The Top 10 Fantasy Films, The Toy Movie Hall of Fame, and ‘Masters of the Universe,’ with Griffin Newman!

23:32Yeah, exactly. And to fill in a couple gaps here, because I mean, this is one of my real nerd corners. And hopefully I don't get too much wrong. But so much of He-Man and the 80s for toys is a response to every major company passing on Star Wars. That Star Wars is the whiff that no one can live down. And so everyone goes, we need our Star Wars killer. And Hasbro has G.I. Joe in its history. They go, let's make them small. Let's make them fight crazy snake people and use lasers. You know, we can sell more vehicles. They rebrand that. They also simultaneously start collecting a bunch of different Japanese toys, mush them together into one mythology.

24:15That becomes Transformers. There's all this sort of everyone is trying to come up with their killer. And Mattel has Barbie is their biggest brand and Hobwheels, which is cars but not characters. And they like needed a thing with characters. And He-Man comes out of like a panicked year of development of what is the thing that can compete with Star Wars. And as I always affectionately put it, what I love about it is that it's a garbage plate. What they ended up doing was kind of combining every pitch. There are like 10 guys who claim that they created He-Man and all of them are correct because they all created what would be the one fundamental piece in any other property.

24:55But with He-Man, they took 10 pieces and they mushed them all together. And they said, why are we choosing between barbarians and robots? Why aren't magic and technology existing in the same thing? Also ninjas, also a cyborg cowboy, right? It's monsters and it's high fantasy and it's all of this sort of stuff. And that was the genius of it was how kind of crass it was. But then within it, what I think is fascinating, and I was talking about, we had Matt Johnson on the podcast and we were talking off mic about how we're obsessed similarly with these corners of pop culture. And he said, you know, the thing that's fascinating is that these were like assignments for people.

25:37These were sort of interim jobs on the way to what they actually want to do, whether it was to write novels or to be a business executive or whatever it was. Either you have loft your creative ambitions or you're stuck in a creative position while you want to get to a management position. And you're the guy who gets the rights to this Japanese video game and you have to rename the characters. You know, these assignments that become like it's four o 'clock on a Friday. And when they hit right, they become things that people like you and I study like religious text. And the meaning is not behind it in the decision making process.

26:10And there's the clip that goes viral like once a year from Power of Grayskull, which is a really good documentary about how the toy line was made of what does He-Man ride? What's his vehicle? We don't have money for a vehicle. and there was another toy line called Big Jim. And they said, give him Big Jim's Jaguar. He's got like a big Jaguar. And they went, well, Big Jim was like this tall. It was like 13 inches and He-Man's five inches. The cat's too big for He-Man to ride. And they go, just paint it green or some shit. And that's the decision. You're like, well, if the cat's green, then it can be giant.

26:48And then it's a battle cat. And then it's a battle cat. And then you can ride it. Right, all this sort of stuff. but you did get people like Paul Dini, who was later, you know, primarily responsible for most of, or a lot of what made Batman the Animated Series great and J. Michael Straczynski and all these people who worked on the early days of He-Man who were accidentally making interesting things, you know, but none of the mythology lines up with itself. This is really key, as you said, is they create the toys first. They go to the toy companies or the toy stores rather and they go, who's going to buy the toys if the kids don't know the characters?

27:24They go, we'll write comic books and put them inside the package. Then they start developing a cartoon show. There are basically three mythologies being developed simultaneously. There is no IP management. No one's really talking to each other. The guys writing the comics are doing one thing. The intent when they created the toys was one thing. And the cartoon is only when they add in Prince Adam. Not to mention Orko and Sorceress. All this stuff is so piecemeal. It is what has made this movie a development hell project for about 25 years is how the fuck do you adapt this? Combined with it's got cachet, there's a fandom, there's nostalgia.

28:04But as you said, it's never been as big as Marvel, DC, G.I. Joe, Transformers. It doesn't have the immediate, everyone knows what that means when you say it, even if they can't name all the characters. and so it's always been in this weird zone of there's no way to make a cheap version of this movie. It maybe could be a big hit if you nailed it, but how do you nail it while giving it the backing it needs to appease the fandom, which isn't big enough to support the budget on its own while also bringing in a new audience? And it's truly been 25 years of basically every major studio. I mean, it was Fox, Warner Brothers, Sony, all had their goes with this.

28:52And then Netflix for years before it ended up with the current Amazon MGM thing.

28:57Sean Fennessey:Yeah. So in addition to this long road to adapting it into a movie and the way in which they adapted into a movie, I think speaks to some of the anxieties that it has gone through in the development process. It's also been rebooted as an animated series twice. And there have been multiple, three times, three times. Arguably four times. Four times. Okay, I don't know. I definitely don't know about the fourth time. Yeah. And each time, it's had varying levels of success, but never replicated that experience in the 1980s. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but primarily because it is inescapable from its roots.

29:33Sean Fennessey:Like the actual, the time in which it was made does not port over neatly the way that something like Spider-Man does. Where Spider-Man has a kind of eternal quality, there is something very locked into that 80s mentality. And also some of the kind of raggedy quality of its development, you know, that the characters don't all make sense together tonally, that the technologies don't all fit together. So it does, that smorgasbord quality that you're describing, it just, it makes it feel like it never should have happened in the first place. Right. It's like this weird, beautiful accident. It's like a peanut butter truck and a chocolate truck.

30:11crashing into each other, except there were also 20 other trucks. And I think you hear about the development hell of this movie over two plus decades. And it's always the, is the move that we have to ground it and make it more serious and actually make it make sense? Or do you need to lean all the way in and make everything a joke and make it a total comedy? And the original thing in its moment had this insane rise and fall. You know, unlike G.I. Joe and Transformers, which continue to exist and have their peaks and valleys, He-Man was done by 1988. It starts in 1982. There's the one previous live-action movie with Dolph Lundgren in 87.

30:53And by the time that movie comes out, it basically had ended. It had crashed and burned. It was insane. It went from, you know, like tens of millions of dollars to hundreds to a billion back to tens to nothing within the span of five years.

31:07Sean Fennessey:I can map it so perfect because I'm born in 82, so I can map it perfectly onto my shifting interest specifically into Marvel and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And those being the two pathways of fandom that I, in addition to like baseball, that I was kind of pouring myself into when I was six, seven, eight, nine years old and away from He-Man. He-Man, it having this kind of primal quality when you're four and you see He-Man and you see Skeletor and you see Evelyn and you see Sorceress and you see Cringer. The power as a statement. I mean, they talk about they did all these focus groups to try to figure out what the toy line needed to be.

31:45And they kept circling back to kids really light up if you throw the idea of power in front of them. All kids kind of feel powerless. And if there's an idea of being able to take control of power in some kind of way, and then the idea that He-Man is basically, despite the fact that he looks like he could be Conan the Barbarian, he is this affable goofball. He's the smiling, sort of hyper-friendly. He's what a child thinks they would be as a grown-up if they got really buff and strong. But also still have their manners, you know? Remember what their parents taught them. You know this because you've been kind enough to give to my daughter some toys from this universe.

32:29She sort of independently got into it.

32:32Sean Fennessey:Yeah, so she just pulled a Shira disc off of a video store shelf when she was like four years old. And then about a year ago, we went to go see a bunch of He-Man episodes strung together at the Egyptian one morning. And, you know, she was pretty young. She was like three and a half, four years old when she was getting into it. And I think it is specifically what you're describing, that there is this essential, heroic, oversimplified quality to both of those characters. She were a little bit more complex, but not really. Yeah, yeah. And so it makes sense that it was clicking for people at that time.

33:07Sean Fennessey:Now, I'm a bit older than you. So how did you get into this since it was gone by the time you came around? Correct. I'm basically born the year it's put to bed. So they did a desperate attempt to reboot it like immediately when it was dying, which was the second cartoon show, which was called The New Adventures of He-Man. And that was He-Man and Skeletor go to space. and otherwise entirely different cast of characters. Now they're just like actually trying to tackle Star Wars directly. So that's running when I'm little, but that was a big flop. And then I went to a summer camp that podcast listeners love when I invoke, where I mostly got taken under the wing of the cooler teenage counselors in training.

33:55and I had always been sort of obsessed with the pop culture that had come right before me. And there was one guy in particular who named himself Grunge and his two greatest obsessions in the world were the Viewisk Universe and Masters of the Universe. It was the two verses. And - This explains why we're friends right now. Totally. But also, just to get ahead of this, the insanity of I ended up voicing Orko on a He-Man cartoon show show run by Kevin Smith is like what's happening in Grunge's background. You know, that's like... Are you in touch with Grunge? Do you know where he is right now? He called me a couple months ago.

34:37I actually owe him a call back. You know, he is a guy I will run into at conventions. Okay. Very often. But yes, so I was like getting into He-Man when I was like 11, 12, 10 years after it had created and cratered. Yeah. Which was a really weird time. And I think I was just sort of fascinated by the sort of like uncanny pop culture object nature of it. And trying to make sense of how something could have been that big of a cultural phenomenon and completely disappeared by the time that I was conscious. Like, how is that a thing? When as all these other things we're saying, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Wax and Wayne never truly disappeared.

35:23None of those things ever went away in the way that He-Man did. And then in the early 2000s was the first major reboot where there was a new cartoon show, new toy line video games, everything. They really made an effort to try to like give it another go. And that cartoon show's, I'm not one of these people who's going to pretend it's better than The Wire, but it is a very, very well-written children's fantasy show, you know?

35:48Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Very different though. Very anime inspired. Very anime. A little proto Avatar The Last Airbender, I would say. And I was into that, which was a really cool thing to be doing in high school. And then I sort of just kind of stayed with it forever. And then about seven years ago, I guess now, I got a message from a guy I knew, Eric Carrasco, who's a great writer for TV, who I have mutual friends with. And he said, I just got hired to write on a new He-Man cartoon show. And Derek gave me your number because he said you're a big fan and I want to pick your brain about some stuff. And so I got on the phone with him and he was just like, you know, I've been trying to dig into the canon.

36:31It's so complicated and it doesn't really talk to itself well. Like, I just I want to talk to some fans and ask, like, what are the things that mean the most to you? What would you want to see in a show? Yada, yada, yada. We talked on the phone for about an hour. this is like summer 2019 and then at the end of it he said what do you think about Orko? And I said Orko is obviously the best character and he was like okay because my first takeaway from re-washing the cartoons is I want to pitch you to play Orko and there was a very prolonged process to actually get the part from there but it very much felt like a realization of it was as much a dream job as anything I've ever gotten to do and is the hardest I've ever worked to get a job that paid scale that to most people would not make sense on paper.

37:17Sean Fennessey:Right. But Orko to me is like such an embodiment of what I like about He-Man where he's a character that was created for the cartoon, not for the toys. He's a little flying magical trollin. He's basically a troll whose face you can't see because he's wearing a scarf and a hat. And I'm wearing the replica hoodie right now. I have way too much He-Man merchandise. But he was basically a... another self-insert character for children who felt so powerless they couldn't even relate to He-Man as the guy who sometimes gets the power. Orko is the little tiny thing who messes everything up. All he's trying to do is be like the core gesture magician and he can't get that right.

38:00And yeah, I just always loved that character and loved playing him.

38:04Sean Fennessey:So that's interesting relative to the film. And your experience, I think, probably maps a little bit more closely onto Travis Knight's experience with it because he's 52. And so when the series came around, he had to be 8, 9, 10. And that's really interesting to talk about around what this movie ultimately has become because as you said, it was in development for many years. Amazon now is in the midst of this, from my perspective, much appreciated pushback into theatrical. and this was a year ago at CinemaCon. One of the big centerpiece things that they presented after Project Hail Mary. They said, we've got this big piece of IP.

38:45Sean Fennessey:We've got this exciting filmmaker. We've got Nicholas Galatine. Is this the one you have? That's the one I have, yes. They gave us that sort this year but even last year, there was all of this kind of behind the scenes package that was shared with us around. And frankly, I was like, oh wow, this is Idris Elba and Alison Brie. And like, there are some legitimate people in this movie. And, you know, there was a 2001, I think was the start of the modern development on this. It was John Woo originally announced. Then it was McG at one point. Yes. Anyone who's ever been a teen heartthrob since 2001 at one point was kind of attached to playing X-Man or rumored.

39:27And you would have the moments where they'd go, we're going to do the Lord of the Rings style version, or we're going to do the version that mostly takes place on Earth that's more of a fish-out-of-water comedy or a self-parody, or you try to make it a gritty action movie, or is it the MCU-inspired version? It did feel like when this finally came together, it was coming together in a semi-legit way. And Travis Knight on paper makes as much sense to direct this movie as anybody.

39:54Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I think he's a great pick, and I'm going to talk about why. The movie is a really interesting thing to pull apart. We'll pull it apart right now. So it's written by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and David Callaham. You can see that a lot of hands were throwing in on this over a period of time. And these were previously directors on the movie. So they're still fingerprints from the last iteration. Yes. And, you know, they wrote and directed The Lost City. You know, Dave Callaham, who is a friend of mine, like has written on 25 movies like this. You know, he's always called in to kind of polish or update or improve upon fight sequences.

40:30Sean Fennessey:It stars Nicholas Galatine, who people may know from Red, White, and Royal Blue, or The Idea View. Camilla Mendes is Tila. Jared Leto is Skeletor. We have to discuss that. He is indeed. I regret to inform you that Jared Leto is Skeletor. He is Skeletor. Alison Brie, James Purefoy, so on and so forth. Here's the log line of the film. The Sword of Power leads Adam back to Eternia, a world shattered under the fiendish rule of Skeletor. Joining forces with Tila and man-at-arms, Adam must embrace his true destiny as He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe. now I did not know until about two months ago that this was going to be a metatextual action comedy I thought based on that BTS that I saw that we were getting pure down the middle He-Man lore and I I actually think it was a good choice even if it doesn't always work and that's basically where I net out on this movie at large I had fun with it it's wildly flawed it's way too long.

41:27Sean Fennessey:It only hits its jokes at like a 33 % hit rate. I think that's generous. I think the comedy is the most disastrous element of this film. I would put the hit rate lower, but I agree with everything else you're saying. The other thing that I'll say is just because of this movie arriving at this time in my life, if they nailed one specific thing, it was going to get me to feel big feelings, which is that in Nicholas Galatine and specifically with transforming in He-Man, they just, they did it. Like they did it and I just felt chills. I felt tears filling my eyes. I was like, this is the realization of a little boy's dream that Dolph Lundgren could never possibly live up to.

42:07Sean Fennessey:That doesn't mean the movie is good. I think it's got a ton of problems, but it gave me a feeling that I wanted it to give me. And so I just want to foreground our dissection of this property with that expression. Well, let me foreground additionally here. I was fighting like two different things while watching this movie. There were the moments where the film was jangling keys and I went, regrettably, it has my keys. It has stolen my keys from my pocket. It is jangling my keys in front of my face. There is no way I'm not going to look at this and have an emotional response, right? This movie just has my number.

42:45I clearly, from explaining my history with this franchise, I'm a bizarre broken person and this silly thing means a lot. Right? It doesn't mean that I'm going to be an easy life for anything this movie does. It also doesn't mean that I was sitting there with my notepad being like, they better get this right. Right, right. I wasn't either. But I was, I felt pretty at peace with just the idea of seeing, I want to see a He-Man movie and I hope it gives me some feelings of any sort. I was at other times watching this movie and I kept thinking of the Steve Buscemi character in Ghost World when Thor Birch recommends that he meets a woman his age who shares his interests and he goes, I hate my interests.

43:28There were times, and I know you've had a bit of a spiral like this watching Mutant Mayhem, the Ninja Turtles movie, which I think is an infinitely better film. It's a pretty excellent movie. But there is something about watching these films now as guys who are both massive movie fans and pop culture fans, but also now have built weird lives for ourselves as like commentators on these things. What we even are is hard to define. I know the is Sean Fennessey a film critic or not conversation breaks the internet twice a week. But but these are the same thing. Let's keep having it, you know, let's keep talking about it.

44:02It's healthy. It's really healthy. And all the work happening over on Reddit is good and productive in all corners of Reddit. I've yet to find a bad one. But but but I you know, there's something weird about being people. We just had this conversation about backgrounds and obsession that is so exciting. It's two movies that we like that feel like pure expressions of creativity that are connecting with an audience organically and a younger audience that people had written off as moviegoers. And then here's a movie that just keeps looking at you and I and being like, huh, are you happy? That's exactly right.

44:39Sometimes it made me happy and I felt guilty. and other times it did something that annoyed me and I was disgusted at myself for caring, you know? And other times I was just kind of stepping back and going for someone who doesn't know anything, which this movie, once again, needs to function as a clean entry point for people because the He-Man audience alone is not enough to justify this budget. And that for me was a real up and down thing. There were moments where I went, this is smart. The framework you said, it basically turns Adam, who is the character that is the Prince of Eternia, who in a kind of Shazam style setup is able to transform into He-Man, be imbued with the power of the most powerful man in the universe.

45:26It basically turns him into a fan of He-Man. Yes. As you said, there's this metatextual hook, which is he grew up in this world and then he was sent to our world. My favorite thing to make up and make fun of is magically they somehow end up in our world as the studio fix for adapting any nostalgic property. Of course. But he's literally like what dropped into the river and has, I guess, doesn't have amnesia. half remembers his childhood and is trying to figure out how to get back almost in like an Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

46:02Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I think actually a lot of the construction of that and the way that it sort of resolves in the final act of the movie is quite clever because there's such a dumb guy quality to all of the characters in the Masters of the Universe story. The way that they're named specifically that feels like it could have only come from the mind of a 10-year-old boy with a shoddy memory. And that idea I think it's the smart framework. Yes, I agree with that. The way that it's told, I think the movie has a little bit of like, when you're reading the biography of a famous person and you're like, can we like get past the first 15 years here a little quickly?

46:37Sean Fennessey:Like, I don't really want to spend time with young Adam. I don't want to spend time with Adam and his job on earth. Like, I just, let's go to Eternia and let's have battles and see Skeletor. And so for a movie that is two hours and 20 minutes long, to spend roughly 45 minutes through that, maybe more, is asking a lot. This movie ostensibly has two first acts. And it is. It's 45 minutes. It's 20 minutes spent on, wow, we're going straight into the deep end. This movie is opening with multicolored skies and voiceovers and talking birds and explaining the lore and showing him as a little boy and setting up the emotional stakes and the fights and all the characters.

47:16And then at the 20-minute mark, basically, it resets to Nicholas Galatine in our world, explaining this has been his story that he's been telling on a disastrous date, which is kind of a funny reveal, but gets into some of these movies. Like, I don't, I'm not going to logic police it on the big things because that's what he mans about is that logic police stand by, stand down. but um stuff like this where you're like okay so he looks like nicholas gallatin he's ripped as hell he's on a date with someone who looks like a model and he thinks i should for 40 minutes monologue about my childhood that everyone tells me is crazy uh there the sort of questions of like who raised this guy once he landed on earth good how does he explain himself how does he have a government identity?

48:07Sean Fennessey:You literally can't do any of those things. You can't. You can't try to understand the movie in that way. And that might be the fatal flaw of it as a new moviegoer, right? As somebody who's like, I don't know what this is if you're coming down. But if you're us and you sit down and you can accept that in the same way that we can accept what I think is the movie's closest comp, which is Barbie, Greta Gerwig's Barbie. And this movie is Barbie in reverse because Barbie is a movie about, obviously, femininity, the glass ceiling, self-determinism, all of these big existential ideas around womanhood that Gregor is interested in.

48:43Sean Fennessey:But it's a movie about escaping the fantasy world to become real on earth. That is really how Barbie realizes her true self. Adam is the flip side. Adam is, I need to go back to this special place where I come from. And honestly, what an amazing insight that is into the way that men think and the way that women think and the way that women try to become realized in the world and seen and accepted and and and promoted and and the way that men are just like take me back to when me and grunge were talking about the view askewniverse in camp yeah like that and and and there's truth in it like it's it's a it's a clever idea so literally going like take me back to my mommy i want to play with all my old toys yes literally the character's drive right like he really wants to my dad was a little bit brash with me my mom was always supportive i miss her and i miss my friends that I used to draw.

49:35Yes. Were all these characters with silly names. I think that is a smart framework for the movie. And it you know in working on the cartoon show but also being such a big fan and following these things closely and being someone like my friend Eric who would get calls sometimes oh I got a He-Man scoop if you want to hear it like anonymously. There's a lot of stuff I can't say but there's a lot of the various stages of development of this movie over at least the last 10 15 years that I had heard off the record. And it feels like to some degree, this is a mashup of a lot of those different elements, but that was the element they finally kind of cracked that made the movie work.

50:13And I feel like they got halfway there to the most functional, dramatic, uh, exploration of that. Yeah. So they didn't quite quite crack it into being a totally satisfying narrative around that, but it is the right emotional entry points. And it's the right framework with which to engage with the spirit of the silliness of the thing.

50:36Sean Fennessey:Part of my, it's not confusion. Part of my sort of like unsettledness with the movie is that one, it's kind of a, it's jumping from lily pad to lily pad tonally where it can't really decide. Does it want to be a kind of sincere exploration of lost childhood? Does it want to be a really arch satire of 80s consumerism? Does it want to be an exploration of toxic masculinity? Does it want to be just a pure high fantasy movie? It's trying to do a lot of things at the same time. That's very, very challenging for a movie. The one thing that is a little bit particularly odd is that Adam on Earth works in human resources and has learned the language of safe workspaces and safe spaces in general.

51:22Sean Fennessey:And he is presented as a pink button down wearing kind of evolved man. and then obviously running underneath that is this desire to Hulk out and to become He-Man and the movie, I don't, is the movie like is it sending up toxic masculinity? Is it like commenting on woke culture surrounding a certain kind of masculinity? Is it trying to have its cake and eat it too? Like it seems a little bit undefined It's another idea where I felt like they got 60 % of the way there They were having the right conversation and they didn't ultimately get to the conclusion of it. Part of the deregulation of cartoons at that time and allowing these things to exist that were produced by literal toy companies and were, you know, transparently existing just to sell action figures is that they had to frame some degree of educational content.

52:20And so much like G.I. Joe, every episode of He-Man would end with a PSA. Yes. It would end with, often it would be He-Man himself, but sometimes it'd be the newest character that needs to sell. Orko would do it a lot. And, you know, no spoilers, but this movie is engaging with that legacy. But it, there is that nature to, there were still a lot of guidelines around violence. He-Man is defined by having this sword. The sword is the thing that helps him transform. He could never use the sword on the cartoon. It's almost a Mandela effect. If you rewatch the show now, in your mind's eye, you go, of course he was sword fighting constantly.

52:59He literally never uses it. He takes it out when he transforms. And I think the only other time they were allowed to use it is if he basically was using it to restrain a bad guy. He held it over his chest and was holding him. But there's like never sword fighting. So you have this cartoon show about a quote unquote weakling who everyone always jokes, looks exactly the same. His transformation is just, he gets a base tan, right? And he switches from a pink vest to being shirtless and, right, strapped. And then he's the coolest, strongest guy, except he can't really fight. And he mostly says to Skeletor, like, Skeletor, lying is never good.

53:40And then at the end of the episode, he looks at every kid in the audience and goes, today we learned why lying is bad. When you lie, you get caught, you know? And so it's part of the odd nature of this thing When the trailer came out, Sean is on the verge of tears.

53:56Sean Fennessey:You're tapping into something very raw in my history. When the trailer came out, they had the big spotlighted shot of his placard on his desk at his HR job that said he him. And there was a certain amount of hand wringing from a very healthy side of the internet going, oh, are they trying to make He-Man woke? and part of the problem with He-Man and trying to adapt it in the modern era is it is fundamentally the hulkish shit in the world, but now that lands differently for people. He was always this very sensitive, emotionally intelligent softy, even when he looked like Conan the Barbarian. He was hulking out, but he wasn't hulking out.

54:34He's not even smart hulk because he's a professor. He's just basically a team leader. That's always kind of what he was, and he's got this incredibly diverse group of allies I mean, literally, and he's just fighting what is, you know, you could argue a somewhat offensive stereotype, but is also just an evil man who just wants to consolidate power. And He-Man is the ultimate kind of like reckoning with, I, everyone's going to roll the rise when I say this, but it's just textually there. It is just about reckoning with fucking straight white straight white male privilege. He-Man is like to the manner born.

55:13He is a prince who is born on like third base, right? And is like jacked and handsome and then is given even more power. And what defines He-Man is that he tries to share it and divide it responsibly and empower others. And he's doing all of that in this way, not because there was some grand unifying theory behind the show. It wasn't Sesame Street that was trying to teach children something. It had to land on that in order to sell its toys.

55:41Sean Fennessey:But think about that is what it is. But think about who's making this movie. Travis Knight, who is the son of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, whose father bought him an animation studio, which he trans from Will Vinton Studios that he transformed into Laika, which then by his own skill and team leadership, truly turned into one of the very best animation studios in the world. He individually, he directed films that are great animated films. He's made live action movies that are good. So even though he is to the manner born, he is talented. It's very clear that he is talented. It's why he was a good choice for this, because I think often people were struggling to crack He-Man as a character because he seems too perfect and devoid of conflict.

56:27And the answer is you're going to need someone with the lived experience and psyche of a Travis Knight, who is the son of a billionaire who couldn't figure out his dad's thing, and who it took a while to figure out what his thing was. He had a failed rap career. He did. You know, there were many eras of Travis Knight's life before he fell into stop motion and started out as just an animator and then basically became the head of entire company and then a director. And now he's made two toy movies that feel very much like him living out what animated him as a child, no pun intended. All of that is smart to me.

57:02Like, I'm like, you have a kind of metatextual structure that makes this a little more understandable for people of what it represents. And then you have a director who has like a really clean emotional into what the story is about. I turned to my friend who I saw it with like halfway through, there's a scene where He-Man's father is disapproving of his son not being tough enough. And I turned to my friend and just went, I wish you understood the shoe business. It feels like it is coming from such a real place. I agree. And it's not like this is entirely some deeply personal statement that has been snuck through the studio system.

57:37It's trying to serve like 20 masters. But I think it's part of why you and I are both resistant to totally dismissing this movie. And it's not just because it has our number in terms of showing the characters we like. There's stuff that's close. And then there's stuff that makes you want to rip your hair.

57:53Sean Fennessey:Yeah. It's actually not a very fun movie, I think, to talk about scene by scene. I think it actually is way more of a load-bearing idea movie, which sounds ridiculous about Masters of the Universe. But it is true. There's way more going on. Like you and I can talk about like, was the air chase sequence with Adam and Tila and a hungover man at arms like too long? Or was it effective or not? Like that stuff is just kind of like, it's just in the stew of an action movie. You know, it doesn't really mean anything. It doesn't matter. But like even down to Jared Leto being cast as Skeletor, who is simultaneously an iconic villain and one of the stupidest characters in animated show history.

58:34I mean, 50 % of He-Man's lasting cultural purchase is just Skeletor's meme ability.

58:40Sean Fennessey:Yes, him and the tone of his voice, his laugh, him halfway through the first season of the animated series turning into a vaudevillian comedian and not really a true villain. Turning into like Paul Lynde as well. Yes, yes, exactly. And also pursuing some effete, awkward, homoerotic, consideration in the show. Which I want to throw this out as well. In the sort of dark years where He-Man Masters of the Universe has been fallow, what basically has always kept He-Man afloat are the Latin American community and the LGBTQ plus community. Like, they are actually the tenants of the thing almost even more than growing up nerdy white boys like that.

59:31like truly and it's always had all this kind of purchase there in both directions so yeah

59:40Sean Fennessey:And casting Jared Leto, who is the most famous person in the cast, but then and him being cast and then now going through this roughly 10 year period of like very gentle cancellation where like it has become clearer and clearer that he both doesn't not hold a strong draw for audiences, nor does he seem to be a person that people are very fond of. And so this is happening at the same time he gets cast as this arch villain from the 1980s animated series. And he also is never seen because he is CGI with a skeleton face. There's something like magical even further. Yes, because I'm just realizing how how sticky this entire corner of conversation is.

1:00:28You're also considering the fact that like this second era of Jared Leto's career. You know, he has his heartthrob era. He has his, is he the next interesting, dramatic leading man kind of era. Fincher's one of the only people who feels like he knows how to use him well in the post my so-called life era. I'm just talking through my Leto eras. And then he disappears for a little while and focuses on the music. And then he has this Dallas Buyers Club comeback where he plays a trans woman in a performance that wins every single award. And two years later would have been canceled. Like it was the last moment someone would have been awarded for giving that performance.

1:01:06And so his new revived A-list status of the studio suddenly going, is Jared Leto a movie star? How do we get Jared Leto? Is tied to the upswing from a thing that would be shunned today. And it was a lot of him seemingly wanting to transform and not do an obvious movie star thing. But they kept putting him at the center of these really big movies. And it felt like time after time, audiences kept saying, we don't like him. We don't like the work he's doing. And we keep hearing bad things about him as a person. So as you're saying, it's the softest cancellation because there was no friction to it.

1:01:48The friction was only that studios kept putting him at the center and audiences were saying like, we're not asking for this. We're not wringing our hands over this guy. We'd just rather not think about him. And so when he got announced for this and when the trailers are coming out right after Tron Aries, everyone was like, why are they doing this? Is the movie shooting itself in the foot? I don't like Jared Leto being in movies. I think you have to admit he is the best performance in this thing. By far. By far. He's really, really good. And it sucks to say. And part of it is probably that you don't see his face.

1:02:24It helps that it's the one time I have watched Jared Leto in the last 15 years and not thought about Jared Leto.

1:02:31Sean Fennessey:But there's a specific reason for this. The reason is that Jared Leto is always too much. He has no ability to turn. And this didn't necessarily always used to be the case. I would not describe his performance on My So-Called Life as overplayed. and he has developed a lot of showy bad habits as a performer where he demands the gravity be operating around him in a movie at all times and if you look at the movies he's made since Dallas Buyers Club Suicide Squad Blade Runner 2049 The Little Things Zack Snyder's Justice League House of Gucci Morbius Haunted Mansion and Tron Aries all of those movies it's about him all the time he's drawing all the attention to him and Skeletor kind of needs that He's a ridiculous, overplayed character.

1:03:16Sean Fennessey:And also it helps that you don't have to look at his face. But he honestly just has the sense of humor in this performance that it needs and is working. It's crazy that he's funny in this. It's crazy that it feels like...

1:03:31The stickiness of Skeletor is this weird thing of he is presented as just this is the most evil creature in the world. Skeletor loves being evil. What's his motivation? Evil. Yes. The movie plays with that. the relentless pursuit of evil, right? But then also he is ridiculous. He's sort of this like doddering fool. You know, as you said, he's so camp and everything that it does feel weirdly aligned with Jared Leto constantly insisting that he is like this generation's digital Peter Sellers. Yes. Needing to completely transform himself into some. I feel like most of his performances have this real loud self-consciousness of can you believe what I'm doing?

1:04:14Like he wants the audience the whole time to think, I can't believe that's Jared Leto, rather than actually playing a character. I was going to say as a human being, but he's played very few human beings in the last 15 years, as you just pointed out. But they rarely feel like living creatures. They feel like exercises. And weirdly, that's what Skeletor is, and the movie makes that textual. You have what I think is kind of the most interesting sequence in the movie, where Skeletor basically invades He-Man's brain and starts like forcing him to relive scenes from his life with Skeletor now representing his own personal shame.

1:04:51And that felt to me like where the movie was fully cooking in a Barbie-esque way. I agree. Because he made this Barbie comparison. One of the things I really love about Barbie is that it feels very unconcerned with explaining its own logic. It does what it needs to do to tell the story it wants to tell, which is the thing that movies used to do and especially children's films and fantasy films and genre films. The setup is the setup. It's more important to spend the time executing emotionally what you want to do in the story. And I rewatched Big recently which I hadn't seen in a while. And it is astounding to watch that today and he gets to the fortune teller machine within less than 10 minutes.

1:05:33And there is no backstory of who made the machine or why or why it's possessed with a ghost or why it works or how to undo it. It's just like, this thing can make you big and it can make you small again. And that's all you need to know. And Barbie similarly goes, how do you get from Barbie World to California? You take, you know, a car to a bike to a spaceship to a boat. And if you want to go the other way, you have to reverse the process. And this movie doesn't do that. This movie often ends up in the uncanny valley of trying to explain stuff too much. I.e. when 20 minutes in, the movie like kicks you out of reality to our world and then spends 20 minutes trying to get back to the movie that we were already in and I think largely enjoying and I think that Skeletor sequence is what the movie should be doing which is who cares yep I agree what what's interesting

1:06:23Sean Fennessey:and what's entertaining yeah I mean just to put a button on it because we have a bunch of other things to go through. It feels like a movie almost entirely made for people between the ages of 35 and 50. But it's also a candy-colored PG-13 action adventure fantasy movie. And I was certain I was going to be able to bring Alice to this, and now I don't think I can. I think it's too violent and too weird. You have a kid who organically has gotten into this property that has such difficulty developing new audiences. Yeah. And she is too young to see the movie at the time it comes out. You agree with me though, right?

1:07:05I mean, it feels like a little too rough. I also think it's like really long. I think that's another problem is I imagine a kid getting antsy at sections of this. I think like the middle chunk is pretty deadly. The movie just, it resets itself like multiple times. And even down to there's this whole notion of, well he got kicked out of Eternia because his mom sent him to be safe on Earth in a Superman style setup the only way for him to get back is using the sword but he's lost the sword and for 20 years he's been trying to find the sword and then he just finds the sword

1:07:41Sean Fennessey:you know like why was the sword there somebody found it in the river one day and they decided it should be part of a comic book store's presentation like the whole thing is just all of that stuff on Earth which is kind of essential to make that late scene, Skeletor scene work. Correct. But all of it is just like, what is this? Like, why are we even trying to make this seem as though it is operating on our planet? It almost would be better if he just went to a different planet entirely. I think so too. Or, you know, was cast out to the woods or whatever it is. But it does feel like this movie is,

1:08:18it's like a filmed adaptation of an in-between draft. you know obviously a script is only done when it's said it's done but this feels like they were trying out some ideas and some of them should have been responded to with more of that and less of that and instead we're just like straight up filming that and you have some of these odd ends but as you said like i appreciate this movie looking like a bag of candy having characters who have ridiculous powers using them in silly ways. What I don't appreciate is the movie genuinely has 100 versions of the joke of your name is what?

1:09:02Sean Fennessey:I thought they landed the plane very well with the final name reveal though. I think so too, but that's a great example of maybe you get two of those jokes. You set it up and you pay it off at the end. It feels like the movie does it 10 times for each character. And it speaks to, this movie feels very inspired by Thor Ragnarok to me. And when I saw that film, I went, man, I really think Motu is a major touchstone for Taika on this, even more so than Kirby comics or any of the other things. The colors, the sort of barbarianism of it, and the weirdness of all the creatures and the transforming weapons and vehicles and all that sort of stuff.

1:09:47And so you could see executives lighting up and going, that movie was a hit. It wasn't too weird for people. It took Thor. It put him in a space land. We can copy this. The way Taika, in my opinion, does this sort of deflation joke feels like it's coming from a place of, I'm a little embarrassed that I'm making this movie. So I'm putting it down so I don't look uncool. He's also better at executing those jokes because he's got more experience in comedy. I've always found that tone of it a little bit annoying because I feel like if you're embarrassed by the movie, then don't make it. You know? Yeah.

1:10:27This feels like these jokes are made defensively from a position of, I like this so much and I'm worried they're going to make fun of me. I'm wearing a shirt with my favorite thing in the world on it, but I guess I have to lampshade the joke before anyone else bullies me. And this is a movie that has a running bit about being shoved into lockers, a thing that kind of doesn't make sense for this planet.

1:10:49Sean Fennessey:No, no. But it has that tone to it where I, as much as I thought the comedy was not working, I almost found sympathetic that it felt like it came from a place of such genuine personal insecurity. And I wanted to just grab it and be like, chill out, man. It's fine. We're here. We're watching the movie. Just be the movie. I don't think the film is going to be a very big hit and I think that probably puts an end to Masters of the Universe as a theatrical property for now which I find interesting because first of all there are three different end credit sequences which we don't have to spoil for people but that all kind of lean towards well this is coming and this is coming and this is coming and that also just feels like 2018 that just is like actually even Marvel seems to be kind of getting over the end credits addiction and, you know, this sort of teasing of the audience about what could be coming next.

1:11:44Sean Fennessey:And the idea of withholding something. And I'll just say like withholding Orko from the Masters of the Universe movie. It's just fucking annoying. Like, it's just annoying that they did that. And I know why they're doing it because I think they had something on their hands, but they just did that. I'm biased. I'm very personally deeply invested in this character. But that was the one thing in the movie that made me kind of like dig my nails into the armrests where it was it hit harder for me because it's a character I've spent time actually trying to professionally apologize so it now feels like my home team but I'm also just tired of that type of thing it felt really close to me to the moment at the end of the Fede Alvarez Evil Dead reboot where in the end credits it just inserts a shot of old Bruce Campbell saying groovy yeah and I'm I'm like, well, that doesn't mean anything.

1:12:37You can't just show me the guy who hasn't been in the movie up until this point and have him do the thing that he did in the original thing with the promise of, well, next time maybe we'll do that. And the other two credit scenes are much more the classic tee-up of this feels like a dangling plot thread of where this thing will go next time. But I'm just kind of allergic to all of this now. I want to watch a movie finish itself. I want to see it be complete. and I don't know if Orko is, you know, like a logistical, technical reservation they had or if it's a, is this character the one thing that pushes it into being too silly?

1:13:15But it's like, do it or don't. You should have done it, but I'm not going to give you credit for showing him for three seconds in the end credits. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. Yeah, and that's where all this stuff feels very, very post-Marvel. Even like at the final scene of the movie, we see our 10 main characters and all of them have slightly updated looks. They've taken all these designs that are really similar to the cartoon and the toys and they made them just 10 % closer. And it feels like the end of X-Men Apocalypse where suddenly the promise is, wait a second, are they all going to have the 90s costumes next time?

1:13:51No, the next movie they all wear black leather. But like all of this stuff feels like this echo of the exact thing that has been in a death rattle at a time that something new is being born. And there's a feeling, even when this is the thing that we like, where I'm like, are we watching Dr. Doolittle? And like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate are playing on the adjacent screens. Dude, yes. Whatever parts of this movie works, this is Dr. Doolittle. Yes.

1:14:17Sean Fennessey:Anything that I like about this movie is either something that I have extracted intellectually or emotionally connected to at the basest level of my undeveloped brain. Like, that's it. And I'm okay with it as a fan, but I can't look, you know, I'll be going to my daughter's art show later this afternoon and I'll be talking to a lot of parents. I will not be able to look at a single parent at that art show and be like, you got to check out Masters of the Universe this weekend. That's not acceptable. That's a great point, though, that the way in which this movie works the least is actually just as a functional summer blockbuster.

1:14:55Yes, yes. Should you see this movie? Right. There is interesting metatextual stuff going on here that they can't quite land, but it's thorny and it's interesting to think through. And there's also the dumbest base level bullshit that makes us happy because we're broken sad men. And the stuff in the middle is what I think a lot of audiences are going to sit there and go like, huh? And I went to a screening in New York that felt like it was 30 % critic screening, 30 % premiere, but after the LA premiere that had been the big explosive, everyone's here. This was a smaller selection of cast and crew.

1:15:35And then 30 % fans.

1:15:37Sean Fennessey:Yeah, same. Mine was the exact same. Right. There was a lot of, especially for the first 30 minutes, anytime anything showed up on screen that looked like one of the toys, they would applaud. And it made me, I didn't want to hold it against the movie because it's not the movie's fault. But every time it got that response, I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed for myself that I cared, you know, because I'm like, well, that's not really storytelling. I like seeing these things too, but we can't just applaud them putting a thing on screen. It's about what you do with it when you put it on screen.

1:16:14Sean Fennessey:So when I was thinking about doing this episode with you, and we talked about this when we recorded the Mosquito Coast episode, like, how long ago is that? A year ago. Nine months ago. I was like, all right, I'm just going to rewatch every high fantasy movie. I'm going to situate myself inside of that 80s period where there was this enormous number of movies, mostly kicked off by the success of Conan the Barbarian. But there were just so many films in that period of time, some of which I'd seen, some of which I hadn't. And I'm going to be like, I'm going to do the ultimate list and I'm going to love it and it's going to be so great.

1:16:48Sean Fennessey:And I watched a bunch of them and I watched Krull and I watched Dragon Slayer and I watched The Sword and the Sorcerer and I watched Deathstalker. and you know I'd already seen of course like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and all these other films and I came away not really loving as many of them as I had hoped I would I've admired a lot of them because there's a lot of really cool practical stuff in them but then I went to go make a list of my favorite movies like this and I was like these are all movies that I've known and have seen and were a part of my childhood or a part of my my daughter's childhood now and there's Something like that kind of masculine man defending his castle and ravishing damsel aspect of it that has actually just kind of never been my thing despite having this attraction to He-Man.

1:17:39He-Man has always sort of been my least favorite part of He-Man. What I find funny is the incongruity of that being the character at the center of the story.

1:17:48Sean Fennessey:Yeah. I'm just like, I don't know if this was an easy exercise or not to just come up with favorite fantasy movies. But like to me, very quickly, like I'll just tell you the movies. They don't need much explanation. Yeah. The NeverEnding Story, which is I probably saw at a very similar age and then I'm about to show my daughter. The only very recent film is The Green Knight, which I think, you know, Larry's movie, which I think really kind of like tries to simultaneously explore like Arthurian legend and a kind of mystical legend and blend those two things together and draw you out with a much more folkloric exploration of the ideas.

1:18:19Sean Fennessey:Princess Mononoke, which I just watched with Alice, which is still unbelievable and a movie with a very, very big idea on top of it about, you know, ecology and the future of the planet. Willow, which changed my life. And The Fellowship of the Ring, which is just like to me, one of the most pitch perfect. Here's how you build a world, introduce characters you instantaneously love and do the thing where you get excited for what's next, but you don't feel like you've been tricked into anything when you get to the what's next. You desperately are like, I need to go to the next stage of this journey with these characters that I love.

1:18:53Sean Fennessey:And like, it felt like a very kind of unoriginal list, but I couldn't talk myself into saying like, well, actually Beastmaster has some really cool effects in it. And Coscarelli at the beginning of his career, you know what I mean? Yeah, I would I would throw Dark Crystal and Excalibur into that canon. Those are the two that I think are worthy of sitting alongside it. But it is sometimes as guys like us who do this kind of pop cultural spelunking, sometimes you try to go deeper into a canon to make a more interesting list and you realize it is just the five things that everyone says. I know. You know, certain careers are just the top layer.

1:19:29Certain genres are really only represented well by the movies that everyone remembers. and the start of the modern development cycle for this movie that we're getting now in 2026 really comes after Lord of the Rings where there was this feeding frenzy of what's the next Lord of the Rings. Basically, none of them work. I mean, it's not surprising that The Green Knight, which is great, is doing its own thing. It's doing a three in legend, you know, and it's doing it in a 24 silo. but the attempts to find the next big fantasy, high fantasy IP, nothing works in movies post Lord of the Rings until Narnia, which then fell off a cliff.

1:20:15The sequels couldn't sustain it. It was only really the first one. And then it becomes Game of Thrones. Then it becomes TV. In movies, it like never comes back. And, you know, the Hobbits made a lot of money, but they didn't capture the world in the same way.

1:20:30Sean Fennessey:No, they didn't. I mean, are there any other, I agree with you that Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, there's something very special about them. And we are, you and I are both Hensonians and like very fascinated in that history and the world and the creation of all of those movies. And I love that he pivoted into like a much darker realm of storytelling at that point in his career. Yeah. But are there any other titles that you're like, well, this has to be in the conversation for the best versions of these movies? I mean, Conan, obviously, Conan looms large. I like Conan a lot. I was going to say, the original Conan film, yes, I think is kind of your text for what we're, talking about and then before that it really is kind of it's it's more Tarzan and things like that you know that's sort of the Johnny Wartmuller Tarzan films are sort of what evolve into things like uh Dragon Slayer and and things like that yeah the only other thing is that I thought about including the Ray Harryhausen movies and it's like what is the what's the line between Greek and Roman mythology versus high fantasy and how much, you know, I could put The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad on a list like this.

1:21:34Sean Fennessey:I was going to say, I think we could put that or Jason the Argonauts. I think putting one or the other makes sense. Yeah, yeah. At least representationally. Yeah. But also so much of it is the visual language of what those movies develop. And then I think a lot more of what we have in film that has stuck in fantasy is stuff that is one foot in, one foot out. It's stuff like Jurassic where it's, can I put something fantastical or that feels historical into a modern setting? Can I have everyday people relate to this? Right. Harry Potter. Harry Potter is that. Harry Potter is magic. It's magic and it's also a coming-of-age drama about being a young person in school.

1:22:15I also think it's telling and why this movie ended up with the framing device it had probably is most of the canon you just put out are children's stories. You know, they're often centered around children or they're from the perspective of a child or a child's sort of way of thinking. And they are about exploring and discovering a new world. The movies where someone starts out being master of the universe and continues to just kick ass for two hours usually have a pretty low ceiling on them.

1:22:46Sean Fennessey:You know what movie Masters of the Universe has a lot in common with that is in this conversation is The Princess Bride. Yes. The Princess Bride is like a deconstructivist exploration of a lot of the tropes of those stories but it never blinks. It never is like we're doing a metatextual thing. It's like it's playing it straight but there is a sense of comic tone that I think Reiner and Goldman were like such a great match for that story and the actors that Reiner is able to cast. Just getting Billy Crystal and Wallace Shawn and all of these people in that movie that lets it have that cake and eat it too in a way the masters of the universe never can.

1:23:22Sean Fennessey:But that's so hard. I mean, there's a reason that movie is so legendary. It's a perfect movie. Exactly, because people can't replicate it. I also think that movie makes its only deflation happen through Fred Savage, which has its own emotional arc of watching his cynicism melt away versus a thing I felt this movie got wrong is, you alluded to it, but the Idris Elba character, man-at-arms who is kind of the right-hand man, the loyal ally, a little bit of a father figure to He-Man, they make this decision that in the time that Nicholas Galatine was gone, he's just become a sad drunk. And there's about an hour plus of the movie that's him stumbling and not knowing how to do stuff, vomiting on other characters, and several moments where they do the buildup as if he's going to do something badass, and then he slips, or he falls or he burps or whatever it is.

1:24:15And it felt like you can do a movie where one character is deflating. You can do your kind of Guardians of the Galaxy. You can do your Ghostbusters. You know, there is this classic format of having the one guy who's a little cynical and questions the reality of the world a bit. Or you can do your, there's a literal outsider who's dropped in fish out of water and they don't know how it works. And so they're going to question it. You can't do the movie where everyone's kind of going like, but I, sort of suck, right?

1:24:43Sean Fennessey:Yeah. It's weird. Idris, too, has attached himself to so many different... I mean, he was literally in the Thor films. He was in the Gun Suicide Squad. Like, he keeps doing this in a way that it's... Like, this character almost feels like a continuation of all of those other characters that he's played to the point of he's so over it that he is now, like, a drunk. It's a very strange career, Idris Elba. He's not bad in the movie. He's never really bad in anything, but there's a kind of autopilot quality. I really liked him in the first chunk. I thought the scenes with him and the little boy were really good.

1:25:16And I thought he was really kind of sensitive and locked in. His action sequence there were good. But then it becomes the Idris Elba problem where you're like, is there a greater example of a guy who just should have been a movie star, but was stuck at a time where the industry had no idea what they were doing? Like he is emblematic of the movie star crisis of the last 20 years, which wasn't about lack of talent. It was a pipeline problem. It was a framing problem. And here's a guy who's just ended up being like the villain in the Fast and Furious spinoff and the third Star Trek movie, the seventh guy in Thor.

1:25:51You know, the third guy in He-Man.

1:25:54Sean Fennessey:Think about his first really big role after The Wire is he stars... American Gangster? Yeah, but that's... His first real leading part is in the first streaming movie. It's in Beasts of No Nation. Oh, yeah. Which is like, that's kind of emblematic of the thing that happened. Whereas like he should have been going into a period in his career where he was going up like a rocket ship. And then it was like, well, streaming movies or TV. And if you want to be in a movie, you got to be the sixth lead behind Chris Hemsworth. Not only that, but incredibly weird stat. He wins Best Supporting Actor at the SAG Awards that year for Beast of No Nation and is not nominated for the Oscar.

1:26:31Yeah. Which kind of lends that movie more of its like, does it even exist quality.

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1:28:56Sean Fennessey:Okay, we've got 30 minutes here. This is your time to shine. Now, you've been doing a lot of research. Is it a Letzian level of research, would you say, to prepare for this? I wouldn't say full Letzian. I went in with Letzian ambition, and I realized very quickly it was not worth going that deep. But I compiled a list, which I have made public and we can share, of toy stories. I was trying to find it as movies that are specifically based off of a toy or characters within. and it could get a little non-literal with that. It's not a great canon. It does break into a couple different silos. You have a lot of adaptations of TV shows of toys.

1:29:43So that's sort of copy of a copy. This is a movie version of a show that was already trying to adapt these characters. That's like original Transformers animated movie, G.I. Joe movie. You have My Little Pony movies, Care Bears movies. And those do count here? I think so. I think they have to because there is a straight line, even though there is the step in between of, really, this is just a continuation of a TV show. Then there's sort of toy as object movies where there's not really the same kind of narrative or characters to adapt. I guess Clue is kind of at the midpoint there. But then more so, we did a series on our Blank Check Patreon of tabletop game movies where we did the two Ouija films, Battleship, Clue, and the two Dungeons & Dragons movies, which are all adapting things, but they're sort of more adapting what it feels like to engage with the toy.

1:30:45Sean Fennessey:Yeah. You mentioned Matt Johnson earlier. I'm wondering if his Magic the Gathering film will have a similar energy. A hundred percent. Yeah. And then there's sort of like the big dogs you have to discuss of the Transformers franchise is obviously humongous. Beyond Transformers, just having greater name recognition. When we were saying earlier, you know, He-Man's never had the same kind of instant sellable IP as Transformers. I think part of that is there have been, what now, seven live action Transformers movies and two animated movies theatrically. It's nine films in total. most of them have made over 100 million dollars domestically and hundreds worldwide I think most people you would ask even the ones who have seen all of them could not tell you two things about the lore of Transformers but the big idea of Transformers is so fucking big that just saying these robots are going to turn into other things will always sell some degree of tickets these movies have varying levels of engagement with the lore of the toys, which, as I said, was sort of cobbled together by Hasbro buying different Japanese toys and mushing them together into mythology.

1:31:59I've never known much about Transformers mythology. I think you and I have a very similar relationship to these movies, which is, by and large, the most satisfying version of key jangling for us.

1:32:10Sean Fennessey:In the theater on opening night, an absolute blast. I don't really spend any time thinking about them after that. No. I let them sit on my shelf and maybe one day I'll go back and explore. But I have always had fun with them, even when they're dog shit. And some of them have been dog shit. Some of them have been horrendous, like crimes against humanity. Yes, but I was at the premiere of the original Transformers Michael Bay film. Lucky man. And it just rocked my world. I was like, this is fucking awesome, guys. And if you don't get it, then you don't get it. They're made by Michael Bay. The guy's incredible at putting sound and images together.

1:32:46Transformers are an incredible excuse to explore those things on a big scale. Barbie, obviously, I think now sits as like arguably the top of the heap along with, I would say, the Lego movie, the first Lego movie, feel like the two modern examples that have kicked off the wave. Post Transformers, there was a real rush of can we adapt this stuff. I feel like Barbie and Lego have been seen as the two that creatively not only succeeded, but engaged so smartly with the toy didn't feel ashamed by the fact that they were adapted from a piece of plastic, that they're actually kind of trying to reckon with cultural legacy and also using that IP.

1:33:28I hate that I keep saying IP so much in this episode, but this was unavoidable in a He-Man episode. That using them to sort of analyze children's relationships to their imagination and what toys represent in that sort of way and what they reflect in us. And are they aspirational or are they sort of, I don't know, mirroring, you know, of our internal feelings? The Lego Batman movie I love in particular, although that's getting a little bit more into tackling superhero culture and movie culture as well. But those are movies that take place within the sort of logic of a child's mind. And then there's obviously the Toy Story franchise, which I think does need to get acknowledged here, even though its main characters are original.

1:34:18It uses a lot of, obviously, pre-existing IP and becomes kind of the definitive, I'm biased, this is like my favorite franchise, sort of exploration of how we think about toys in pop culture and the relationship between kids and toys. And this whole thing that Barbie and Lego Movie are both obviously riffing on as well, of like, do we imbue life into these things? Is that the way you tell stories with these characters?

1:34:44Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I mean, I should note this because we've talked about it off mic. This month is just an absolute thunderdome for you. It is a remarkable thing. You texted me and said, June is Griffin Newman's psyche on trial. It is Toy Story 5, it's He-Man movie. Then the amount of time I spend wringing my hands about the death of theatrical comedy. We have Scary Movie 6, opening against He-Man. Jackass 5. New Star Wars movie. Jackass Forever. And Mandalorian and Grogu. And Disclosure Day. Yes. So you're like, there's Spielberg going classic Spielberg. Toy Story, Star Wars, Jackass. It's kind of everything I believe in in terms of commercial cinema.

1:35:29Just in terms of like what I want Hollywood to be putting out. And all of them are being tested in really extreme ways. We're kind of 0 for 2 right now. We're not doing great. But this is what's fascinating to me is, I think there's another era in which, if you don't have things like Backrooms, Obsession, Sheep Detectives, Devil Wears Prada 2, which I really love, movies that are doing well right now, and that I think are creatively successful, succeeding, then the fact that the things that I have historically cared about not really working would depress me deeply and I would get into a it's so over spiral.

1:36:08Versus now I'd go like, maybe nature is healing. Maybe these movies don't need to be made for us anymore. You know, I'm still enjoying them. Something else needs to happen. I want to call it two other toy movies that I sort of, I texted you. I'm thinking of going freak mode. There's also shit that just is not even worth talking about. There's shit like the Ugly Dolls movies, The Trolls trilogy is the more successful version of the Ugly Dolls movie. There's Max Steele, which was a Mattel attempt to do. There are a new kind of He-Man in the early 2000s who was like an extreme sports secret agent kid.

1:36:45There are things like the Bratz movie, which stars Chet Hanks, weirdly, as a nerd who the Bratz pick on, and Jon Voight as the principal. All these sorts of, like, those are more like just dumbass, we bought the rights to a toy and made a movie over a weekend and it was made all with like tax shelter money, bullshit. But the two other ones I want to call out that are personal favorites of mine. One, I think we do need to consider the Hudsucker Proxy a toy movie. It is a movie entirely about the hula hoop. It is a movie about the business of toys.

1:37:19Sean Fennessey:Sure. And it is sort of exploring the predatory nature of trying to make a thing that will break a kid's mind. I'll allow it because it's you and I know how much that movie means to you it's a real favorite of mine the other one I really love you can't recommend like the Bratz movies or the Trolls movies like at all right no I'm trying to think if there's anything I watched that isn't obvious that I would recommend no I think all of that stuff is bad I really think it's really bad I went through it it's really bad it's really bad it's like it's lowest common denominator I mean, I do think the second Mike Flanagan Ouija movie is really good.

1:37:58Sean Fennessey:Agreed. Agreed. Yes. And if people haven't seen the daily Goldstein Dungeons and Dragons Honor Among Thieves, that's also really good. Yes, I enjoyed that as well. Talked about it on the show. Those are really, really successful genre movies. But otherwise, it's sort of like your barbarian problem of the ones that are the good ones are the ones that everyone knows are the good ones. There aren't really hidden gems. The one I want to shout out for people, and I think it's pretty readily watchable on YouTube and not through many other means, Richard Williams' The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy.

1:38:36Have you ever seen this movie? Richard Williams, one of the greatest character animators in the history of cinema who did all the animated sequences and characters and who framed Roger Rabbit. His big sort of Fitzcarraldo-esque passing project was The Thief and the Cobbler, which was never completed, then taken, and finished as a different movie, Arabian Nights, without him. It's sort of one of the great Magnificent Ambersons of animation. What would this have been if he had ever gotten to the finish line? In the period where he was trying to get Thief and the Cobbler made, he took this assignment job to get the money to self-produce more of Thief and the Cobbler.

1:39:15And he made a Raggedy Ann and Andy movie that was truly like an IP play. Some musical theater guys got the rights and wrote songs and hired him to animate it. And it is an absolute nightmare movie. It feels like the Jim Tenson fantasy films we were talking about. It falls into that sort of mind of the child. It's halfway in between feeling like you're watching a film of what a kid imagines their toys are doing and what Toy Story gets to later, which is the psychology of God. it would actually be an existential nightmare to be a toy. It is some of the best animated stuff you will ever see. In particular, if you don't have the time or patience to watch the entire film, there is a musical sequence in this called Blue, sung by a camel with four legs.

1:40:03And the dancing the camel does is some of the most technically impressive animation you will ever see. It's astonishing. It leads to the final thing, which is the more obvious thing in the canon. I do think you've got to include Winnie the Pooh in this. Now, Winnie the Pooh wasn't IP in the same way, but Winnie the Pooh was a child's series of toys and characters he created that then his father wrote stories about. They are tales adapted from the mythology created by kids for their toys.

1:40:36Sean Fennessey:You've really drilled down as deeply as you can, but that is true about Winnie the Pooh. I think of it as a literary adaptation, but you're right that that literature is born of a boy and his bear. If you watch the many adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which was the package film they did of what had been three theatrical shorts, the framing device of that is a live action camera pushing into a boy's room surrounded by the dolls. And then the book opens and you're like, oh, right. What we're seeing is what he imagines his toys do. Is it A.A. Milne? Is that the author? Correct. Yeah. Damn. Well, it's kind of a sordid history.

1:41:15Sean Fennessey:I mean, it's really not very impressive. And there are a lot of the movies that you named are almost like what I sometimes call like a movie kink, like Clue and like Transformers. Like those are movies where I'm like, this just kind of touches something inside me that matters to me. And you were joking about me being a critic or not. But one of the reasons why I've always kind of tried to dismiss that is I'm kind of like, I just have a lot of biases. And some of those biases are like, I know people in the business. And some of them are like, you know, I have a different kind of a role in my professional life that makes it difficult for me to have this position.

1:41:51Sean Fennessey:But sometimes I'm just like, I don't really subscribe personally to the objective ivory tower vision of these things. I'm like, I want to get on a Masters of the Universe pod and be like, I almost cried when Adam raised the sword. Like, that's not criticism. That's like I'm expressing an emotional feeling. And a lot of the movies that you just went through, they conjure the same feelings in me, even though I know that from this kind of distanced, critical lens, they're not only flawed, but they're like cynical and kind of ugly at times. Yes. That's the big thing with the history of toy movies and why so many of the ones I'm calling out aren't actually driven by a product.

1:42:27you know in order to make a canon that is good you have to cheat and put in things like winnie the pooh toy story yeah and the hud sucker proxy yeah you know and then you're like really it's only barbie and lego movie that came from the cynical place and ended up somewhere fairly pure

1:42:43Sean Fennessey:yeah and they did they both did the thing that we were talking about the masters of the universe does too where they um they are openly acknowledging what the act of adapting them means and that's extremely unusual and it's very, very millennial to do that. It is. And this has been a millennial conversation about our kind of fascination and struggles with the things that we care about. And you know, when Greta was on the show for Barbie, I said this to her. I was like, this is so interesting that you keep making things that are about things that happened to you when you were 12. Yeah. And all of your movies are that.

1:43:22Sean Fennessey:And this new movie, it sounds like, is also going to be that. and you know she seemed to receive it nicely but she was like I hadn't thought about it that way but then was like I have to give that some thought and yeah and I think that a lot of the ways that you were describing the way that the box office is changing and like what what our expectations are for movies and whether like where you would feel a bit stymied by something like solo in 2018 where you'd be like ah this is so disappointing that this is where these things have gotten to me there was almost like a relief that Mandalorian and Grogu wasn't good I you know I I was like, it actually is a let the past die moment.

1:43:57Sean Fennessey:I was just listening to you guys and Gethard talking about the movie on your pod. And I thought it was such an interesting conversation. Just even the dynamics between are we supposed to be holding these things to a certain standard? Or are we supposed to be resetting our minds? And just Gethard having like a completely different mentality to you guys about what a movie could and should be trying to accomplish individually was really interesting to me. one of our very close friends, someone we've known so long and so important in the history of the podcast. Anytime he comes on to do Star Wars, we all almost have nervous breakdowns.

1:44:29And we accept the differences of what we're asking of this thing, Star Wars and what it represents. But increasingly, I'm just like, I'm so tired. I just actually, it doesn't feel worth the effort for me to fight through Star Wars to figure out what I still like about it. And I know you've had this experience watching them all with your daughter for the first time, which is sort of like the purest way to re-engage with what the thing actually is away from all the conversation. And I had the opposite experience, which was in the lead up to Mandalorian and Grogu, I decided to watch all the Disney Plus shows that I had skipped and outside of Andor, which was such a delight to watch for the first time.

1:45:11You know, a lot of that was a struggle, but in watching the stuff that didn't work, I kept remembering what I love about Star Wars. Yes. And and part of that for me was like, maybe I just need to let that be over there. And I'm fine with that. And I'm not going to get worked up about this. And it's fine if this all moves on from us and our interest. And also we let some of these things actually sit on ice. Like, you know, there have been multiple He-Man cartoons, but it's largely existed outside of the spotlight of the public consciousness for most of the last 35 years. and whatever response this movie is getting, it's not getting, oh Jesus, another He-Man movie.

1:45:53It's getting some, are we still really making movies based on toys? But it doesn't feel like something that's beating us over the head. People seem to be reacting more to the fresher things and that's exciting. And it's exciting that there's something happening that feels essential.

1:46:11Sean Fennessey:I think you might have cited this on that episode, but this anxiety that we had that there were going to be so many toy movies in the aftermath of Barbie and all these things went into development. You know, Lena Dunham's Polly Pocket movie and all that stuff. And then this is really the only one that has come out. This is the only thing that has happened. And it sounds like maybe the Barney movie will happen. The Daniel Kaluuya. There was the Snake Eyes movie, which totally has been wiped from memory by Henry Golding. Right. Which was the third live action G.I. Joe. Yeah. And was the one that happened kind of in the post-Transformers wake, but I guess pre-Barbie.

1:46:44I guess Hot Wheels

1:46:45Sean Fennessey:Hot Wheels is coming out later this year. That's the other thing. Apparently that's an Apple movie. Excuse me, not to correct you here. I think Matchbox is coming out this year. Sorry, Matchbox. But Hot Wheels is still in development. My apologies to the fine people making tiny cars. Yes. Do you know they're owned by the same company? Are they really? Yes, they're not even rival brands. Did Mattel buy Matchbox at a certain point? Yes, but it's been a while. It's not like a recent acquisition. Okay. hey Griffin you're the best man thank you for doing this with me such a pleasure what it's about at the end of the day is bros being bros and sometimes it is fun to see a guy named Mekanek who's a mechanic with a mechanical neck use said neck to hit people yeah some real structural challenges in many of the creatures and beings on Eternia but you know let's not explore how much that would hurt yeah but you don't break you just want to unplug that triclops like what's his day-to-day life like like what's how does he how does he like horrendous like like is he can he go on dates like how does it work it's a tough one i don't yeah yeah it's really rough yeah okay well uh thanks man hey just never grow old stay young okay stay gold pony boy trying it's not it's not looking good when i when I peek in the mirror, but I'm trying.

1:48:10Sean Fennessey:See you, Griffin. See you. Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Samara Weaving and Adam Raymeier.

1:48:20Sean Fennessey:Very happy to be joined by Samara Weaving and Adam Raymeier. Thank you guys for being here. I like to start these conversations by asking folks who make movies what were the movies that made them think they could make movies. Do you remember? It could have been as a kid, could have been as an adult. I really do remember. Go for it. Go for it. What did you? I was with my family and I hadn't been into the theater in a long time because we were living overseas and there wasn't a lot of like English-speaking movie theaters. And we found a theater that had an English-speaking movie playing and it was Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one.

1:49:00Wow. And I think I was about 12. and I remember watching it and having the, like, blacking out, like being so immersed with, like, childlike wonder at this world and I had completely, like, escaped my body and, like, got into this fantasy and I walked out of the theatre furious that I wasn't a part of what had just happened, you know? I was going, it was like being, like, watching a party but not being invited. Yeah. I was like, how dare they make this without you? They're all playing dress-ups and they look so much fun and they're fighting and I'm laughing and they're wearing all these costumes.

1:49:41Like, where am I? Where did you want to be? Pirate? Oh, all of them, you know? I just, it was like the perfect movie experience at that age and at that time. And I think I turned to my dad like pretty soon after going, okay, so I can do make-believe for a living. Like, it's a job. Like, what are we doing here? Amazing. How do we make that happen? Well, I mean, I grew up in the heyday of like Star Wars and like that. So, I mean, you know, seeing like The Empire Strikes Back, you know, and like my crowded theater in nowhere, Nebraska, you know, it was really cool. But beyond that, like, and we were just talking about Severn, you know, but like things like The Grim Reaper and like sort of like lower budget horror movies were very inspirational to me.

1:50:27uh you know madman comes to mind but like just seeing those and then emulating that type of stuff with my friends uh i had a friend whose mom had you know a vhs you know camcorder and and she would like she would tape us and it was like you know she was the dp and we would roll around and kind of do uh you know emulate chuck norris movies mixed with it's like martial arts mixed with horror and stuff like that and um just making stuff when we were you know 10 11 12 me and my cousins did the same thing and they were always really horror heavy yeah like someone

1:51:03Sean Fennessey:always was dead yeah it's like the greatest entry point because it's achievable but it also is like fascinating to little kids what um did you just like decide at that time you were going to act and you're like i'm going to be kira kniley or johnny depp like that's the thing i want to do i was going what are we what are we doing it was the i think i put two and two together that it was like a thing that adults could do as a job and after that what are we doing with geography and maths and the rest of this i just want to dress up and play what we're doing that all feels like a waste of time other than that yeah what for you i mean you're you have been working in independent film so like there is something about holding a camera as a young person where it's like achievable yeah and i and i went to columbia college in chicago and i learned i learned how to shoot.

1:51:50This is a time when everything was filmed. So I learned how to load cameras and shoot, you know, everything, edit on a Steenbeck and all of that. And so for me, I learned a practical trade, like in college. And I went out and then I worked as a working camera operator, working VP for many, many years. And yeah, I mean, that was my entry point. And then I, you know, I always wanted to direct and write and I was doing those types of things with my friends. But after many, many years of helping other people with their dreams, you know, you're like, take a chance on yourself. And I made a very low budget, you know,$13 ,000 feature called The Bunny Game with my friend Rodleen.

1:52:27And it ended up like it ended up getting banned in the UK. We sold it to a bunch of territories and it was very successful as a micro budget film.

1:52:37Sean Fennessey:What about for you? Do you remember when you cracked in and you were like, this is actually going to happen for me? yeah i had done um a like a a crime drama when i was about 13 i played like a bratty kid just like myself essentially and then i did a um a soap opera called home and away it's like the famous i still want to see this yeah don't it's such bad i'm so bad at it um and uh i remember i i I basically had to decide between university and the soap opera wanting me back on the show. They were like, we're going to pick up your storyline. You can come to us for three years, which felt like a lifetime to a 16-year-old.

1:53:25You do a lot of episodes a year, right? Like it's like insane, right? Oh, a thousand. Yeah. How many did you do all in? You're shooting like a movie a day. That's insane. That's crazy. Because you're doing 10 episodes in a week. I mean, like lines. I think it's a great school for the technical sides of how to build your craft. You need to know your lines. You need to find your light. Because if you don't, hit your mark and remember, they'll just recast you. They don't have time.

1:53:59Sean Fennessey:So did you sign up? Did you sign up for three more years? And I remember sitting in the bathroom after art class or something. and I was in the bathroom and the casting director was calling me being like, we need to tell the studio if you're doing it or not. And I really, I think at that age, you just want to go to university with your friends because your friends are like the most meaningful thing of your life. And I remember going, okay, I'm going to do the show. I'm going to, that's what I want to do. I think after that, it was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. Right, you had committed.

1:54:30With my life, yeah.

1:54:31Sean Fennessey:What about for you after the first film? Were you like, I'm going to be able to stick with this and make a career out of this? I was doing a lot of second unit work and stuff like that. So I was like constantly on sets and around things. And I was learning from other people's mistakes. I was on, I also did BTS for like a company. And I'd go around and shoot on things like Fast and the Furious and like these big, you know, big, big jobs. So I could see how things moved on the bigger shows. And I could see what I gravitated towards, which was character-driven, smaller, those like telling more personal stories.

1:55:08That's instead of doing like green screen stuff and the cars on some type of thing doing slow. That to me is kind of boring. But getting to do something that's – I mean when you started talking about the soap opera, it's like – You know, we did Carolina Carolina on a 25-day schedule, you know, with almost 100 locations. So I'm thinking that there's a correlation to your work ethic, like being able to move like that. I don't know. You just have to – there's no time. And, like, maybe it's the Australian culture of how they treat actors very much like the crew, you know? Like we had one trailer for 20 of us to all hang out in.

1:55:52There's no sort of, like – it's not very glamorous at all. So I think that kind of helps. Not like working with me where it's just total glamorous. It's very J-Bo. Exactly.

1:56:01Sean Fennessey:Well, I feel like your career, you have really nicely balanced this blend of indie and kind of like slightly more run and gun with studio stuff. And your sensibilities, I feel like, are often rooted in studio history movies. Yeah. But the way that you're making them feels more independent. Is that fair to say? That is fair to say. Yeah. I feel like I'm doing like commercial work. Yeah. But it's just with this sort of indie spirit and a different slant to it. Yeah. So I'm curious. Let's talk about this movie. So one thing that jumped out to me is you didn't write this movie. I did not. And I feel like your movies have a very specific tone that you've written.

1:56:35Sean Fennessey:So I'm curious like why you wanted to direct a script that you didn't write. And then maybe when you read it, like why you connected with it too. I think for the same reason, actors want to make themselves vulnerable and do like try different things. For me, that was a huge part of it. Like being really vulnerable and being like, okay, I didn't write this. And at the same time, that's super liberating if you didn't write the project because you're not precious about anything. When I write something, I'm really slow and it's very designy. I'm thinking about shot for shot how it all is connecting together.

1:57:07With Tom's script, I could just take things out. Let's get rid of that. I wasn't precious with anything. So I did a couple passes with Tom. And as we sort of – one of the things that happened was we were really ready to go with this probably 2023. But then the strikes happened. And when the strikes happened, we couldn't go. So we had like a year or so to wait. And in the meantime, I had done Snack Shack and we had shot that and cut that and everything. But as in the ramp up to like making the film and after casting Samar and after casting Kyle and Tom went off to shoot Charlie Harper, I had the ability to – he gave me his blessing to do what I wanted with the script too.

1:57:57And we had sort of shifted it from more of a crime thriller when I read it and I read the first act. I'm like, man, this thing really wants to be like a 70s style romantic romance movie. That's what it's telling me to do with it. And so I was able to put my stamp on it and I'd never done that with something before. And it felt like, like I said, very liberating to, to be able to do that. But it was just cool. Like to, to have an idea that was outside of my wheelhouse that I wouldn't have really thought, I would not have thought of this story. And so it was cool. And I, I'm open to that now to other things coming to me and, you know, um, some things come and there's less that I want to finesse.

1:58:38And then sometimes I'll look at something and I'm like, the first five pages of this is great. I would just take over into, you know, so things come to me like that too, where I want to just overhaul the whole thing. But I like the concept or the idea. Samara, I'm curious, like, not just what you responded to in the screenplay, but are you strategic about the kinds of parts you want to take in succession?

1:59:02Sean Fennessey:Like, do you want to do something very different from what you had previously just done? Do you think about the body of work when you're thinking about picking a movie? I think I'm starting to. It's hard, you know, because when you're starting out as an actor, especially when I first moved to LA, it was like, does anyone want to hire me? So there's this imposter syndrome that's still looming of going, can I say no to something? Is that so presumptuous of me to think that something else will come along? But I'm starting to believe that that's not going to be a problem anymore. So in the last, I'd say, like five years, I've tried to be a little bit more deliberate and careful all about what I'm doing, but definitely and trying to live by, you know, if it's not an absolute yes, it's a no.

1:59:46And this was just an absolute yes. I read Tom's script and it just captured like a feeling, a tone of the movies that I really loved growing up, that like True Romance, Bonnie and Clyde, like that I just hadn't really seen a lot of recently, you know, where it's just this beautiful, like, fun, entertaining story. And I hadn't played a character like that before. So there was a lot of fear around, okay, can I pull this off? I've always wanted to. Let's see if I can. And then I watched Adam's movie Dinner in America and fell in love with Adam and Kyle. So it just felt like all the pieces came together in such an incredible way.

2:00:32And to Adam's point, what I find fascinating about this shoot that I'd never experienced before was Adam and Tom being so collaborative as writers, not only with themselves but with Kyle and I. Because as we were shooting, and Adam is genius shooting in chronological order. So Kyle and I started realizing, oh, wow, we've got really good chemistry. Like this is great. Like this is kind of the heart of the story. and we changed the ending yeah we did because like as we were shooting we realized it would never do you know what i mean like it takes such a we realized that it wasn't quite lining up with how what we had shot like leading up to it we were like wow we have an opportunity to sort of finesse this and we got together like at a restaurant before like the weekend before we We shot the sort of – we had just like a little small window of time.

2:01:30And then we made changes based on just our – sort of how we felt about everything up until that point. We were like living in the story. We were going, wait, does this ending make sense? I think he's like a good guy actually. I think he needs to be – I think these two need to like ride or die fully. And just the fact that that happens so like – Organically. Organically and just authentically. Authentically. And Tom was watching the dailies going, um, yeah, you know.

2:01:59Sean Fennessey:That choice is the thing that made it feel even more classical to me. And, you know, you cited a couple of movies that have that same energy. And I feel like in all your movies, Adam, they're very sincere. Thanks. And that's like very uncommon in contemporary movies. That's so true. I know. You know what I mean? Why is that? I wanted to ask you guys about that. If you look at stuff from like the early 80s, you look like the volume of stuff coming out, every movie is a classic movie. Like you look at like the bills like for theater bills and stuff and you're like, oh, my God. It was like, you know, Trading Places and Beverly Hills.

2:02:36You're like, wait, these Eddie Murphy movies and this, they're all like close together and it's like a great run. And the variety of things that you could see like on any given month was amazing. and they all had heart, you know? Yeah, maybe that's the word too.

2:02:53Sean Fennessey:It's earnest, but not cloying, right? It's not like sentimental, but the movie I think is a really interesting representation of when you meet somebody and even if it's not necessarily the best idea for your life, like there's something, the tractor beam quality that brings to it. But does that come naturally for you to just tell a story that sincerely or are you like working with restraint? No, I know. It's just that part of it. I don't know. it just comes out through me it just then people say that like your films have so much heart they have so much heart and i look at dinner in america you know i can barely make it through that movie without you know crying when i see emily and kyle together they're so good and the same thing with you know um with connor and and gabe and and snack shack and mika and nick i mean it's it's beautiful and and now with um sam and kyle in this movie it's like i have i have like i was in Cleveland and I was just watching it and randomly, and I just started crying and it wasn't, didn't have anything to do with anything other than I was really proud of you guys for like your commitment and just like, and it was a hard shoot.

2:03:58It was a really hard shoot. Like we didn't have a lot of time. We had 25 days and there's like a hundred locations and it's really crazy. But to watch you guys and see the gifts that you give, like take to take and what we were, you know, Justin and I were able to use, my editor were able to use. I love that. And I think that we were able to really, you gave so many gifts, Kyle gave so many gifts, and we were able to just pull that out in the movie. And it just, yeah, it's just filled with heart. Just a big softie, aren't you?

2:04:28Sean Fennessey:Yeah, seriously. You mentioned Kyle and finding that you guys had chemistry. Can you demythologize that for us a little bit? But like when you're as a working actor, especially in a movie that is very romantic. Yeah. How does it feel on set when you know you have to like very quickly establish something so that it's believable? And then how do you find a way to get along with someone? How do you, if you hadn't met them before, how do you make a connection with them so that you can sell it? It's hard. It's hard. I really do think that. And we got really lucky, I do believe. Or Adam saw something and was going, these two will get along.

2:05:05So I don't know. It could have just been good foresight or it was luck. I knew Kyle forever with that. And when I met you, I was like dead set on that. I remember we had our meeting at Great White and I was like, she's Caroline. Yeah, thanks. But I am like, I don't know. I think chemistry reads and chemistry tests are so important because I really don't think you can fake chemistry. It's really hard to do, to really sell it. And I think a lot of movies that I'm excited to go and see and then I watch the two like big movie stars and I'm going, oh, they cast these two because they're big names and they're going to draw attention, but they don't have that quality, you know.

2:05:49So I don't know. I think we got really lucky. The whole industry is like that, you know, and it just feels very, like most of the time feels very false and it feels like a lot of just bad choices and bad pairings. Like, but this one for me was easy to see with these two. And I knew your work ethic was strong. I knew Kyle's work ethic was strong. I hadn't worked with you before, but you know, I did my homework, you know, was stiffing around to ask him Tyler, you know, Hey, how is Sam? Yeah, I don't know. The chemistry thing's weird because it's sort of like the camera can pick it up and you can feel it in a room.

2:06:28You know, like if you have two friends over and you're like, oh, Leigh's doing a lot. Like it's not like a tangible. You can't like manufacture it, I don't think.

2:06:34Sean Fennessey:Yeah. It's interesting, too. I wonder how did it impact the fact that Kyle and Adam already had a working relationship, knew each other, and you're coming into something that is pre-established. It was quite comforting, I think. And Adam, like he uses the whole, the same crew basically. So it felt like a very well oiled machine because sometimes, you know, it's a bunch of strangers getting to know each other and trying to work with each other. You got to spend a couple weeks like getting into the rhythm of things. Yeah, but it was like, and everyone was really warm and welcoming. Things went great after day one.

2:07:10I mean, that was the thing. Day one on this film we shot when Oliver pulls up in the car and they meet for the first time. And, you know, I like to do the fluff day. Getting to know you part of it out of the way. That should always be first in my mind. Shouldn't do the end of the movie first. Yeah. Hold off on that. Not everyone agrees with you, though.

2:07:32Sean Fennessey:Sometimes you mention you shot chronologically, but that's not common. It's not common. I actually sometimes like to do – who said this? There was an actor who said this. And I really agree. He likes to shoot the middle of the movie first to get the rust off. Then you do the beginning and the end and you're really good. Because as an audience member. We weren't entirely chronological. But I made a point to shoot the most dramatic part of the ending. We were doing that on the last day. I was always like, that has to be on the last day. Because I want as much runway on the tarmac of them together to really sell that.

2:08:10And I want them to, like the schedule, we need to make sure that the first day is a meeting for the first time. Because that's, you know, where she has some stuff prior to that. But it's all kind of like flash forward, flashback kind of, yeah.

2:08:27Sean Fennessey:I've been riding with Kyle since Veronica Mars. So it's so interesting to watch him become like a legit indie movie star. And I think you're somewhat responsible for kickstarting that with Dinner in America. but he's been doing some really cool work. Why did you first cast him? What is he like now? Has anything changed? I was so interested in him. So when I was casting Dinner in America, I was looking at four or five actors and Kyle was one of the top five actors that I was looking at. And there's a picture of him. You can find it online. It's like some type of daguerreotype or tin type of him.

2:09:06And he looks like James Dean. He looks like a bad boy, but he has like in the image too there's a vulnerability to him that's just amazing and i was like i would cast him off of that single image i would cast anybody off of a single image if it showed me their soul and it this image showed his his soul and i was just like i would love to cast this guy and he had auditioned for a movie that ross putman um was producing with karam sangha called um first no it wasn't first girl it was the young kisielowski and he didn't get the role this guy ryan um malgarini got it and they had kyle's email so carom sent kyle the script um crickets we didn't hear shit kyle was also doing a a tv show called outsiders and we cast the movie with different set of actors and a different DP.

2:10:04The movie fell apart. And then I found a new DP. And he was working with Kyle in, like, Romania on a project. And he was like, hey, there's this movie that I'm attached to. The film just fell apart. And they're looking for a new lead. I think you'd love it. It's called Dinner in America. And Kyle was like, where have I heard of that before? And he went back in his email, like, two and a half years back. And he searched for it and the script was in his email. He read it and the next day we're talking on the phone. Wow, twist of fate. Like, you fucker. I made this movie two and a half years ago.

2:10:42Because we struggled and as movies often do, they come together, they fall apart. And yeah, so cast him the next day and the rest is history.

2:10:53Sean Fennessey:That's fascinating. Did you guys watch any movies before you made this? Was there any like reference points or touch points that you were like, this is what we're looking for? I did watch a few. I watched like abstract kind of things. But I watched like, I really like, I love Patricia Arquette. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. She's great. Yeah. Alabama. Yeah. She's the best. Yeah. I mean, the whole cast in that movie is like. Incredible. I mean, Tarantino wrote it. There's no weak links. And I feel like almost like Kira is almost like the Dennis Hopper of that. Yeah. You know, kind of has like that really nice, long, tasty sequence with Christopher Walken.

2:11:29That's a great sequence.

2:11:30Sean Fennessey:Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Caroline for you because it's pretty restrained like what is going on with her. It takes a long time to kind of figure out what is maybe motivating her, how she's gotten to this place in her life. Like as an actor, especially if you're shooting chronologically, like how do you do that? How do you like hide something and then wait? And then, you know, you mentioned Kira and you guys have a very emotional confrontation later in the movie. I don't know. Tell me about building that out. I mean, really, it's just credit to Tom's writing. I think he captured this vulnerable but strong woman.

2:12:08And you can just feel this like yearning for trying to find out who she is as a person. and there's this big sort of overhanging question of who am I and am I good or am I bad? And I know I related so much to, you know, being in a smaller town and having bigger dreams and kind of feeling stuck. And what else? I mean, honestly, for this character, the accent was a really big, like, key to her. once I got the accent down and then once I started putting her the costume on it really came together because I think if you wear that outfit and you sound like that you can kind of get away with being like you can get away with a lot you know like you can be bored and snarky and like kind of annoying to your dad and you know late and making bad choices and everyone's a bit But like, aw, you know, like as soon as Aaron, the makeup artist, is putting extra freckles on my face and this like blonde bouncy hair, like you can go rob a bank and everyone will be like, good on you.

2:13:21Sean Fennessey:What about the music, which is like amazingly well chosen, I will say. I would love to take credit for that. I would love to. In this situation, not at all. It was my editor, Justin Krohn. Justin is he's very well versed in country music and adjacent things and that is him going fucking bonkers so did you just say to him like drop some cues in what do you think would be good here so so so a little bit of history Justin was like a college roommate like we've known each other for 29 years and you know he he's a close friend and I think we had done we had done Snack Shack together and Snack Shack I had written in like a lot of the cues were written in I think Justin had a handful of ones that he had like picked that were that were great for the movie but I was super specific about that and I hadn't worked with an editor before I'd always up until that point I edited everything that I did myself and um so I was super specific about the music in Snack Shack because that was my summer movie that was my story my experience in 1991 so I wanted it very curated like from what i what i remember from being around the pool and then we got into you know then we got into carolina and um he uh he just had more i i'm not as well versed in country type of stuff and we there wasn't anything specific outside of prior to it i had i had a couple artists commission um the song carolina caroline which we we ended up kind of abandoning at a certain point, like tonally, it just, it didn't feel right in the spots that we had it in.

2:15:09But outside of that, Justin was just peppering in, you know, music and a lot of female driven country and stuff that felt really good with Caroline's story. And so just the intuitive process. I mean, he would try things sometimes and we'd listen and it wasn't something that I wanted her work but i would say 85 of the time on this movie it was so smooth and effortless and he just curated this amazing there's like 24 songs needle drops and all of that is offset with chris bears amazing score that's like this sort of synth driven score i think those two things just go really like it's a mashup we had done that similarly similarly in dinner in america had this sort of EDM big thing against the punk aesthetic.

2:15:58And Snack Shack had, you know, Keegan DeWitt's like really pretty score against these kind of pop music things. And it was like the same thing with this. It was like Chris Baer's score really offset the, it made it this really cool mashup of like, you know, you've got the country Western thing, but you've also in like the robberies and stuff like that, you've got something driving it too at times that's, you know more akin to heat or something like that so it's cool there's one other thing about the movie

2:16:27Sean Fennessey:that you guys haven't mentioned but i really like which is like it is a real con man movie you know which is another kind of classical thing a very like 80s centric thing and selling that is also challenging like and honestly as a viewer keeping track of how i'm being conned is a lot of fun like maybe you can talk about the mechanics of figuring out how these things work and how you can do it I have no idea. I spent weeks like YouTubing it and like, again, I didn't do maths at school. I thought I would be an actor. Like I did. It got to the point where there was like a whole crew. We had stopped for like half an hour going, okay, let's just figure it out.

2:17:09And we all were baffled. I was sitting there on this table outside this thing trying to show them like, no, I do this. You still don't? No, I don't think. I do.

2:17:18Sean Fennessey:Was that intentional for you to disorient us as the viewer too? Because sometimes in a movie it is about deconstructing what's happening and showing us. And we have Kyle explaining it. But it is still confusing. Yeah, it is confusing. And I think the first one is the best because Sam is watching the whole time. She doesn't say anything in that initial sort of exchange with her boss, Charlie. And Kyle, they're doing the thing. And then she's like, God damn it, Charlie. And she goes outside. She's the one that recognized it and somehow knew that it was dirty. And she calls him out on it. And so we know something's going.

2:17:54If you watch it, it's all very accurate. You see him put the 10 down and walk away. And he's like, whoa, hold down there, us. So yeah, it does work. I will say if you're going to do it, you want to catch people off guard. You want them to be – you want it to be busy. You want maybe like a line of people where it's like hurry up, hurry up. You want them to feel rushed. You don't have to think about it too much. At one of the screenings, somebody popped up and said, my first day at work at a gas station, this happened to me. Really? Yeah. There you go. Interesting.

2:18:29Sean Fennessey:Do you identify with a con man at all? Not really. Okay. I'm a little too straightforward. Okay. And like, you know, I wanted to, I've said this a few times, but I wanted to on, I didn't attempt to do it. I thought in my head, when we were shooting, we were in Kentucky, and there was a situation with the clerk one night at a gas station. I almost did it. I almost did it. And I prevented myself from just the cameras and stuff. I didn't. It could have just been research, you know? Yeah, right. You were just trying to see how legible it was. I didn't want to get busted. Yeah. What are your hopes when a movie like this comes around?

2:19:09Sean Fennessey:Like, do you, is your expectation, because you've been doing this for a long time now and working independently. Like I said, you're balancing this, like these two strands, it seems like in your career of independent, you know, a lot of genre focused stuff. And then you're in big studio movies. Sure. And is it, you want the movie to be critically well-reviewed? You want it to make X number of dollars, you know, like you had a festival premiere. Like, how do you think about expectations around a movie like this? I mean, for this one, I love it so much. Like, I'm a true fan of this movie. So I really just want people to go and see it and watch it.

2:19:45You know, I'm, like, quite proud of it. I think sometimes it's different, you know. You're like, oh, I hope some people see it and I hope that I get reviewed okay. But this one I'm just, like, I want to scream it from the rooftop. So it's just such a nice feeling. I mean, for me it's, like, you know, you guys get to come. You sweep in and do your thing and then you're out. But for me, it's like, you know, there's 9, 10, 11 months after that where you're working and you're building and, you know, deconstructing and reconstructing. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I just – you simply want people to see it.

2:20:23You want eyeballs on it. You want people to have an experience. And, you know, when they walk out of it, people will come up and they're very grateful and they're like, this is how movies used to feel. Thank you. And I – like that's – I feel like that's enough, you know?

2:20:37Sean Fennessey:That is why I asked you guys to be here. I was like, this does make me feel something that feels a little ancient in a good way. So congrats on that. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what is the last great thing they have seen. Oh my gosh. I watched the best movie. I'd never seen it. What was it? Reds. Oh God. Warren Beatty. Unbelievable movie. Are you joking? Yeah. How have I not seen that before? Did you watch it in one sitting? Yes. In a theater. Yeah. It was incredible. In a theater? Yeah. No kidding. What augured that? What do you mean? Like, where did it play? Why was it in the theater?

2:21:09Oh, we built a theater. Oh, my God. I know. What? If you ever want to. It's been so amazing. We, like, built a cheeky little theater under the house. And we have been watching, like, movies that we're either too young to have seen in the theater. And it's so much fun. But Reds, it's a masterpiece. It is. I had never heard of it before.

2:21:32Sean Fennessey:Yeah. I mean, it's incredible. The getaway was so much. Like there's so many things that shouldn't work that do. It's an epic. It's a love story. It's incredible. I mean, that last shot where it goes from like all the men walking off the train and then it pans to her and then there's a dead body going past. And then he's the, oh, sorry, spoiler. But oh, my God. It is. And it is three hours. Yeah, more, I think. I was going, no, it wasn't. That was like an hour. It was, yeah, anyway, I'm a big fan. It's a great recommendation. God, what did I just have in my head? And I got swept away. So sorry.

2:22:09No, I got swept away. I had, I did have, oh, I know what it was. I went with Gabe LaBelle. We went and saw Jackass 1 and 2 at the New Bev. Oh, nice. Like a few months ago. Oh, my God, nice. And Johnny Knoxville was there, like Jeff Tremaine, Lance Bangs, Rick Kosick. So I got like, this is like hero status stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:22:30Sean Fennessey:Did they introduce it and everything? They did. Okay. And it was. I love that this follows the ends, by the way. No, but that's – honestly, what you just did is like the polarity of this show. Yes. Which is like those are two very different and distinct styles of movies and I love both of them. They are. That's a good double feature. And I got to talk to Jeff Tremaine for like 15, 20 minutes outside. It was like amazing. And I just – I'm just a fan of those guys. Like I think that as far as like comedy is concerned, they push things in a direction that was – I don't think anything's really caught up to that.

2:23:02Like it's just, you know, like maybe some Sacha Baron Cohen stuff. Like I, you know, Borat in the theater was amazing with people. Jackass 2 in the theater when I saw it originally was like amazing. Electric. It was. You know, and it's just, yeah, it really was electric. It was like being at a party. But to see it at the new Bev, totally packed. I mean, everybody was just rowdy as fuck. Gabe and I were screaming. I told Johnny, I love you, Johnny. You know, like, yeah, it was really, really special.

2:23:33Sean Fennessey:Guys, those are great. Congrats on the film. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you so much.

2:23:42Sean Fennessey:Thanks to Adam and Samara. Thanks to Griffin. Thanks to Lucas Cavanaugh, Sarah Reddy, and Jamie Yukich for their production support on this episode. Next week, we're breaking down the new Scary Movie movie, and we're also talking about Mel Brooks' entire career to celebrate his 100th birthday. And you know what? Scary movie would not even exist without Mel Brooks. So show some respect. Check out his films. We'll talk about them here on the show. See you next week.