of the world have integrated what they learned from just reading a book into their actual work, which is something that I think a lot of people do with a lot of movies like this, is they watch these things and they learn, or at least they think they're learning about how things are made. And isn't there a documentary about, Is there a documentary purely about the shower scene?

1:28:27Sean Fennessey:There is. 7852. Right, right, right. Which is, I think, great fun. I've seen it. Alexander O 'Philippe is the name of the filmmaker, and he's made a number of movies about these very specific moments in movie history. His most recent one is called Chain Reactions, which is four different people reflecting on their relationship with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But I enjoy all of his movies. I think they all have something. He made one about Alien. He made another one about, oh, a terrific one that I really enjoyed about David Lynch's relationship to The Wizard of Oz. Right. And I think those are all worth seeking out.

1:29:09They're not quite explorations of filmmakers. They're really more about film grammar and film ideas.

1:29:16Sean Fennessey:But those are a good shout. And then Five came back. I know this is made for TV. It is, in fact, a kind of miniseries. Yes, an adaptation of Mark Harris' book, yes. Mark Harris' terrific book about five filmmakers who were, five great American filmmakers who were tasked with documenting World War II. And the impact that that had on their lives and careers moving forward. And the impact was not small, as you might imagine, on those fellows. And each director is assigned a different director, contemporary director. You might be able to pull that up. Steven Spielberg does William Wyler. Do you have it in front of you?

1:30:07I do not. Paul Greengrass.

1:30:12Sean Fennessey:Francis Ford Coppola has John Huston. Guillermo del Toro has Frank Capra. Paul Greengrass has John Ford. and Lawrence Kasdan has George Stevens. Yeah. The aforementioned. It's on your Netflix app. Which are three episodes. It's fairly conquerable. It's really compelling stuff. Anything else? Nope. Making movies about directors is an interesting fetish. Very rarely commercially successful as a conceit. People do sometimes want to see movies about Hollywood. They even sometimes want to see movies about the making of a movie, but a movie about a film director is an unusual thing. Do you like them?

1:30:58Well, I like White Hunter Black Heart very much, which is a Clint Eastwood's movie about John Huston and the making of the African Queen. Now, names are changed, right? He's not actually playing a character named John Huston. No, but he is performing as though he is John Huston. He's doing a John Huston impersonation. It may or may not work for you. I think it's one of his,

1:31:25Sean Fennessey:if not his most underrated movie. It is a movie that is not very widely seen. Yeah. And is in that interesting late 80s, early 90s period where he's kind of fishing around pre-Unforgiven. Right. Where you've got Heartbreak Ridge and Bird. And I think this movie comes after Bird around that time. Yeah. And... It's an interesting, it's a cool film. I like it. And he's giving a performance. He's not doing Clint. Right. He's playing, I guess, maybe what he remembers of John Huston. And it's about making of the African Queen and primarily about trying to shoot an elephant while in Africa making the African Queen.

1:32:10It's a really good movie. You know, Warner Brothers has released and re-released and re-released all of these. usually when there's a physical media, a change in the physical media market, some of the first stuff to get out there is Eastwood stuff because men tend to drive the physical media market and therefore they put these Eastwood movies out there.

1:32:31Sean Fennessey:Dirty Harry, Outlaw Josie Wales. Those are always some of the first things on a new format. For some reason, they have not done this with White Hunter Blackheart. Only on DVD. They've not given it any respect. It's a really compelling movie. Whenever I say something is underseen or underrated, it usually means it doesn't have a 4K. That's the synonym for that. You know, there is a different strain of this kind of movie. All That Jazz is an interesting movie about a film director. Yeah. It's a self-portrait. Thinly-veiled, I guess. Not even thinly-veiled. Barely. Why did he even change the name of the character from Bob Fosse?

1:33:09Sean Fennessey:We'll never know. Right. But Bob Fosse's story effectively about himself entering the creative depth, the creative death throes, I would say. That is in part also about working on stage, right? And is not totally about filmmaking, but does feel like a portrait of a film director. That's one of the best movies ever made, but I feel like it's maybe not considered a movie about a director. Is that, what do you think? Well, I mean, his film directing is seen in all that jazz as a kind of sideline, right? It doesn't have his focus. He's mainly a Broadway guy and mainly a dancer, and that's what the film mostly concerns itself with.

1:33:52This movie thing is like a thing that keeps bothering him on the schedule, that he has to keep going in and working on Lenny. Lenny here is not Lenny Bruce. They've changed that to a different comedian. He's played by Cliff Gorman, who played the role of Lenny in the Broadway production on which the movie Lenny is based, the great Cliff Gorman. Well, I mean, we could go on and on about all that jazz, but it's a great portrait of an artist and a kind of self-destructive slash self-destructive drive of Bob Fosse in particular. Okay, so I've got, I haven't, I've not mentioned this to anyone.

1:34:37Sean Fennessey:I'm just going to do it live on the show right now. Oh my God. So the last, it's not, it's really not a revelation at all. so settle down. Two years ago, to celebrate Altman's centenary, we did an episode about his career. We had a program on the Criterion channel celebrating his work. This year, Abel Ferrara turned 75, did his films on the channel, talked about it on the show. Next year, there's two candidates in my mind for who I'm interested in spending a lot of time on. One of them is Bob Fosse, who would turn 100. next year. And the other is Ken Russell. I'm just, I'm always looking for excuses to, to repel into the.

1:35:20Why Ken Russell?

1:35:21Sean Fennessey:Does he have a. He would have turned 100. I see. Next year. So those are the two people who's now Bob Fosse has a relatively modest film career. I think he directed only six films. Yeah, really short. Did a choreography on maybe five or six proper Hollywood films, like pajama games, stuff like that. Um, so that would be an easier package to conquer. Ken Russell, there's a lot to put your arms around. A lot of movies. Well, but still, it's not, it's what, 40? That's a lot. Well, I've been doing Hackman and Duval. I know. That's a lot to me. That's very true. I find the director packages are different because you have to, it's more studied.

1:35:58Sean Fennessey:The actors are, you can watch a bad movie and just look at what they're doing and reflect on that. But I don't know, what do you think would be more interesting to spend time on? Look, I'm just doing and my duty as the third chair of this podcast. Well, I'm asking your opinion as the third chair. If I had a vote, it would be Ken Russell. I mean, do you have a vote, I guess? I mean, because I... You're a good person in my life. Because I... Because I judge an artist based on their successes and not their failures, they both have some unbelievable successes. A lot more... I don't know if Ken Russell has failures so much as unrealized dreams.

1:36:43Sean Fennessey:You know, I mean, everything is a swing. Every movie he makes is a swing, which is fascinating. Well, he and Borman kind of cut from the same cloth in that regard. And Ken Russell certainly belongs in that second tier along with Borman. He does. You know, there are some other more standard Hollywood versions of what we're describing. There's Chaplin, a movie about Charlie Chaplin. Right. Gods and Monsters, you know, which is about James Whale near the end of his life. There's a Hitchcock biopic starring Anthony Hopkins. Isn't there a Hitchcock biopic with Toby Jones? Toby Jones as well. Yeah. Yeah.

1:37:21Sean Fennessey:There is Ed Wood. Right. There's Steven Spielberg's The Fablemans, which is sort of about the origins of arriving at directing. Have you ever seen The Disaster Artist? Nope. You know what that is? Nope. Do you know what the film The Room is? Yes. Now I know what you're talking about. Have you seen The Room? I haven't seen The Room. You never participated in that? I never. That was not... That ain't me, man. Is it because you feel you're above that? Didn't we just talk about movies that are so bad that they're good? That's the way The Room sounds to me. I think it's an it enters a different stratosphere of so bad it's good it might be the ur so bad it's good but it's also it's cult is an active community I would say are you suggesting that I should see the room?

1:38:17Sean Fennessey:not alone for this podcast on video I think that would be a confusing experience room watch party room what do you call it? watch along Watch along? Room watch along? I don't think you'd totally get the effect by having us nattering at you during it. But maybe you and Carrie and the nanny. Could watch The Room? Is it on physical media, The Room? I assume so. You don't own it? I don't own it, no. To me, it's only meant to be seen in a movie theater with a lot of people while holding plastic spoons. Throwing toast at the screen sort of thing? Yes, it is. There is an interactivity? There is. Yeah.

1:38:55Sean Fennessey:It is. I think it is the millennial Rocky Horror but it's a much less interesting movie than Rocky Horror The Disaster Artist is about the making of the movie right with James Franco Dave Franco Seth Rogen a number of other people I think a pretty interesting movie that came out right around the time when who made that movie James Franco directed it and right around the time when he was kind of deleted from our culture anything else any other movies like this that you enjoy oh you also mentioned uh nouvelle vague nouvelle vague of course just came out i actually haven't seen yet uh more a movie that i enjoyed more about that crew of directors and the and the relationship that some of them had to the older french masters the making of breathless stuff i found a little bit less compelling personally uh i'll mention one more movie that doesn't belong on any of these lists, I've mentioned it on this podcast before, and that's The Stuntman starring Peter O'Toole.

1:39:57You know, there is a kind of myth about the film director. And certainly The Stuntman explores the myth of the film director. It's a picture of a film director a lot of us see when we talk about film directors. So I think it's worth seeing, just for a little context, even though it's not based on any one person necessarily.

1:40:21Sean Fennessey:You mentioned Wells earlier and how you're a completist. Does that mean you've seen Mank and RKO 281 and me and Orson Wells? I have. Okay. Seen them all. And I like them to varying degrees. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how frequently he has been portrayed. He's tough to get your arms around in every sense. That's true. Yeah. And he also appears. well he's famously the inspiration for the brain from pinky and the brain are you familiar with pinky and the brain vaguely animated series yeah i don't think you would have been interested when he debuted a play about orson wells oh yeah what was it called called orson's shadow written by the actor austin pendleton oh yes of course it's about a moment in wells's life when uh Lawrence Olivier, who was starting the National Theater, hired Orson Welles to direct Olivier in a production of Rhinoceros by Ionesco.

1:41:22And Olivier was going to appear in it with his then-girlfriend, Joan Plowright, even though he was still married to Vivian Leigh. and uh i played ken tynan the critic kenneth tynan who olivier very smartly pulled into the fold when he was starting the national theater knowing that having a critic on his side was a good thing i can't wait to be compromised in that way and tynan was friends with wells and sort of bartered the introduction between them and they fought bitterly and olivier fired him off of the production. And so it's a play about that. It's a beautiful play. And it's really about some of what we're talking about here, that Olivier was very much a traditionalist and was very concerned with the way he was going to appear and had a lot of insecurity.

1:42:17Sean Fennessey:Why did he hire a buccaneering maverick like Orson Welles to direct his play? Because he knew it was a good idea, but he couldn't ultimately submit to Welles' genius and irascibility. Do you see yourself as more of a Wells or an Olivier? I don't see myself as worthy of that question. I was hoping you would take the bail. Is there anything else you'd like to say about these films, these worlds, the way that directors are portrayed on screen? I hope that people check out this. I hope that the people who are into this and have listened this far in the discussion, we'll check out Borman and the Devil.

1:43:00It's great fun. And it may be even more fun if you watch Exorcist 2 shortly before watching Borman and the Devil. I mean, look, I think Exorcist 2 is just, as I said at the beginning, I think it's awful. But if you're a film fan, I think you should see it.

1:43:20Sean Fennessey:It's a worthy curiosity. And I think in all likelihood, when the movie is over, if you watch Exorcist 2 first, the thing you will ask yourself is what the hell happened here? And the movie explores that. So it's a useful companion. All right, Tracy, where can we find you? What are you doing? I'm, you know, third chair of the Big Picture podcast and occasional third chair of the Blank Check podcast. Congrats on the Taxi Driver episode. Greatly enjoyed that. Thanks. There was a discussion on the Midnight Boys podcast, which is another pod we have here at The Ringer, about the third chair situation.

1:43:57Sean Fennessey:Chris Ryan was a guest on that show. Van is one of the co-hosts of that show. And there was some discussion about the third chairs teaming up to make a show called Third Chair as an offshoot or as a separate enterprise, perhaps. Your thoughts. When you're losing, you extend your hand and say, why don't we all join up together? I mean, here's the thing. It's so over. Once Van entered the conversation, it was really over, right? I mean, I accused Chris last time we were on here of being W. But now that he and Van are chopping it up with lioness, I mean, are you kidding? He's not W. Those guys are Lyndon LaRouche and Pat Buchanan.

1:44:46Sean Fennessey:Okay, thank you, Tracy Lentz. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. So thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for production support. We'll be back later this week to discuss Robert Pattinson in the film Primetime. We'll see you then.

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