‘Tony’ and the Top 5 Coming-of-Age Movies, With Matt Johnson!

22:15What an amazing music supervision job. Needle drops are insane. We'll talk about that in a minute. Sal, at some point, gets fired from the restaurant where they all work at for being late, but also for starting a fight with Chef. And it's essentially a choice of, you know, is Tony going to follow Sal into oblivion or is he going to stick at the restaurant? he kind of sticks at the restaurant and there's this moment about midway through the movie as chef starts to you know educate tony in the ways of not only a kitchen but a relationship to craft and service and uh doing something well which is something that often comes up in bourdain's writing and television where he's like doing a simple thing really well and so there's this my favorite moment of the movie is when he gets Tony off the hammock that he's been staying in.

23:05They go into the kitchen and he, I guess, dilutes salt water down to its sea salt crystals and strains tomatoes down to liquid. And they refill salt shakers with seawater salt and refill ketchup bottles with homemade ketchup. And it's like a two or three minute scene that It could have been one to 10 seconds. And it just is supposed to reset the cardiac rhythm of the movie. Yes. And it becomes about grace almost for about 40 minutes.

23:41Sean Fennessey:Quite literally, there's a strain of spirituality running through the movie where Chef takes Tony to church. And simultaneously, when he has this severe break with Sal and they pick the fight, he says, you're the sin eater. And it is the sin eater and the shepherd. and they're kind of these two, this angel and the devil portrayal that like it's a very kind of linear, clear, structural device in the movie that is very simple but very, very effective. And it's actually, it does a good job of like distracting you away from the Bourdainishness of the movie where it's like, it's actually also about these people.

24:12Sean Fennessey:It's about the people that impact you, not just the person that you are, especially when what you are isn't really anything yet. I like movies like that that are not about people and we'll talk about that with some of the coming of age stuff. Like, these kind of portraits of people in progress as opposed to completed. And the version of the movie that's like Bourdain at Lael, like, making steak, that would just be boring to me. Yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of periods of his life that I think would be fun to evoke, like Lower East Side 1980s or, yeah, like, rough and tumble 90s restaurant life.

24:48But I think that there was something about... This is the first point where Bourdain starts to really self-mythologize. And even in the book and the quote card that's in the beginning of the film, he's like, I was just basically a snotty-nosed, loudmouthed brat who needed to get his ass kicked. And I did. And that's what the movie is about. But it winds up becoming a little bit more about to what extent we all kind of shape our own character. And to what extent people around us influence that. I mean, we could probably trade boring stories of throughout our lives. Like, it doesn't have to be like do heroin or become a world-renowned chef.

25:30It could be like, my college roommate really liked fish. And he asked me if I wanted to go to a fish show. And I said, no, thanks. And if I had gone to that fish show, like, am I sitting here?

25:39Sean Fennessey:No, I think about that all the time. I have so many formative experiences in high school of people that I met and looked up to in one direction or another. And if I had tried to more specifically mimic their lives, some things would have gone well and some things wouldn't have gone not so well. But it is a really great snapshot of a person, like you said, anthropologically figuring out which road to go down. Now, it's interesting that like so much happens to Bourdain in the intervening 15, 20 years before he becomes this well-known figure. And so it does, it is a little tidy at times, the movie.

26:11Sean Fennessey:I found the ending a little tidy. Yes. where something very dramatic happens in the kitchen that shows that he's not ready for prime time effectively and that despite all of his kind of yearnings for creativity and to show off for this girl and to show Chef that he is evolving as a man because of all the things that Chef has shown him that he's not ready to do it and then the film has this kind of like encomium final seven or eight minute sequence with a big fish bake near the end that felt also very touchstone 1997 to me where there needed to be like a degree of warmth to the way we went out, which I understand and I think is very gratifying for audiences.

26:50Sean Fennessey:It did feel, it felt a little studio notice to me. Perhaps all the characters gather together and fist bump and the flagship is saved. Yeah. I mean, it's not so far afield from the way that, you know, Nirvana the Band ends where there's like restitution at the end, you know, like we're going to be okay. But that was, that's the one thing in the movie that I felt a little soft on. I was amazed by the music choices I was like I feel like my dad who was alive in 1975 picked the music you know like there is a very level of that like tasteful rock critic plus normie sure yeah like music supervision here that is very very good it's hard to fuck up Calvary Cross but when it hits in this movie on the boat on the journey to Provincetown and it also comes like in that 15 minutes into the film the credits start moment, you're just like, fuck, man.

27:45Totally. Matt can really throw hard. I know. It's such a great moment.

27:48Sean Fennessey:And it does, it makes you, I remember when the trailer came out, you were like, I don't know, Spoon, what's this about? And, because they were like, Spoon is not, that's not 20 board games. I just did, if you were going to make it, I was just like, who put the Spoon song in here? I want to also just shout this out. Like, I've got mixed feelings about the over music supervision of, of movies and TV shows in general. And how often I find that like, there will just be like, a random drop where I'm like, clearly this was like, we have a great relationship with Universal Records who would love for us.

28:17I mean, you watch any YA show now, you're just like, every scene has three songs in it. The combination or the balance that Tony has between the music drops, the needle drops, and McCarroll's score, which I think is beautiful.

28:31Sean Fennessey:It's so good. Almost entirely piano, very simple. And like the different way the cues kind of change color when different moments are happening in the movie. There's the entire project of making this film and the way that they make it and the way that Bauman, Michael Bauman, the cinematographer, Matt Johnson, chose to shoot a lot of the conversational scenes half blocked by the person who's the typical over-the-shoulder coverage. I noticed this as well. Yeah. The shadow. What do you think that was about? But I have an idea, but what did you think? I caught this as well. I don't know, and I wish I had asked Matt about it.

29:13Sean Fennessey:I think some of it is the, like, you're only talking to yourself quality of the movie. I think that's probably it. I also think there's a degree to which, like, when you're young especially, but maybe in no matter what point in your life, you're really only seeing one half of a person, and it's the half that they're showing you at any given moment. But I thought that it really hammered home the, sure, you can argue about the development of certain characters versus others in this film, but this is really a movie about how someone chooses to see people rather than what they're telling him and what they're showing him.

29:49Sean Fennessey:Yeah. You know, and so much of this is, you know, the way that the camera shoots Leo Woodall throughout the first half of this movie is like, this guy is James fucking Dean. He is the coolest thing. He can snap open a Zippo. He takes notches out of door frames where he takes girls to bed. and then fills like a jar with him. He's the guy who can go out with no money in his pocket and have a night that lasts six hours long. That's who that guy is to him. And the way that they kind of are always behind half of the shoulder I thought was brilliant. But it's an idea and it's an intention and it is a choice.

30:25And you do wonder how many Hollywood movies, although they don't make very many that are about just regular human beings like this anymore, but how many Hollywood movies, if they were made with the care and creativity and interest that this movie had would be 75 % better, 50 % better. You know, like this is a guy who's essentially like, he's like, what if John Cassavetes and Ron Howard made a movie together? And you're like, fuck.

30:48Sean Fennessey:That's exactly what it is. This is awesome. No, I know. It's also like, it's good taste in terms of you've got one really, really well-known person in this movie and everybody else is like, we know who Stavi and Leo Woodall are, but most people don't know who they are. And this is like part of the work is like, let's launch a new generation of exciting young people that can appear in movies. you know like we should put Amelia Jones in more movies yeah I uh I really admire that the movie does I think pair pretty neatly with Blackberry um about this kind of like unbridled ambition without much sense of purpose and that's a core theme of a lot of the stuff that Johnson is doing and I feel like I tried to get to the bottom of it with him when we spoke but I like he made it now so now what do you do and like Like, you kind of have to confront that once you have crossed the threshold of no longer the scrappy underdog and into, well, I have some clout.

31:43Sean Fennessey:I have some juice in my life. And a lot of the films and stuff that he's been doing is all about this kind of like outsiderdom. And you and Andy talked about this really interestingly. Like, Bourdain having to confront no longer being the punk rock guy banging on the door trying to get in and being a guy who's establishment. You know, and like, what does it mean to become establishment? You know, this movie stops just short of it in the best way possible by showing us, you know, Eric Repair at the end of the film. Very nice touch. You know, Bourdain's closest friend and a food icon as well. But I'm so curious to see where Matt goes.

32:18Sean Fennessey:Like, I know some things that he's working on. Sure. But will there be, like, any pivot away from, like, if you're making a Magic the Gathering movie, that's a huge outsider story. There's nobody cool playing Magic the Gathering, you know? I think this happened to Tony. this is happening to Matt right now where the very thing that makes you so beloved by people becomes a liability. And yet this has never happened to you. Well, I don't know. I don't... Life's long. You were just tongue-tied for a minute. I don't even know what you mean. But Matt Johnson's... One of the attractive qualities is that if you put him on a Q &A and post-screening chat, he might just be like, I hate that movie.

32:58or, you know, I, or this thing sucks or whatever.

33:01Sean Fennessey:We talked about this, his edgelorddom and whether or not it can sustain. And Bourdain was notorious for writing a New Yorker article that was like, here are all the things that restaurants lie to you about. And then 20 years later, he's hosting The Taste and appearing on Top Chef and doing food and wine appearances to, you know, hustle American Airlines points or whatever. And it comes for all of us. and you just have to learn to adapt. I think what I see in both of those guys is a formal inventiveness and attention to detail and love of process that I think will serve them both. That, you know, obviously served Tony very well in making multiple television shows of great, great interest.

33:45And Matt, so far, kind of being undefeated in terms of like, you really want to see this movie, man. Like, this is going to light you up a little bit.

33:54Sean Fennessey:Yeah, it's really impressive. Um... I think this slots in nicely with coming of age. You know, this is a big tent, these kinds of films. How did you think about it when I asked you to do a list? You know, I think the easiest way to look at it would just be like, you know, a life-changing moment for a young person. But I tried to look at this a little bit more from the perspective of how I think they framed Tony, which is, even though in no way does this character come off as innocent ever, a loss of innocence. And there are a couple of moments, I think, when he catches Sal shooting up, not catches, but when he watches Sal shoot up, there's obviously like a shadow that looms over Bourdain's future drug use, but also this character being confronted with like, it's not listening to the Stooges anymore, is it?

34:44Yeah. It's like we're shooting heroin on a beach somewhere. Yep. So I tried to look at films that were about that loss of innocence, not specifically drug use, but.

34:54Sean Fennessey:I didn't intentionally do that, but when I look at my list, that's the same story. And is that just the standard archetype for these stories? Because if you don't have that loss of innocence, are they worth making in a way? Well, I think that it's about whether or not the person is seven years old or 25 years old, it's about introducing them to the real world, right? Or what happens outside of the imaginary kingdom that they've built for themselves that they've maybe protected themselves with. I also thought it was interesting with the movies that I picked, which I would fully admit are favorites rather than the best.

35:29Four of them are from my childhood. Same. and there's really nothing you can do about that but I think that's okay

35:36Sean Fennessey:I'm quite curious to know what teenagers make of a movie like Tony if it appeals in any way it being a period piece it being about a person that they probably just don't have much experience with but it having a very winning movie star kind of performance at the center of it and a vibe that is like this is the loser's version of cool it is like the almost famousy feeling of like you can be, you can have a really exciting and cool life and not have to worry about being the coolest person alive. Yeah. And that's such a unique dynamic that I relate to for very obvious reasons. It's just like a tortured thing for young people to like be told they need to decide what they're going to do and have all these people in their lives giving them advice about what they should and shouldn't be doing.

36:22We didn't really remark upon it, but a lot of my favorite moments in this movie are not overly dogmatically pointed, big flashing lights, like this is the issue for this character. Yes. His mother is never explicitly described as being tyrannical with him and has never really gotten, you know, we don't get into like the psychological background, but it's just very difficult to please, I would say, and withholds a lot of approval and affirmation.

36:57Sean Fennessey:But you can see there's something wonderful about the portrayal of the two parents, Rich Summer and Dagmar Adamanczyk. Like, she is incredibly intelligent and studied and particular. And he is very warm and over-eager and excited. You smash those two people together. I mean, Eileen and I talk about this all the time with Alice. Like, you constantly have these conversations about your kids where you're sort of like, there is this kind of 50-50 alchemy that happens in a person. Inside of them are two wolves. Quite literally. And I'm sure you feel that way about your parents. I certainly do about mine.

37:31Sean Fennessey:And I think to evoke that without announcing it is very impressive. Yeah. And cool storytelling. All right. Let's do our list. Okay. So just hit me with five. Let's just have a sincere, direct, brief communication. Sure. Okay. My first one is a movie I've talked about on this podcast before, but my own private Idaho. It came up this week on the Rewatchables. It did. Because we were speaking of Keanu. We keep trying to get Bill to go to Idaho. Yeah. Might be the last rewatchable. Bill loves Good Will Hunting. Yeah. Is this the film that immediately precedes? No, it's not. There's a couple in between Good Will Hunting and My Own Private Idaho from Gus.

38:11Right. This is the, in some ways, not the original, but like it's the original coming of age story from the original BS, Billy Shakespeare. and it is Gus Van Sant's reimagining of Shakespeare's Henry IV part one and two and Henry V starring Keanu Reeves in River Phoenix I don't even think I knew about Henry V or Henry IV when I saw this I definitely did not I didn't know that Bob was Falstaff I didn't know that that this was following that arc because I was more into it as a underground dreamlike road movie about two hustlers banging around the Pacific Northwest, and one of them is narcoleptic, and the other is about to inherit a fortune when he turns 21.

38:58And it's an astonishing pair of, but really River Phoenix is kind of, this is if you want to know why people freak out about River Phoenix, watch My Own Private Idaho, and is so beautifully observed about two people who are kind of like in between childhood and adulthood, trying to make sense of the world in a very finite period of time, and has this baked in sort of plot mechanic, which they get from Henry IV and Henry V, which is that when you're young, you oftentimes become acutely aware that you are not on the same schedule as everybody else and you are not on the same road as everybody else.

39:39And there's something really sad about that when you're like, oh man, like we're not going to the same college, are we? Or, you know, me and my high school girlfriend, we're probably going to break up. That's really weird. Or... Not me. yeah but it doesn't leave you in your childhood you know you realize it happens to you it echoes throughout your life happens all the time in adulthood now and this movie captures that this like yeah you know these two characters who are like we're bonded forever right Keanu's character is just like well until I'm 21 you know like yeah that's so funny I feel like this movie

40:09Sean Fennessey:does a really good job of showing it through time and it reminds me of a little bit listening to you talk about seeing Pulp Fiction where it's another movie where you're sort of like oh you just do anything you want with a movie. Yeah. Like you don't, it doesn't have to feel, the movie doesn't feel linear. It doesn't feel like it's happening in a specific set of days over time. It's just sort of like, then this thing happened, then this thing happened, then this thing happened. Was that a dream? Yeah. Or did that really happen? Did they really, like, are they hooking up with this person or is this something that he's imagining while he's in a, like a booth in some adult store?

40:38Like, just a, really, it changed my life when I saw it. I did not know movies could be like this.

40:43Sean Fennessey:Great pick. I picked a much more conventional movie for number five. I picked A Perfect World, which is Clint Eastwood's road trip crime movie about an ex-convict played by Kevin Costner who takes a young boy hostage in his attempt to get free while being chased by a, is he a federal marshal played by Clint Eastwood? He's a Texas Ranger. Texas Ranger.

41:08Sean Fennessey:And I think this is just an amazing, it's a very entertaining movie and a very beautifully shot movie. and it's in that it's right in the sweet spot of Clint in the 90s post-Unforgiven pre-bridges of Madison County when he's kind of like trying to do Americana in a number of different ways and this is like a real demythologizing of the American criminal story but I think I think the actor's name is is it TJ Lowther plays Buzz the little kid and I was probably about this kid's age when I saw this movie and this kid sees a lot of stuff he sees violence Once he sees sex, he sees death. He sees things about human experience, interaction, emotion that you wouldn't see if you just spent your entire life in your mom's house.

41:57Sean Fennessey:And it's really amazing how frequently he pivots to showing the kid's perspective in this movie, despite Costner giving, I think, one of his great performances and one of his most charismatic performances. He's so exciting in this movie. So cool. but Eastwood didn't make a lot of movies about kids. This isn't really like something that he's very interested in historically and so I find this to be like such a special movie. You know, there's plenty of stuff that is kind of nuts and bolts. Laura Dern and Clint Eastwood in a trailer chasing down this old, this convict, but the stuff between Butch and Buzz is so special to me and so it popped into my mind when thinking of this prompt.

42:37I just remember this film so well for being the follow-up to Unforgiven and being kind of, I don't know, like the amnesiac to Kid A or something like that. Yeah. You were like, I was so excited. Unforgiven was such a huge movie for me and it took me so long to discover the rhythms of this and what it was trying to say. And maybe I was too young at the time to really understand it. It's one of those movies that you, I don't know, it's like watching Badlands or something where you're like, I think I get what this is about, but I don't really, I don't know if I'm going to really understand it for another 10 or 15 years.

43:13Sean Fennessey:Yeah. It's interesting. I saw this before Unforgiven. And I probably, this is probably one of the first Clint Eastwood movies I saw in just this very small period of time, the age gap that you and I have, I think speaks to, this was an HBO classic, you know? So it just was on TV all the time. And so you would pop in and it, for me, it felt like I was seeing very adult things at 11 or whatever when the movie came out that are so fascinating. It's also in the same year as in The Line of Fire and it's like these really interesting portraits of kind of fading masculinity, both of them, like not being able to quite...

43:46And then he was done with that topic and moved on. Oh no,

43:49Sean Fennessey:it cropped up a few times more. His final film, of course, well, I guess his second to last film is Cry Macho. Yes. So, it's something he's interested in. I hope Clint's doing okay. You think he's out there? You think he's listening? I think he's probably done making films. I think he's 94? Yeah. So probably. But I mean, Juror number two is two years ago. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Did you see Juror number two? I did. Did you enjoy it? Opening night on HBO Max, I believe. I see. Yeah, that was a damn shame. My second film is Fresh, Boazier Keene's 1994 movie starring Sean Nelson and Samuel Jackson and Giancarlo Esposito about a young kid living in New York City who is something of a chess prodigy or an emerging chess prodigy but is also a drug runner.

44:35It's very much of the moment when there were a lot of films coming out of New York and L.A. made by young filmmakers about city stories. Whether it was like Nick Gomez with Lord Laws of Gravity, Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers, just like a ton of movies that were very of the moment and looked like life at that moment. this is about a kid who learns chess from his estranged alcoholic father one of my favorite Sam Jackson performances and uses what he learns on the chessboard to rescue his sister but it's also about kids who are asked to grow up way too soon and being put into worlds of adult desire and adult violence when you don't quite understand it and in some ways very much part and parcel with a perfect world completely

45:25Sean Fennessey:or they're the same year just about right 94 94 93 yeah yeah they're very close my number four is Fish Tank it's one of the only semi-modern movies on our lists Andrea Arnold's portrait of a teenage girl who feels adrift and outside not unlike a Tony Bourdain type who makes a surprising and ultimately very very dangerous and ugly connection with her mother's boyfriend who's played in the film by Michael Fassbender in a searing performance. Yes. This is back on my hunger and shame shit. Yeah. I don't know if we'll ever get this guy back as a performer. Let's just make the agency brother. Yeah. Well, you haven't seen Hope yet, is what I'll say.

46:08Sean Fennessey:I'm excited for that. It is maybe not exactly what you were expecting, but this is just a wildly intimate, dangerous seeming, very challenging movie that makes you question why the story specifically is being told. And then maybe like in a similar way to Tony even that there's not like an easy solution to life experience that like horrible things happen and you have to think about why they've happened and like what it means to be independent and have agency at a young point in your life versus being taken advantage of and exploited. Katie Jarvis in the movie is incredible in the lead part. Andrea Arnold...

46:48Sean Fennessey:She kind of got Big Little Wized for a while, right? Yeah. Always really interests me. I was not super in her last film, Bird. Did you ever see that one? I don't think I saw that one. That starred Barry Keoghan. And it was similarly about a young person in a kind of fantastical and ultimately dangerous world. And a lot of her stories are about that. You know, American Honey is sort of about that too. But just from a pure aesthetics perspective, like she captures being inside of these worlds like so, so well. all these kind of like intimate, often English environments that people who are of virtually no means trying to get by.

47:26Sean Fennessey:And then what is this kind of fallout from not having more? And yeah, so I would highly recommend this movie. Shot by Robbie Ryan, one of his earliest films. It's like, it's a beautiful and quite sad. I love Fish Tank. I'll throw in Breaking Away. There's Pierre Yates' 70s movie about townies living in Bloomington. swimming at the quarry you know what are we going to do with the rest of our lives and something that takes on outsized importance is a cycling race that comes to town where a series of like a group of italian uh cyclists are gonna compete in a race as well as are some university students who do nothing but torment these guys and they torment them um and you know yates is is really one of the most underrated filmmakers probably of the last but 40 or 50 years and he's anyway I would wonder whether or not Matt Johnson's a fan because there's like or of Yates' work in general because I think they each bring like an incredible creative verve no matter what the material is this is so different from all of his other movies though I mean his movie I feel like he makes typically we did an episode of the rewatchables about this movie this is an amazing film his movies are usually so conventionally entertaining and masculine and genre focused.

48:49Sean Fennessey:So like bullet, the deep, hot rock, Outland, Eddie Coyle. No, Outland is Peter Himes. He made Krull. That's right. That's right. Suspect. Like a lot of these movies are like, they're thrillers. They're like, they're, they're, they're, you know, Tom Selleck is an innocent man, an innocent man. Like that's what he makes. And this movie is so sensitive. and sort of spiritual. It's kind of a sports movie, but barely. It's kind of a greasers versus socials class war, but not totally. It's very similar to Tony in that it's about a guy who is basically affecting the life that he wishes he could have by putting on this Italian accent and wants to be an Italian cyclist even though he and all his buddies are basically walking around in jean shorts all day long and like having milkshakes and wasting their lives.

49:47Just a really beautiful portrait of youth and maybe not super loss of innocence, but more just like learning that you're not always going to be young.

49:54Sean Fennessey:No. Yeah. I think that's well put. My number three is Walk About, which I just rewatched this year because it was part of the Odysseys collection that I co-curated on the Criterion channel. It's basically Nick Rogue's first movie. He co-directed Performance in 1970 with your boy Mick Jagger. Yeah. But this movie is based on a 59 novel by James Vance Marshall. And it's about two very young kids, like 11 and 7, who are driven to the Australian outback by their father. And his intention, he tells them that they're going to take a picnic. And his intention is to shoot and kill them. And he attempts to do so, and he's unable to, and he turns the gun on himself.

50:36And he leaves them out in the outback by themselves

50:39Sean Fennessey:to fend for themselves over time. It's a feel-good movie. it's a very harrowing opening and it's a very gorgeous middle and it has some challenges as the story goes on Jenny Agater and Lucy and John are the two are the sister and brother and you know I think it's probably the official feels like the official kickoff of the Australian New Wave and you can hear a lot about that on the Blank Check series about Peter Weir since he was a participant in that too but this movie which also stars David Gulpilil, who is the aboriginal boy who sort of like saves them and shows them how to survive in this space, who went on to have a really interesting career as an actor as well.

51:22Sean Fennessey:But, you know, this is a movie about... It's metaphorical and literal at the same time. It's a little bit like, well, playtime's over. This is what it would really be like when you have to go out into the world. And you can project that onto you graduated from college. You want to move to the big city. What are you going to do now? Or it could just play straight up as a very ethereal, magisterial thriller about two lost kids. Yeah. But man, I couldn't believe how beautiful it was. It's one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen. The photography is stunning in this movie. And it still has a lot of emotional power to it as well.

51:56Sean Fennessey:And I probably hadn't seen it since film school. Like I want to say it was like 30 something years since I had seen it. And I really thought it was absolutely amazing. And I think it speaks to like what's so powerful about this as a micro genre or subgenre of film is that it allows directors to really play with ideas of perspective and point of view because you're shooting this world from an emerging narrator, an emerging person's perspective. And I think Rogue does an incredible job of like, what would the fucking Outback look like to these kids? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This movie has a great end note too.

52:32Sean Fennessey:The way that it concludes the story is really kind of fascinating and beautiful. It's almost like, once you have an experience, you can never go back and the way that you think about it, whether you've romanticized it or not is also really interesting to me that I think is also somewhat tied to Tony. Okay, what's number two for you? I picked two, which are two adaptations of Larry McMurtry books from his Talia trilogy. One is Hud from 1963, which is based on Horseman Passed By and then the last picture show. So this is like McMurtry's basically fictionalized version of his own youth and he would write lots of Bill Dung's Roman to make a Tony joke.

53:16He would write a lot about his own life in and out of Archer, Texas and his adventures in Hollywood. One of my favorite coming-of-age novels ever written is All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers by Laird McMurtry. These are more 1950s set stories about a time in America that I think we would tell ourselves is when America was safe and America was beautiful and America was living up to all these ideas. And McMurtry is an incredible myth buster and he just goes into these things and he's like, it wasn't like this at all. It wasn't like what you think it was. The good old times, the good days were not that good.

53:55The bad days weren't that bad. HUD is slightly tweaked from the book in that it makes, it inverts certain characters. It makes certain characters bigger deals than they are in the book. But it's got my favorite Newman. It's got some of my favorite cinematography in any movie ever from James Wong Howe. Patricia Neal plays Alma, who's the housekeeper in this Brandon family, which is this ranching family in a small town in Texas. One of the great, great supporting turns. I think the movie doesn't work without her.

54:32Sean Fennessey:Yeah, she's, she's unreal it's a very difficult movie to watch in some ways it is not going to make you think Paul Newman was like you don't come away from that being like man I loved HUD no it's very similar to Fish Tank where you've got a leading performance that is very powerful and charismatic but a little evil you know that there's something that is very raw and dangerous there's something broken about this kid and but the real coming of age is is this younger character named Norman who's trying to decide which path to take. Not unlike Tony, not unlike a lot of these movies where they are just sort of at a crossroads in their life.

55:10Last Picture Show probably doesn't need to be greatly expanded on. This is Peter Bogdanovich's film with Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges and Sybil Shepard. It's just one of those great, great... It's just one of the most amazing portraits of youth I've ever seen. Both of these movies are available in beautiful

55:32Sean Fennessey:4Ks on the Criterion Collection. I would encourage people to check them out. They've never looked better. I also picked two movies for number two, and they're paired as well. And they're two movies that I've talked about many times on the show, so I don't need to go on about them at length, but they're Rushmore and the Squid and the Whale, which are just like Tony, two portraits of the artist as a phony young man. And they're both, they seem to be, I guess this is somewhat unverified, but very autobiographical portraits of real stinkers. Guys who really think they're hot shit, and are really aspirational and really ambitious, but don't have the goods dot, dot, dot yet.

56:09Sean Fennessey:And Rushmore is like a portrait of a wonderful, wonderfully sociopathic failing teen who wants to run everything and has a creative soul but has no idea how to succeed and even what it means to be a grown-up. And The Squid and the Whale, you know, is about two different kids as their parents are going through a divorce, but the Jesse Eisenberg character in particular, who's sort of the lead of the movie, is a, I will say like very similar to Tony and a very familiar person to me, but a person who really wants to be praised and told is great at something, but has no ability to do anything interesting.

56:45Sean Fennessey:And it's like figuring out what it actually means to be interesting in the process and is pulling all the wrong things from all the wrong influences, parents included. So that kind of speaks a little bit to that dynamic that they show of the parents and Tony too, that, you know, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are so amazing in The Squid and the Whale and they're both so frenzied and toxic in their own very specific parental ways that is so immediately identifiable to me. So I love both of those movies very much. And I don't even know if the characters actually do come of age in the movie. No, I don't even know either.

57:19Sean Fennessey:You know, like Rushmore ends with this sort of like you put on the show exaltation, but I'm not sure that Max Fisher is made whole by that. I kind of like to think of Darjeeling as the sequel where he comes of age. Truly, truly. Okay, what's your number one? Stand By Me, which is like, I think the first time I really even was self-conscious about a coming-of-age movie, just because the narration in this is so explicit. This is Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's novella, The Body, stars Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland, Jerry O 'Connell and Corey Feldman. And to me, it's still like a note-perfect movie about a bunch of kids spending a weekend camping in the woods who come across to go find a dead body that they have heard about in the woods and is just so beautifully rendered and is so perfectly pitched at like the tone of deep affection and also deep humor of childhood.

58:20And I think even if you didn't grow up in Maine in the 50s, you'll recognize like the beats of it. and it's just about like the joy and the terror that can regularly confront you when you're a kid. The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today.

58:58Matt Johnson:Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club. Of course, Jason. It's in the name, Sam's Club. Oh, yeah. Come join us. Sam's Club. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.

59:44Sean Fennessey:Mine is similarly a movie about friendship amongst boys and the complications therein. It's Juice, Ernest Dickerson's movie that I've definitely talked about a lot on this show that is about four kids growing up in Harlem, all of whom are aspiring to different things in their life. It focuses mostly on Q, who's played by Omar Apps, who is an aspiring DJ, and is sort of set right in the midst of this amazing moment in New York hip-hop. And Q gets to sort of participate and show off, and you see the way in which he wants to be basically the next Jam Master J type of person. and he's entrenched with three other friends played by Tupac, Khalil Kane and Jermaine Hopkins who, you know, Pac's character Bishop is a legendary movie character and he is sort of the dark side.

1:00:31Sean Fennessey:He is the Leo Woodall. He is the Sal who potentially is luring Q down a very dark and troubling path. His other friends are more innocents and this movie also I think has a real kind of Shakespearean quality to it too in terms of the arc of all the characters. Epps is a weird one man in 1992 I was like Omar Epps is gonna be like Jimmy Stewart like I really thought I thought he was gonna be a great American actor and he was just such an everyman to me obviously like I got really obsessed with the culture that this movie is about when I was a kid did you ever get turntables? I didn't I mean I didn't have money techniques are expensive they're expensive somebody asked me in a sub stack chat what would be the number one movie prop of all time and I said Q techniques.

1:01:17Sean Fennessey:That would be like a great thing to have on display in my home. But yeah, I love this movie and I think so many times coming of age you think of them as like about your parents or about your siblings but this is like a lot of times this stuff is steeped in the friends you make and what paths you go down. I had some friends who were troubled, you know, and I hope they're okay. I don't really know many of them anymore but... I have them actually right just outside the studio here. I've been doing a self-designed anti-dementia test or dementia test for myself where I just been putting on rap songs I haven't heard in 30 years and seeing if I can still rap them from memory.

1:01:56Wow. And Know the Ledge is one of those. I won't do it now, but if you put Know the Ledge on, I would know all the lyrics. Did that with Can't Trust It, which I haven't listened to. I've been listening to a lot of Public Enemy lately.

1:02:07Sean Fennessey:It's funny that you say that. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. This has... Gosh. I'm trying to think of like, what's the best needle drop in this movie? Is it when they're going through the party and Cypress Hill is playing? It might be that. When does Naughty by Nature play? I think that's right at the beginning, right? And it's Uptown Anthem, right? That's the Naughty song? Yeah. Anyway, this is a beautiful movie. Ernest Dickerson made some cool films. I think this is his debut immediately after working with Spike on three or four films in a row. But I don't think he ever got back to these heights.

1:02:43Sean Fennessey:Anyhow, Sierra, thanks for participating in this exercise. Let's go now to my conversation with Matt Johnson.

1:02:54Sean Fennessey:Matt Johnson is back and now an icon of the show because you were also on the Canadian Movie Draft episode, which aired since this happened. So it's Matt Month here on the pod.

1:03:02Matt Johnson:You're poor viewers. I'm sorry to hear that. No, no, you're doing great.

1:03:05Sean Fennessey:I wanted to start because last time you were formally on the show, Nirvana was just coming out.

1:03:10Matt Johnson:Yeah.

1:03:11Sean Fennessey:And we talked. I loved it. I loved our conversation, but I'm curious how you feel about what it did when it went out into the world.

1:03:17Matt Johnson:It's odd because it happened so gradually. You got to remember that it got finished and released at South by Southwest 2025. And Neon waited almost a calendar year before they released it. And so when I spoke with you, crazily, it was right after I had finished shooting the Bourdain movie. but right as Nirvana the Band was kind of coming out and even within that time, Jay and I had also toured most of the United States with the film. And the feeling that we both had was, oh wow, like a lot of Nirvana the Band fans found out about these screenings. And that's what we thought because they were all sold out and the energy was just completely insane.

1:04:04Matt Johnson:I was at one of them in November in LA, yeah. Okay, yeah. And so our perspective of this - It was like a rock concert too and it was all the hardcore fans. My good friend from film school, Nico Pareda, who's extremely talented. Well, he's prolific. I think he's made 10 features in Mexico. Said that when he came out of the TIFF screening, I hadn't really seen him much since we were in undergrads, since we were undergraduates. And he said, Matt, this was an odd experience for me. And I said, what, did you like the film? And he said, I don't know. But I felt like everybody else thought it was a music show or like a concert.

1:04:38Matt Johnson:Like that was not the feeling of watching a movie. And Nico said a lot of, he was the first person to ever cast me in a movie when we were an undergrad and he gave me a huge boost of confidence. I really owe him because I was always so, so painfully shy. I never wanted to be on camera. I really was insecure about how I sounded, how I looked. And he, along with, believe it or not, Dan Levy, we're co-stars. From Schitt's Creek. From Schitt's Creek. We were co-stars in his undergrad film. No kidding. And yeah, he said a number of things that have really stuck with me. And anyway, him saying that it was like a rock concert really changed my perspective on it.

1:05:16Matt Johnson:And the point of this story is that we were, maybe it was because we were trying to humble ourselves, but we thought that it was all people who'd watched the TV show who are now watching the movie. And we've come to realize that, yeah, it had taken on a life of its own. And now it is completely out of control. I can't explain it. I have no idea.

1:05:40Sean Fennessey:Are you happy about it?

1:05:41Matt Johnson:Well, I'm so happy that people are connecting with it and it seems to mean something to people, but it's strange because so much of my life has been me operating from a place of obscurity that I'm sure you can appreciate that it is very difficult to be like, I'll use this metaphor. I find it so enjoyable and I feel like I have an opportunity to really do something interesting when I have to host an event or give a speech at a wedding or I did the eulogy at my uncle's funeral. This is going to sound morbid and maybe crass, but I like being in environments where people are expecting one thing. And then the way that I am naturally is like, whoa, like, like, oh, that's, it's funny that, that this person is doing this, whether it's any, any kind of public forum communication.

1:06:42And now I'm losing that ability.

1:06:46Matt Johnson:And I don't mean to do that literally, but I just mean that there's now an expectation of me. that didn't exist before. And so it makes everything I do not harder, but I don't have the same trick that I can play, which is that nobody knows who I am. I'm this unassuming, seemingly dopey person that then can surprise you because your expectations were so low. And losing that - I relate to this a lot. Of course, because it's a true gift and it's given to us by our anonymity and also by, I think me being Canadian is a big part of it, but I thrived on it. And it was a defense mechanism because I thought, okay, I feel so much more comfortable having a very low expectation and then playing with that low expectation because it means I can kind of play a Mott and Bailey game where I can back away if I stumble or embarrass myself.

1:07:46Matt Johnson:it's the way that we shoot movies like Jay and I or whoever I'm acting with can take huge risks knowing that no matter what the embarrassing stuff won't be there and my way of transposing that into real life is I can set an expectation with people and then if I don't meet that expectation that's the joke the joke is I'm not meeting that expectation and so and then we can all enjoy that. But now it's like, well, people meet me and they have a very clear expectation of how they want me to behave.

1:08:17Sean Fennessey:Okay. That's a wonderful segue to Tony, because this is the first film that you don't appear in.

1:08:22Matt Johnson:Or, and also I'm not doing any of my tricks.

1:08:24Sean Fennessey:So do you think that that was a self-knowledge of trying to pull back from something that was happening even at that TIFF screening or, or even before that, where you felt like maybe you were becoming a little too well-known in that way or too seen.

1:08:38Matt Johnson:Okay. Yeah. No, you're giving me too much credit. I'll tell you, it was totally cynical. I can tell you all my secrets since I like you. So one, I knew I was about to make this magic card movie and I looked in the mirror and I talked to my friends and I said, well, okay, they've decided to let you make the magic card movie and you've never made a movie before. So you'd better go out and make one. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to make a movie where I don't get to do any of the things that I normally do, which are these same like Mont and Bailey tactics of, um, of hiding my own inability to make movies inside the movie itself, which is why in Tony, the camera never moves.

1:09:23Matt Johnson:I never zoom. I don't do any, I, I, I completely, I talked with Jared on the phone before I shot the movie. Um, uh, and, And because obviously, rightfully so, he was like, so how are you planning to shoot this? And I was like, Jared, when people see this movie, they're going to think it was shot by a different Matt Johnson. Because all the stuff that we do, I'm intentionally not doing any of it. Because one, I'm very, like I love David Lynch. I was very inspired by the straight story. I remember when I was a kid, even hearing about that, being like, whoa, like why did he do that? Like, we didn't have to.

1:10:01Matt Johnson:And I don't pretend to understand the reasons behind it. I'm sure he's talked about it. But for me, it was like, okay, can I do this without any of the things I normally have, without any of my friends with me? And really using only the tools of actors who I love and the words that I write. And obviously, Michael Bauman is going to make everything look – our vision of it was, can we make this movie feel like you're turning pages in a book? as opposed to all my other films, which is like, you're there kinetically watching everything, spying on it. And any minute you don't know what's going to happen.

1:10:38Matt Johnson:And so like the beauty of turning pages in a paperback book, but I only had those tools and that's it. And I thought, if I can do this, then maybe when I go to make much more standard movies, I'll be able to start integrating these two things together. But I wanted to start at zero. My editor, Bobby Upchurch, loves, I'm going to forget his name, but he's an American superstar director. He directed Mudd and... Oh, David Gordon.

1:11:09Sean Fennessey:Not David Gordon. It's not, but it's similar. It's a guy like David Gordon. Jeff Nichols. Yeah, Jeff Nichols.

1:11:13Matt Johnson:So he's a huge Jeff Nichols fan, and he will always show me Nichols' movies. And I like various things about them. but what Bobby loves to talk about is how Nichols in every film tries to teach himself a new tool and so Bobby will show me I think he showed me money was like this is the movie where Nichols tried to teach himself how to use steadicams and and when you watch somebody's filmography from that point of view you go oh this is a clever guy like yeah using every single opportunity to make a film to try to master something because, I mean, as I'm often admitting, most of us have no idea what we're doing.

1:11:56Matt Johnson:And we're just trying to react to the movie as it's made. And so anyway, I tried to take a page out of his book and be like, okay, can I make a movie with nothing other than, as my professor Amnon Bookbinder said, the shot and the cut.

1:12:12Sean Fennessey:I had Jeff on the show for bike riders and he is very insightful about the process of making he must be um smart guy I I would I would not have thought of you as a guy who would make a biopic and I know that this is not a standard cradle to grave biopic but it is still in a sense oh yeah biopic what was your perception of them before you decided to do this well I've got a

1:12:34Matt Johnson:secret there too okay and that's that for a long time i had been thinking about like how every single one of my movies in some ways i mean i'm always in them and in some ways are like about me whether it's nirvana the band or blackberry it's like i'm i'm trying to reflect myself and i'm making them autobiographical in a way but i was but i i've never been able to do something that is man this is verging on the personal but like i've never been able to make something that is sincerely about myself because because i'm in them and they're they're so i don't want to say goofy but like my movies are about a about a supersized persona that that it's like my superhero identity in a way but but for me to make a movie that is really about what it was like for me as a kid and like what, like the types of stuff that, that I would maybe be more insecure about talking about.

1:13:36Matt Johnson:I was like, well, I could never make a movie like that. And the character's name is Matt Johnson and I'm in it. Like, like I just wouldn't be brave enough. And so I had been looking for an outlet to do a real autobiography. And it was only when I met Dominic Sessa and had been pitched previously this Bourdain film and, and, and had turned it down that I was like, oh, this, here it is. I can, I can smuggle an autobiography that is kind of half Dom's life and half my life and the places where that connects. And, and we can kind of form a conspiracy with Anthony Bourdain and the parts of his childhood where it kind of lines up with the things that me and Dom agreed with.

1:14:23Matt Johnson:And, and this is it like i sort of recognized the opportunity for what it was and uh and then i was all in and uh and so yes this is the long way of answering your question of um biopics are not interesting to me um there are some some of them that i that i like but i actually can't think of anywhere i'm like oh yeah god that really moved me i think because in some ways they're you know the original IP films, like, like, I suppose the best of them is Citizen Kane. Yeah. As far as like biopics that I really love, but, but.

1:15:05Sean Fennessey:Well, they're like some of the earliest best picture winners, like Life of Emile Zola and films like that. It's a perfect example. It's a perfect example. And like Coal Miner's Daughter, there's like, becomes a long tradition of it, but obviously this is very different in your approach. I think in, in all of your other films, but I can think of a moment in The Dirties, I can think of a moment in Blackberry and certainly in Nirvana that are kind of heart sick and a little sad and a little bit insecure. Right. And it feels like you made the whole plane out of that in this movie. You know what I mean?

1:15:33Sean Fennessey:Like you took those little moments and you know what I'm saying?

1:15:36Matt Johnson:Well, I was thinking about what, uh, what, what I actually was like when I was that age. And it is not the, what's the line in dead poets. I was not the towering mental giant you see before you, I was on the beach and people would kick copies of Byron in my face. And I was a kind of arrogant, angry, really resentful, rude. I'm talking about when I'm like a teenager. And of course, I was still myself, but I shudder at the way that I would try to get people to think I was good. And yeah, I thought, well, what if I make a movie where the character is only that? and he's not trying to make a charming film about himself.

1:16:21Sean Fennessey:I think it's pretty brave. I mean, I wrote that this is a movie about thinking you have some big ideas about yourself and meaningful ambition when you have absolutely no sense of who you really are.

1:16:29Matt Johnson:Yeah, and also realizing that with what you have in your hand at that time, you are nothing. Yeah. And all the potential that you may think you have, well, it doesn't even realize for Tony in this movie, right? Like, it's why I love the ending line so much. between him and the person admitting him into the school, which, I mean, I guess it would be a spoiler for me to bring up, but like he says the exact opposite of how he was behaving in the opening scene. And he seems in some ways defanged and almost, well, he's gelded in a way at the end. And yet it's true strength. You know, you go, oh, wow, no, that's power.

1:17:16Matt Johnson:Good for you, kid.

1:17:17Sean Fennessey:I'm waiting for you to introduce yourself as Matthew Johnson at a screening. You know, that's how it will really happen. The thing that, one of the things that I think works so wonderfully about the movie is the decision to effectively not explore Bourdain's mythos. Like, not just not tell the later version of his story, but not even really, I think, work too hard to psychologize the specifics of his life.

1:17:39Matt Johnson:Oh, go ahead. Can you tell me specifically what you mean? Because it's an interesting line of conversation.

1:17:44Sean Fennessey:He very easily looked at an episode of one of his television shows where he talks about something with this great depth and insight. And then tried to kind of work backwards to have a moment of realization in the movie and say, well, if you saw episode 27 of Parts Unknown. Oh, I understand exactly what you mean.

1:18:01Matt Johnson:Give the movie hyperlinks.

1:18:03Sean Fennessey:Yes. And not Easter egging it. Not really trying to gratify the many millennial men for whom Bourdain is an icon. And so the movie is called Tony and it is about a person named Anthony Bourdain. And it seems very much like what happens in the earliest stages of that book. But it doesn't seem like you're bending over backwards to satisfy that audience either.

1:18:23Matt Johnson:No.

1:18:24Sean Fennessey:Which I just thought was a very, I don't know if it was a brave choice, but it was a really smart choice. Or some would say suicidal. Well, I'd like to hear about like. Some would say it was a suicidal choice. Like, did you have to fight for that ability to do it that way?

1:18:35Matt Johnson:I got to say, I was really surprised by how much authority I was given. And I mean authority, like I was given like an unbelievable amount of freedom in terms of telling this story. That stunned me because we originally were not working with the estate. Like when I first like hired Dom and said, okay, this is how we're making the movie. And then we started working with A24. There was no, there wasn't even an idea. Because I'm used to making movies like Blackberry or this movie I'm making right now where it's the Wild West. It's like I work with lawyers to make sure that I can tell these stories, not with the people whose lives I'm making the movies about.

1:19:13Matt Johnson:And so it was a real shock that after the estate got involved, they were so, I guess the term is open-handed with how they were letting us make this movie. but to be specific about like why or why not make it the rude way of saying it is fan service like why not make the movie that way comes from my own history with the guy which is that I knew him only vaguely as a media personality and it's not like I had an opinion of him that was much different than my opinion of, you say, Gordon Ramsay, you know, I mean, in the, in the, they're sort of at the same level in my, in my, in my mind. And I thought that that is something I could bring to this, which is that my own curiosity about this character, his legacy, what he means to people could be an entryway for audiences to maybe find the same things interesting about him starting from nothing that I do.

1:20:19Matt Johnson:And I had learned from Blackberry, another movie where I had no knowledge of telecommunications, cell phones, nothing, that is a decent recipe for an idiot like me, I should say, to be like, okay, well, I don't know anything, but these details about his life, I find fascinating and I can't explain why. And so maybe if I present those as honestly as I can, using things from my own and Dominic assess his own history to kind of fill in the gaps, maybe other people will find them interesting too. Do you research a lot though? Like how did you, well, research is a broad term. So I read everything that he wrote and I moved to Provincetown and talked to all the people there who knew him when he was young.

1:21:02Matt Johnson:And that basically formed that combined with the things that Dom and I were talking about, uh, about things that we'd gone through form the basis of the screenplay. Like, like everything that the characters talk about, the interactions that they have are all coming from things that Bourdain had written about that I had then kind of double checked with people who were there because it's so funny. I mean, it's all self-report, right? That's one of the great secrets of Anthony Bourdain. He's like, isn't my life amazing, according to me? According to me? All you got to do is be a good storyteller.

1:21:32Matt Johnson:You know this about yourself. No kidding. And look, I think this is another movie that doesn't let facts get in the way of the truth because the idea that Bourdain himself is inflating these things that happen. I'll tell you a perfect example. So I get to Provincetown and Bourdain famously worked at two restaurants, one called The Flagship, which has now gone, it's turned into like a $5 million Airbnb. And the other, a place called Ciro and Sal's. So he worked in the kitchen there starting, I think he was actually a line cook there. He was dishwashing at The Flagship, but the kid who washed dishes at Ciro and Sal's was a guy named Larry Luster.

1:22:12Matt Johnson:turns out now Larry owns Ciro and Sal's. Okay. This is a, it's an unbelievable, uh, uh, story, which I won't get into. They should make a movie about Larry and his family. 50 years later. It's crazy. Wow. And he's still, he's still there. Now his kids, his sons are taking over the restaurant. So, and he was just a dishwasher who, who came there with his brothers because his brother worked at a, uh, uh, I think at an air force or army base nearby. And he said, Hey, this is a cool town. We should go work there for the summer. Anyway, I would talk with him about things like that famous story in Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain grabs the cast iron pan, burns it.

1:22:48Matt Johnson:It drops to the ground. Well, it's Larry's older brother is the guy in the book who picks it up barehanded, showing him the boils and blisters on his hand. And he's like, what are you talking about? Like, you're such a baby that you can't do this? Larry and his brother together at dinner at the lobster pot tell me, that never happened. Are you insane? I would never grab a pot with my hand. Like people come up to me all the time saying this story and I have to tell them all it. I would never do that. Yes. It's psychotic. And in that is sort of the secret of the whole movie, right? It's like you're watching the story, the memories of a kid where, of course, it's true that he burned his hand and then somebody else picked it up and put it down.

1:23:32Matt Johnson:And that showed him, I have a long way to go. Yeah. But did it happen? Of course not.

1:23:37Sean Fennessey:I feel like it's such a great reflection of the fact that people with the biggest egos also have the deepest crevices of insecurity. So even when you're telling a story that is embarrassing for you, you have to exaggerate the effect in the storytelling.

1:23:49Matt Johnson:Well, hey, and I'm just as guilty. I mean, it's what I find so relatable about it. And it's why when I'm sitting there at lunch with Dominic Sessa with no interest at all in making a movie about Anthony Bourdain, within five sentences, I'm like, not only do I have to make this movie, but I know what it's about. And then, because really, well, Dom's a young guy, right? And he had really just made the holdovers and was sorting himself out and realizing, oh, I have a new, I have a new identity. Like I have a whole new identity. And watching him reckon with that, But with this level of maturity and sensitivity and a total lack of ego, like he's just speaking with me.

1:24:37Matt Johnson:I mean, I won't embarrass him by saying the specifics of what we're talking about. But I was like, if I said to Matt Miller, my producer who was in at the lunch, I said, we could just start rolling tomorrow. Like he's completely ready. I just need to shoot this guy in a close up experiencing these things. And we have a movie.

1:24:57Sean Fennessey:Part of what's so wonderful, though, about his performance and the way that you've written the character is you don't give him a lot. You don't give him a lot of cheap, easy wins for the first hundred minutes of the movie. No. In fact, he only loses.

1:25:12Matt Johnson:Yeah. But he also gets all these kinds of false victories where he thinks he's won. Yeah. Right? You know, think about how many times he lies and thinks he got away with it. Like, that's the whole movie. Yeah. And, like, he's like, yes, I did it. I lied to my mom. She believed me. Yes, I did it. I lied to Nancy and she thinks I'm here for writing fellowship. I lied my way into this kitchen. And he just keeps going down and down and down and down and down, thinking that he's going up and up and up and up.

1:25:36Sean Fennessey:One of the things that, you know, you mentioned that the film has some different formal stylistic moves than your other movies. But I also felt like, you know, it's quite contemplative and sad at times. And it also feels like if it was turned one degree to the right, it could just be New England taxi driver. You know, like it could be like the villain origin story. Of course. But where it lands ultimately is like, this felt like a movie that Touchstone Pictures could have released in 1997. I was like, this is like a very classical kind of Hollywood production.

1:26:04Matt Johnson:I take that as a huge compliment because I was playing around with the idea of like old school story structure. I mean, I'm sure people, this is obvious if you watch it, but I ripped the whole plot off of Pinocchio. Like I'm essentially trying to remake Disney's Pinocchio almost beat for beat. Like if you line them up, you'll be like, oh Jesus, you should be sued. I think that's in the public domain at this point yeah Pinocchio I think I've got it I think Disney changed a lot of shit to make it

1:26:32Sean Fennessey:how old is their Pinocchio? I think it's 38?

1:26:36Matt Johnson:I think it's the 30s yeah

1:26:38Sean Fennessey:we'll delete this part of the show

1:26:39Matt Johnson:no no no please run it run it I'm not the copyright holder do you think Josh DiMauro is listening to this podcast? you never know probably you never know but I was really trying to do a kind of like old school 90s is exactly right i mean it's probably because i'm so awash in it after having finished nirvana the band but but trying to to put a character through like like a classic hero's journey and and and and had i told you that story about um like the what i think the secret to writing movies is for me about about the history of psychoanalysis have i taught you about this

1:27:20Sean Fennessey:I think we talked about this off mic.

1:27:22Matt Johnson:Oh, really? I think so, yeah. I'll repeat it. I mean, if you're a screenwriter listening to this and you find this useful, it really changed my life, and I'll tell it as briefly as possible. And it's that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung sort of had two different approaches at dream analysis. And it was that the client comes in, tells you a dream. And Sigmund Freud would say, ah, interesting dream. Let's go down from that dream into your own biographical story. So what in the dream is representing things that happened with your mother, things that happened in your own life, like these things that happened to you specifically, it's telling us secrets about your own past that your subconscious is manifesting.

1:28:01Matt Johnson:And that's how we'll decode the dream and use it to help you. Whereas Carl Jung hears the exact same dream and goes up and says, okay, so what myth, what story either from the Bible or Greek mythology, like what does it map to? And then let's look at the story of the myth and it will tell you where you are in your own story. Right. And that will provide the answer of where you need to go next. And I found that framing of movies so unbelievably powerful. Like how I said, I just took Pinocchio as the myth and me and Dominic Sess's biographical details as the Freudian side of it. And then in the middle, the dream is the movie.

1:28:41Matt Johnson:right like and and and the more i apply that filter to the things i'm doing and it may just be like a shortcut for me to to make it easier for me to understand but i find it extremely powerful because if i get lost one way i can go the other way to help figure out where i'm supposed to go

1:29:03Sean Fennessey:it's so funny because i feel like one of the the recurring visual sonic motif of the movie is a person being abruptly awoken with splashed water and their dream ending.

1:29:12Matt Johnson:Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

1:29:14Sean Fennessey:So I'm sure that was, was that subconscious or the conscious speaking on the page? Well, I mean, how pretentious do you want me to be?

1:29:20Matt Johnson:I won't go there. I'll tell you, one of my favorite moments of the movie is when Dominic Sessa wakes up on his own. I really like that. I do too. Yeah.

1:29:28Sean Fennessey:Another reason why I thought of the 90s a little bit while watching this movie in a good way is I am like a card carrying Antonio Banderas super fan. Me too.

1:29:36Matt Johnson:And he doesn't, he's never gotten the credit he deserves. because Hollywood basically said, okay, all right, we've got like a prototypical super charming killer. How many different ways can we, we're going to make him like a warrior. We're going to make him an assassin. Desperado, assassins. Yeah, as Steve Buscemi says, the biggest Mexican you have ever seen in your life. Like, and I am sure like you grew up just loving this guy And he has the Denzel Washington magic, which anything he says doesn't matter what it is. Every line, explication or not, you're just like, more. It just sounds cool.

1:30:16Sean Fennessey:He just has the best voice. But then for me also, I mean, I loved him in the 90s, in Desperado, in Zorro. I loved all of those movies. And then getting a little older and seeing the Almodovar films, and you're like, oh, wow, this is a very complex psychological performer as well. And I do feel like, you know, he's a little disserved over the last 10 or 15 years with the parts that he's getting.

1:30:35Matt Johnson:I agree completely. But he's so fucking good in this movie. And I'm telling you, it's all him. I mean, I write all the roles for the actors. And so originally this guy was not a Roman Catholic, you know, like the details of him and what he has interests in basically became what the character is. And I do not mean to say he's playing himself. Not at all. I mean, it goes without saying, but it was the synthesis between like a kind of religious humility and this master chef kind of in hiding that kind of unlocked this character where everything he says and does, he just seems so intentional, but also so scared.

1:31:22Matt Johnson:Like he doesn't, he so doesn't want to be caught showing off, but he's the most handsome, charming, graceful person in all of Provincetown.

1:31:32Sean Fennessey:Yeah, but he's also a really tragic ghost of future past figure in the movie in such an amazing way.

1:31:37Matt Johnson:Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people view the film and they're like, okay, so this is about Anthony Bourdain picking between a good mentor and a bad mentor. And I'm like, no way. Both of these men that he's looking at are total failures. Yeah. But they're also unbelievable successes. and Bourdain has got to figure out, well, what of each of these guys am I going to keep? Because obviously Antonio Banderas is playing a guy who you'd view as, okay, that's a good influence, but you look at his life, you know?

1:32:06Sean Fennessey:I was wondering about this since this is, you know, your first film that is not made in the same style as the other films that you've made and it's with these Hollywood actors, but it's an ensemble piece. Big time. And Leo and Stav and Antonio and other actors as well, but they're just forces of nature charisma-wise. You know, like Leo, like, almost walks away with a movie in the middle of it. Isn't it crazy? Yeah, and like, I've talked to people who've seen it and they feel the same way, right? So how do you, one, how do you basically make chemistry in a situation like that where you've got a small number of actors, especially in those kitchen sequences?

1:32:38Sean Fennessey:And two, how do you, like, make sure that the movie is balanced enough in the favor of who you need it to be?

1:32:43Matt Johnson:Yeah, I'll answer the second question first, which is I have no idea. Like, that's not something that Kurt, Bobby, and I are conscious of really um because we i think like most film goers just try to put the cool shit on screen and if and if leo's doing the cool shit we're like okay yeah more more more more more yeah uh i think it kind of works itself out if if the story is working uh but in terms of getting people in a room to have fun with one another that's that is just the the magic of casting. I kind of have a perspective on that. Well, I guess I should say it's more of a philosophy. It's like, I'm only going to put people in my movies that I like because, well, when I'm watching even just footage, when I'm watching any of my movies, I know something is wrong when I don't like one of the characters that I put in a movie.

1:33:42Matt Johnson:And I don't mean like I disagree with. I mean that I don't like love them. Like when I'm watching, okay, when I'm watching Tony, I love everything Leo Woodall does. I love him. I want him to win. I look at Dominic Cessa. I love him. I want him to win. I want Antonio Banderas to win. I want Amelia Jones to win. Like I love them. Like I watched them and I could cry looking just at the vitality in their face as they're, as they are trying to get what they want. And so like the secret is meet them there. Like don't hire somebody to be in your movie who you do not feel that way about because you can't fake it.

1:34:22Matt Johnson:And so long as everybody comes there and they, they recognize that you really do want the best for them, then they'll play. They'll play. Like, I mean, maybe you can make a mistake and who knows, like maybe secretly Stavros and Leo Woodall hated one another, but no, they they they understand okay we're here and the and the better we do the better we're all gonna look and everybody was on everybody's team i also everybody's the same age oh young in their career and and they had each other's back we were we were trapped in cape cod man like we were trapped what was um was there one thing you would do differently if you could do it again

1:35:02Sean Fennessey:because since you had not been in a situation like this before i mean there's there's hundreds

1:35:06Matt Johnson:of things that would do differently. But, but, but I mean, my first time working in like, like the true American system, I was working with almost exclusively strangers. There's things that I, um, had such a relaxed attitude about because I'm so used to, uh, like my friends and I almost in a kind of autopilot. Like if you watch Nirvana, the band, you don't like, it's so painfully obvious that the people who made this have, well, no regard for bureaucracy. I'll just say that. I'll just, I'll put it that way. And so moving into a system where things just needed to be done a certain way, and for good reason, took so much getting used to for me.

1:35:52Matt Johnson:But again, it gets back to this thing I brought up at the beginning, which is I knew I needed to go through this kind of with no safety net because I was about to be thrown into like a 10 times more complicated situation. And I didn't want that to be the learning experience.

1:36:11Sean Fennessey:Just a little bit about choosing music. Sure, sure, sure. It's a lot of classical needle drops, big needle drops. Yeah. Obviously, Jay has score as well, which is really nice. I know.

1:36:20Matt Johnson:I love Jay's score. And he wrote those original piano cues so early. He was just watching footage. Well, like we always do. Kurt and Bobby will just send him dailies. And then it was, I think the very first thing he sent me, I was like, oh yeah, you've created the subconscious of Anthony Bourdain. And that, the very first thing he wrote is in the movie. Like he, he defined the tone instantly, but in terms of needle drops, this was the first time ever where this is getting back to your hyperlinking question, where there is a personality behind, I tried to do this in Blackberry a bit, although those guys were not really music fans, um, where the personality that you're making the movie about has a relationship with music already.

1:37:00Matt Johnson:And so the place that, that, uh, Kurt, Bobby and I started was with Bourdain's playlists from this time. And he has lists of music that he, that he loves, but then there's also something very cool, which is that he obviously is the music supervisor of his TV show. And so what we did, we, we just looked at every single one of the songs from this era that he put in his various shows because clearly those mean something to him. And so it was like this amazing, like we have our pick. And so like the, the song that's first playing in the kitchen when, I mean, I don't want to spoil the music in that.

1:37:36Matt Johnson:Well, I mean, I guess I can talk about it. What the hell do people care? I think that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. But, but, but Strawberry Letter is the song that he says, if he heard walking down the street thinking about Provincetown, he would just burst into tears and it, and it just so happens to be the song that is playing almost in the background while he's in the kitchen for the very first time washing dishes, paying no attention to it. So as many of these things that we could take from his own preference, we put in the movie, but then, and I have to give the credit in a way that I'm sure most people aren't used to hearing the executive on this film from A24, one of the executives, Noah Sacco watched a cut of the movie and out of nowhere was like, you know, I really love classic rock from this era.

1:38:21Matt Johnson:do you mind if I suggest a few songs? And the movie was basically done and I was like of course, of course. He sent me three songs. Every single song is in the movie and one of them is the closing credits.

1:38:31Sean Fennessey:No kidding.

1:38:32Matt Johnson:Yeah like he just it's the only time in my life I've ever got like feedback from a studio or a financier that was like oh wow yeah. A good note. They're like unbelievable notes. That's great. That I got from them.

1:38:46Sean Fennessey:I feel like you're in a very interesting moment in your life.

1:38:49Matt Johnson:Oh sure yeah.

1:38:51Sean Fennessey:You are from afar in demand. And you just talked about how, you know, whatever your imposter syndrome or your anxieties or your, you know, defensiveness or all the things that you had as a young person. It's now really being challenged. Well, but it kind of is Bourdain-ish. You know, we're at a certain Bourdain kind of crosses a Rubicon as a public figure.

1:39:14Matt Johnson:I know. It's so funny what happens to him. They're like, okay, guess what? You're a famous writer now. And he looks in the mirror and goes, well, I didn't mean to do that. Yes.

1:39:23Sean Fennessey:But I think I feel like you aspire to this, but also I'm curious to know like how you're handling it. We're like, I feel like you're on the minds of executives who want to make big movies. You're making the magic movie. You're making other stuff.

1:39:35Matt Johnson:Yeah.

1:39:36Sean Fennessey:Is it everything you ever hoped and dreamed? Are you happy?

1:39:38Matt Johnson:You know what? I think happiness is a bad metric because, you know, I think happy means different things to different people. I I'll say I feel I've never felt more proud that I can um I can uh I don't want to say be a role model but be like an example of not how easy it is to be a filmmaker but how you really don't need to be some kind of genius to do it right like you can you can that's not helpful people don't

1:40:07Sean Fennessey:listen to you on this show and think this guy's not really smart they think the opposite of that

1:40:11Matt Johnson:Well, you know what Miles Davis says about this? What's that? Is that a genius is the person who's most like themself. And that's a path anybody can take. And to take your point of what studio executives, et cetera, whatever that grouping of people really even means, what I find that anybody who wants me to make a movie for them or wants to talk about a project is interested in, they're all interested in the same thing, which is how I would do something, right? Like whatever it is that is me, which I don't, I even have trouble defining. How can that connect with the property they have or an IP or a story or whatever?

1:40:50Matt Johnson:And, and everybody has that. Like every film student has that because of course there's only one of them. And so for me, the, the challenge of my life was trying to figure out, and it's a work in progress, but like, like, what is it about my own specific circumstances? as a kid growing up where I did and my interest being what they were, like, what does that mean? And it's why all of my movies are constantly trying to re-examine that as much as possible and not necessarily change it, but like, keep getting closer and closer to it. Because it will be the journey of my life, as I'm sure it is with you.

1:41:31Sean Fennessey:Not the same, but I know, I appreciate you saying that.

1:41:34Matt Johnson:Sure, sure, sure.

1:41:35Sean Fennessey:I, uh, I'm curious what is a, what is the metric of success for a movie like Tony? Because it is, I feel like, you know, it's a, it's an American studio film. You've got a rising young star. You've got a legend of Hollywood and the cast. Like, is it a, is it, do you look at box office actively? Do you read the reviews of the film? Like, do you think about it any differently than your previous work?

1:41:57Matt Johnson:Uh, you know, every movie, I think I've told you this before that like the great victory of every single movie is when you solve the story problems in the editing room. And Kurt, Bobby and I go, oh my God, I can't believe we fixed this. And it never gets better than that. So that, that like nothing ever even comes within like a, like arm's reach of that feeling. So, but you're asking specifically, like obviously like almost to cynically look at, at the success of a film and, uh, practically, but they're both the same, the same. I don't mean cynically negative, negatively. I just mean in terms like the practical result of it.

1:42:32Sean Fennessey:You're making a product that is going into the marketplace as well, you know? Oh, definitely.

1:42:35Matt Johnson:And I do think that all my work is trying to be at the crossroads of what audiences actually do want to see. I'm making movies for people to watch and enjoy. And so I do respect the idea that people are going to go see this movie if they like it and they won't if they don't. I'm making a crude case for the commercialization of film. Um, but, but I don't, I'll put it this way. Let's say that this movie were released and critics were all like, oh my God, this is like a pathetic navel gazing piece of garbage and nobody went to go see it. that still wouldn't change the feeling that I had when I watched it with my friends in the editing room being like, ah, we did it.

1:43:34Matt Johnson:So I, what I want is for really young people to watch it and feel like it's useful to them in the same way that I felt that about Nirvana, the band and the dirties and all of these movies, even though I wasn't mature enough at the time to, to make that claim but but i want to keep making movies hopefully to try to it well so it's it's so self-aggrandizing to say make the world better but but but that's that's i think a good movie can do that so do i yeah i so do i i think even like like very small independent like seen by 5 000 people movies can be and and i think that that viewing them that way in the same way that when I was in film school and you'd be up all night and you'd be like, oh my gosh, this movie that I'm making now is like the most important thing I've ever done in my life.

1:44:24Matt Johnson:That still animates me because I still think it's true that if you give something, everything that you have, and you really, really do try to make it great outside of, detached from your own ego, then it does make the world better. And I think that's true of every vocation, every job, this podcast, like the more you put into it, like if you really, really, really do great, you lift everybody. We all get lifted. And it's why we were talking before about criticism. I think film critics are a part of that. And it's why when people don't meet that standard, they're told, I think that if you had thought about this movie more or worked harder or whatever, pick your criticism, then it's not just that your movie would have been better.

1:45:08Matt Johnson:It's that the life of people everywhere would have been better. And that's a huge responsibility that a lot of people don't want to fess up to that, that the actions that you take as an individual might affect the world in some small way. But of course it's true. It is true.

1:45:22Sean Fennessey:Um, you're feeling good about the state of movies. You came in and you said it feels like something has happened.

1:45:28Matt Johnson:Yeah. It's like we're living for a Renaissance and it's exclusively because of like people 25 and under. It's crazy. It's awesome i've been praying on this it's like letterbox somehow it's so bizarre that that that that that that it's i won't even know that i don't know that it's cool but it's almost like like it has movies have become a new kind of collectible you know in the way that when i was young we'd collect pogs it's like oh you're you're collecting the history of your own culture

1:46:07Sean Fennessey:which is which is so so crazy it's a great way to describe it and and that is what it is because you people can see what you've watched yes they can see what you have accomplished you literally

1:46:17Matt Johnson:create your own history yeah of course of course and and the closer you get to it and and of course people are like oh i want to watch like every weird idiosyncratic thing and and the look the challenge that everybody's going to have is you have to figure out what you like that's hard and And it was becoming harder and harder as culture was becoming almost more rarefied. With the internet, it was like people could get into all these weird niches and there was nothing that created a collective viewing experience. That's completely gone. And yet somehow it's been reformed where all of these niche interests are now coming together.

1:46:54Matt Johnson:It's like, no, we've all now seen these weird movies.

1:46:56Sean Fennessey:I have a strong feeling about this, which is that the homogenization of Hollywood movies between 2005 and 2020 led people, it led to like a kind of break with the contemporary culture and sent people back. Oh, wow. They were like, I feel like I'm watching the same movie over and over again, but I know that this isn't the history of movies. What else has there been? And so once they got through every Fast movie and every Marvel movie and every Jurassic movie, all the franchises, they were like, there's more here. and it led to this unconscious collective realization of discovering history. They wanted to go to the original texts.

1:47:31Sean Fennessey:They went back to the original texts. Yes, and now the industry is following them in a way that I really love. Anyway, that's my hopeful outro. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen. You just got off a plane. Did you watch anything on the plane?

1:47:43Matt Johnson:I was so close to watching Roofman. Oh my gosh. Oh, I liked it. Well, C. and France is one of my heroes. He's so great. He's one of the few filmmakers that I'd be afraid to meet. He's one of these very... He's a very nice guy. you know I say this place beyond the pines I say this about him and very few others but he knows secrets and I don't know how he he's a deep cat I don't know how he knows them so I will say I almost watched Roofman and so I'll say that's the last thing that I that I watched even though I didn't actually see it because the because the feeling of almost seeing it really filled me with a feeling of like oh yeah I'm gonna watch a new C in France because I love C in France I love him

1:48:23Sean Fennessey:No one has ever answered that question in that way. Hegelian negation. Johnson, you are the best.

1:48:30Matt Johnson:Thank you. I'm so happy to be here and I'll see you again.

1:48:37Sean Fennessey:Okay, thank you to Matt. Thanks to Sierra. Thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanaugh for his production support. Next week, we're drafting again movie flops. You feel ready for this? Yeah, I don't like targeting flops, but we're going to make it work. You don't like targeting flops? Yeah, I want to celebrate the good qualities of movies, not their economic failures. Well, that's not the only way we're grading flops. Ooh. See you then.

1:49:21This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast.

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