The Interviews (ft. David Kittredge on Boorman And The Devil; Padraic McKinley on The Weight)

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to another episode of The Interviews. We're kicking off with a long one folks, an extended interview with David Kittredge, director slash editor slash narrator of the excellent documentary Berman and the Devil, which tells the wild story behind the making of John Berman's Exorcist II, The Heretic, complete with interviews with Berman, stars Louise Fletcher and Linda Blair, and a host of familiar faces. It also, in a way, makes a case for the film, which has long been famously considered one of the worst blockbusters ever made. I spoke to Kittredge on Zoom recently, and we had a fascinating chat about a fascinating film that went way over our allotted time.

1:01Chris Hewitt:Enjoy. Thanks for doing this. I love the film. You know, you work on a film for several years as I have on this film, and it's like, you know, to get this kind of reception, the reception that I like, because we premiered it at Venice last year, so I've been running around with the film for about a year, and it's, I don't honestly know how to process it. It's just been amazing. and I've met so many amazing famous filmmakers that I'm like, oh my, you want to talk to me? I'll talk to you. That's great. You're a legend. But it's been a little bit crazy. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you. Well, David, I want to talk about the journey that this film has had to the screen because it's evidently a long one.

1:45Chris Hewitt:And there are a couple of clues. One is very, very sad. Obviously, Louise Fletcher is no longer with us. If I had known I was going to get this much shit for john saying that he was 85 i probably would have cut it out because i didn't know like because it's true i shot john borman in in he was the first interview in this film and that was in 2018 right and that was and he was 85 and um i actually saw john yesterday and that was the first time i had seen him since 2018 um he's not now no he moved uh in with his uh son charlie in surrey okay yeah and um yeah i mean he's i mean he's 93 now i mean he's still there and and and it was you know lovely to see him um i'm glad i shot him when i did uh and i'm glad everybody got to see john borman the way that i think john would have wanted to be seen twinkling and sharp and uh and and all the oh yeah kind of all the great things that that you know make up who he is yeah and um yeah i mean he's had some health issues uh in the last year or two especially and um you know he's hanging in there um which is amazing yeah yeah i i just i and it was really lovely to kind of go to him and say, you know, thank you.

3:14Because I mean, you've seen the film, so you know, he didn't have to open up to me the way that he did. He didn't have to be vulnerable. There have been people who have kind of given me the credit for this. And it's like, I don't, I can't credit. I mean, I mean, I think he liked me. And I think he, he believed me when I said I wanted to look at this one film in his filmography, probably the last film he wanted to actually look at and say like, okay, this was a film that fundamentally changed you as an artist, the way that you looked at film, the way that you looked at the audience. And you can see the films he made after and some masterpieces that he made after.

3:56And having gone through the cataclysm of the heretic, both in the making of it and the reception of it, fundamentally changed him as an artist. And not for worse, either. I think that it really broadened his belief, it broadened his vision of what cinema really is, which is not just about making movies for yourself. It's like there's a communication and a dialogue you have with the audience. um and yeah it it was very moving yesterday i mean this is very emotional because it just happened yesterday i'm still very emotional about it because i'll never be able to repay him that debt if if my documentary is worth anything it's because he chose to be open and vulnerable and um that's a debt i can never repay how did you get in touch with him in the first place I was put in touch with an author who wrote a book about him.

4:59And I basically said, like, can I give you an email to forward to him? You know, being respectful, you know, it's like, I want to be respectful. um and he did and john got back in touch with me and we had kind of it was kind of a courtship to get him to agree to an interview because i had to i felt i had to convince him that i was like a for real like as a filmmaker like i was an actual filmmaker like not some you know amateur or you know kind of youtube you know video essay like whatever um and then i was not making a film out to mock him or the film i actually wanted to look at this this work in his body of work what was he trying to do where was he at how and again technically this exorcist to the heretic like it or hate it um it's technically an astonishing film and and some of the stuff they did in it with the in-camera effects and and the camera tricks and all the stuff it's stuff that he would employ later but it's it's also just unbelievably inventive stuff it's it's one of the most visually stunning movies of that period of any scope.

6:08And I think just as a cinema lover, I wanted to know how some of it was done. So yeah, and after a few months, and this was 2017 when I first got in touch with him. And then after a few months, we agreed, he invited me to his home to shoot him in his home. And I had one day with him. And that was February 28, 2018. And And the entire interview takes place that comes from that day, that one day. There were no reshoots. It was, you know, you got what you got. But he sat with me pretty much the whole day. And I got an interview that I was watching. I remember I was watching the footage back in my hotel room that night, duplicating the media.

6:52Oh, my God, I got to get this off on one disc. I got to put this on multiple hard discs because, you know, whatever. and I was watching it and I just felt like A, I have a responsibility, an overwhelming responsibility to make this film and finish it and get it out no matter how long it takes because this, as a cinema lover, this is one of the great directors of all time as far as I'm concerned and he's talking not just about this one film, he's talking about his life, he's talking about what it is to make films, to make art, to make any sort of ambitious art and how to survive when it turns into a catastrophe.

7:30And this is all stuff I don't think a lot of artists talk about. And to have one of our greatest filmmakers, one of the greatest filmmakers ever, speak about this, I just felt this responsibility. I was like, I don't care how long it takes. I have to make this and I have to make this as fantastic as I possibly can make this. I told my friends, I was just like, if this isn't one of the greatest movies ever made about making a movie i'm not going to stop until it is i i that's all i wanted to do um because you know i think there are a lot of people like me who just love cinema and love movies and it's this movie is for us first of all how long did you have with john i had a day uh i

8:14Chris Hewitt:don't i don't remember how many hours okay so it was a full day though i mean like because we started in the morning we set up we started shooting we took a lunch break then we we we shot all afternoon and and by the time i left the sun it was like magic hour the sun was going down so i was just your crew local crew oh yeah no actually seamus deasy who was his cinematographer on the last several films he made uh shot it and it was really lovely he offered um wow because they're close friends and i think i think he i think it was insurance i think you wanted to make sure it was done right uh and i was like oh my god you're gonna get seamus deasy do it like he's great whatever that's fine you just gave me a gift um and we had two cameras and yeah that was it and and um it's funny like you know i talk about that moment in the hotel watching the footage and hearing john talk about like his life his work ambition his family how he felt when exorcist 2 the heretic came out and it was so rejected it was there were riots you can't even talk about the rejection of this film and and make people in 2026 understand it exactly because this was this was at a time before home video much less the internet and you know if you wanted to see a movie you would have to see in the theater or or wait several years to see it edited for television there was only later in like the 80s that people started having like you know um like pay cable and stuff and being able to see stuff it might be different in britain because I think that you guys were playing unedited movies even then, but in America, you couldn't, you couldn't see anything.

9:50And they wanted to be scared and they weren't, they were not scared by Exorcist 2. They were mad. And he, he really, I learned later, he said in an interview, actually, just a couple of weeks ago, and I did not know this, that he had never really talked about this period of his life. And this is the greatest professional trauma of his life. a trauma that I can't even imagine to have worked so hard and so long on such a sincere film like it or hate it, Exorcist 2 The Heretic is an utterly sincere film and just, I can't he almost gave up filmmaking and thank god he didn't yeah, absolutely

10:34Chris Hewitt:I mean, from that you go into his house your focus at that point is The Exorcist 2 not dying i was so nervous like i'm talking to one of the greatest filmmakers ever and i'm like okay i'm hyper prepared right yeah i didn't want to have a heart attack really okay i i i have like 11 pages of questions okay and i'm like okay i don't know if we're gonna get through everything like we're supposed to have two days together that morning john pulls me aside before the shoot is like david i think we can get this done in a day and i'm like you're john borman yes we'll get it. Just tell me, fine, we'll get it done.

11:12And we did. And I just think I was in like kind of a fugue state when I was interviewing him. Because I'm also like kind of like I'm largely, I have largely been an editor for most of my career. And so I know bites, I know sound bites, I know moments. And it's like, I'm watching him. And part of me is listening to what he's saying. And then part of me is like listening for, okay, that's a bite. Okay, that's a bite. And there were very few cases he's so good there are very few cases where i was like could you say that again um like without the pronoun because like you would need to happen without that with the context you know like you would have to take out the context so there i think i only did that i only had him repeat something i think once and i don't even think it made the final cut so um he was just a fantastic interviewee, you know, open, funny, such a lovely, I wish I could have just, you know, spent dinners with him.

12:11I spoke to a lot of friends that would, he would hang out with, you know, in the seventies and eighties. And there was like, he was the best guy to have dinner with because there were always stories. I mean, he told so many stories like, you know, that a lot of which I couldn't use in the final cut. And, you know, when there is an eventual blu-ray of this film there's going to be a lot of john that you did not see on that blu-ray i mean

12:33Chris Hewitt:there's a classic stories about lee marvin lee marvin on top of his car i know that's the one where lee marvin was like on the roof of his car drunk yeah that's a great story uh i think he told me that at the dinner i had with him before the shoot but i don't i don't think he ever said that to me on camera he said he said that before though he writes about it in his it's in his book adventures of a suburban boy which is a great autobiography it is it's amazing uh uh and so so you go into this you have the interview with john uh he says so much about his career and about his life did that take you by surprise and did that make you almost want to change the focus of your film because it is very much a film about the making of of the heretic but there's a lot of there's a lot of burman in there as well the title itself burman and the devil you know exorcist original title i mean it really because he was the first interview like i wanted to make a movie about exorcist 2 because i was obsessed with that movie not just the movie itself but how it got made the budget level got me it was the biggest budget in warner brothers history and it was the sequel to the third highest grossing movie in history of anywhere the highest grossing movie at warner brothers for sure and it was a phenomenon the exorcist was a phenomenon and to do a sequel a big big budget sequel that was so far afield tonally and And execution wise, it was like, the exorcist is a naturalistic kind of almost like at times documentary style.

13:58You are there, which is why it's so scary movie. And exorcist to the heretic is this kaleidoscopic dreamlike phantasmagoria that is not naturalistic at all, really. It's, you know, it just exists in its own world. And, you know, to do that, to make those choices is so gutsy. And so, yeah, some might say misguided, but at the same time, Exorcist to the Heretic, like it or hate it, it's a wholly unique film. There's not another film like it. Not in tone, not in execution. And for all its flaws, I just find myself sometimes thinking about it. um and so yeah i knew there was a version of a documentary about this film with john and one without john certainly i wanted it with john when he agreed i went out there but i that hotel and bray looking over that footage i was like this movie is not about exorcist 2 this movie is about what it means to be an artist and to make something that is profoundly ambitious and what happens if it's a catastrophe and how do you survive and is it still worth it even if it's a catastrophe and this is I think something that I know I as an artist I'm not in I think John's league but it's like you know I and a lot of people that I know in the industry a lot of creative people grapple with issues like this because I think that you know in our day-to-day you know there's a culture of fear around movies and financing movies because everything's so expensive because everybody just don't you know they don't want to lose their jobs they don't you know it's this whole to get anything done especially now it's very very difficult because everyone's terrified and boorman and his spirit and and the and the guts of this movie like you know in a lot of ways it was the worst case scenario when this came out it was critically reviled audiences hated it with the fury of a thousand suns and and yet i think the argument the documentary mazes makes is it was still worth it and not only that i don't think you get a point blank or a deliverance or an excalibur if you don't allow directors to make a movie like exorcist 2 because you don't get the good stuff unless you take the risks and yeah the risks maybe didn't go well with this film for a lot of reasons uh some of which were on john and some of which really weren't.

16:28Um, but you know, it's that risk taking, that risk taking, uh, ambition and the choices you make to take those risks that I think is what cinnamon needs now, especially now. And I think that's what audiences crave, you know, it, it, at least, you know, for me, it's a lot more important to me whether that a movie like try stuff it doesn't matter to me as much if it all succeeds all the time yeah yeah that's right you know i'll cut a movie a lot of slack if it's just imaginative and interesting and different and it surprises me you know i see movies dozens of movies every year that are perfectly fine you know they they they work they're fine they're good you know you watch them and it's just and you don't remember them you know but they're okay and it's like i personally don't need to see any more movies like that i'm i you know i think at a certain age you're just like what am i wasting my time with this stuff for you know give me something that like swings with the fences even if it doesn't succeed like give me southland tales you know give me give me you know 1941 you know like there's there's tons of examples of this we should draw the line somewhere david i didn't even i didn't even get real harsh on that either like there's a lot of good stuff in 1941 um i love 1941 i think it's i think it's a i think it's genuinely underrated i think it's actually a good movie but i can't argue with the critique that it's a little bit shrill but i enjoy the hell out of it whenever it's on and also one of john williams absolute best scores ever i will put that in john williams honestly i will put that in a top five and that's hard for john williams like raiders and star wars and you know like oh my god but um superman oh my god yeah but i would put 1941 up there i think his score for that is just phenomenal that's interesting

18:39Chris Hewitt:but just to go back to the idea because you mentioned financing there and is that one of the reasons why there was a kind of eight year gap between that John Borman interview and the release of the film at least over here because I imagine this is one of the things that fascinates me about documentary filmmaking I imagine this was relatively hard to fund, to finance how are you doing it? Documentaries. Well, everything is hard to fund. Documentaries are even harder. And yeah, I didn't have any kind of like massive backing behind this. I had a little money that I had saved up. I had a couple of friends who believed in the project who put some money in, but the entire budget for this is like, it's minuscule.

19:24It's a rounding error to most movies. It's ridiculous. it's like you know um this was a labor of love it was it was passion you know it's like you know and and everybody who who really like was behind it like my two producers travis stevens and jim fall and um you know the the amazing team that i got you know and nobody nobody got their raid or anything close to it some of us didn't get anything like you know right for at least for now now uh we'll see if it pays off um but yeah I mean I had to keep the lights on I had to do other jobs but and one of the other reasons that I mean one of the main reasons that this took so long as the pandemic punched like a year and a half hole in our schedule um we weren't able to shoot anybody for a while and then um I was on another project called queer for fear the history of queer horror where I was the lead editor and a co-exec producer uh with Brian but Brian Fuller was the executive producer and I'm very proud of that project.

20:21It turned out very well, but that was like a couple of years with that. I was basically really, really busy, you know, making that happen. So yeah, there were a number of reasons, but, but, but it, you know, in a way, it was good in the sense that, you know, we could have the time to do it right. And, you know, I think the first rough assembly, which was 196 minutes, by the way, was in September of 2023. And then we premiered in Venice in September of 2025. And now we're, you know, we just released in America in August. And now we're releasing in the UK this month. And so it's kind of like this is the culmination of many, many years of work and a lot of really great people believing in this.

21:08Chris Hewitt:Amazing. And in that time, I mean, John is the first card to fall, but my God, what a card. And then that leads to other cards. So, you know, from there, you can go to Linda Blair, you can go to Louise Fletcher. And we did. That's exactly what happened. It's like, after we got John Borman, the next one was Rospo, because Rospo Pallenberg, his associate and the uncredited rewriter of the script, was the next one. And then it was Linda after that. And then a couple of like Melissa Scoff, who was born in secretary. I found her in Los Angeles and Jim Hempfel, who is a historian and a critic, a great writer as well.

21:48And then Louise Fletcher. I found I shot her in early 2019, just, you know, months before the pandemic. And then a few other people, then the pandemic shut us down. And then after like in 2021 or 2021, I think we started shooting the critics, Bill Gabbiri and Stephanie Zacharek and Simon Abrams and and all the crew members. And that went all through 2022. And then the last interviews we did were Joe Dante and Mike Flanagan. Mike Flanagan was the very last one. And we shot him in January 2025. 25. And that was really actually great because Flanagan saw a cut of the film and loved it so much that he wanted to be in it.

22:34And it was great because like, we knew we needed certain moments or certain things that he had to talk about. Like, you know, like, like he has a bit in the film where he's talking about what is success for a filmmaker. And it was really important to me that we had filmmakers talk about that from kind of a personal aspect uh and joe dante did and and mike flanagan did and and uh and this was actually before i think it was officially greenlit that he was doing an exorcist uh just wanted to ask that yeah i was

23:04Chris Hewitt:i was literally looking it up as you were as you were talking it was funny because he was i think he was writing it and i think it was like i don't remember if it was announced or not um may 24 24 was announced that he was in talks so it was announced but it was not like a full green light whatever because he wasn't even done the script yet yeah um but he told me the concept which i promised i would not tell and now it's starting to come out and i'm still not going to tell because i promised but you know i can't wait to see this film by the way like everyone asks me about what do you think mike flanagan so i think mike flanagan's film is going to be phenomenal and i'm not just saying that because he was in the film i'm saying that because he told me the concept and i'm like i will see that film my god yes that's that's the way to go and i i adore scarlett johansson i think she's brilliant in everything so i'll i'll go see anything with her so yeah i can't wait for that to come out i think that comes out in march or something it comes out in march yeah i'm really really fascinated by it because he's clearly someone who is you know he knows his horror onions he clearly loves the original friedkin but he also has an affinity for for the exorcist 2 as well he's talking about filmmakers taking swings and yep well he respects it i think that's the thing he respects the swing um and he like like like dante like like boorman like you know you know will admit readily admit that like this movie does not work for a mass audience especially a mass audience that's expecting exorcist 2 yeah you know as you know like from the doc um boorman did not shoot it as exorcist 2 it was called the heretic it was going to be released as just the heretic that was it was the the exorcist and it was just gonna be the heretic and at one point it was like the heretic colon exorcist part two or exorcist two and then late late late in the game warner brothers basically came to him was like it's going to be called exorcist to the heretic and bornman did not want it to be called exorcist to the heretic that is not the movie he shot he shot the heretic and it's a it's a you know nuanced kind of thing but i do think that it is important like if you're going to see exorcist 2 versus the heretic exorcist part 2 i think there's a difference and it's mild but i think there's a difference and i think i'm often asked actually if it had just gone out as the heretic would it have been you know uh how would it have done better and my answer is if i was a warner brothers executive in 1977 and i was looking at that research like the data about the title awareness and all that stuff because i saw these papers i saw the forms i saw the the percentage was and uh i probably would have made the same decision that the warner brothers executives did because i don't think they would have gotten that opening weekend had it not been called exorcist to the heretic and it was a big big budget movie and they needed that opening weekend and i get it but if it had been called the heretic or the heretic exorcist part two i think it would not have grossed as much but it would have been far less hated than it was so you know depending on what what's important to you is it more important to you to make money or is it more important to you to be less hated it's like i you know if i'm a warner process executive it's probably more important than you to make more money that is very very true yeah i get it you know i i get it i I don't, you know, I think it's unfortunate, but I get it.

26:26Chris Hewitt:It's a fascinating thing because my relationship with that film is, well, I guess it's up to other people to decide what is interesting. Because I saw it as a kid. I saw it maybe in my early teens. And it had this reputation as one of the worst movies of all time. And when you go into with that, I think you see a movie that is pretty honking. Yeah. You can put it in that context. You can. You can. Do you feel and do you find, or have you found even, that with this movie that people are coming back to it and revisiting it? Because now I haven't seen it in years and now I want to go and revisit it with the knowledge of everything that Berman was trying and with the gonzo stuff that I wasn't able to appreciate when I was 11 or 12.

27:13off is that what i think it's i i think your your your experience is very similar to mine um i i saw it first when i was a teenager on video and i knew about its reputation and the only version when i first saw it was the recut version the the version that's 16 minutes shorter with richard burton dying at the end and a lot of the stuff that made audiences like rabbit and ballistic taken out. So what was left was, it was a fascinating movie. It didn't really connect with me. I really didn't get obsessed with this movie until I saw the first North American premiere cut, which Warner Brothers home video released in the mid nineties.

27:52And then it was like that had, you know, Linda Blair tap dancing that had all the stuff in it that made people insane. It's fascinating what you talk about. And then I got obsessed with it. I'm like, oh my God, what is this movie? And how did it get made? And what were they trying to do? And oh my god it's visually insane um but it's i've been on the festival circuit like a year and a lot of the times these festivals would these film festivals would run the documentary and then they would run exorcist to the heretic after it either as a double bill or just like later in the day and it's very funny that after if if exorcist to the heretic played after my documentary there was very little laughter if any like like most of the time when you would show this movie people would laugh at the more risible lines or moments or something like, you know, but not after they saw Borman and the devil.

28:41It's like they willed themselves to come to the level of the film, which is really hard. This film asks a lot of an audience. It really asks it to buy a bunch of stuff like, you know, the synchronizing thing and all the dreamy, trippy, crazy stuff. And it's like, but I hope if the documentary manages to get people to watch Exorcist 2, The Heretic, and actually give it a shot, like a real shot, like that as a sincere thing that maybe doesn't work all the time, but, you know, has its moments and has its charms. That's really wonderful.

29:21Chris Hewitt:And finally, did you, once you had all these interviews, and once you started getting a cut of the film together, did you think about going back to John for a top-up, so to speak, or did you reach out? I didn't need to. I didn't need it. I mean, I left that interview with... I put together a sequence of the interview with topics and just this little five-second technical card, like, Excalibur, and then John talking about Excalibur, and like, Zardoz, and John talking about Zardoz. it was two and a half hours and cut out my questions largely it was two and a half hours which if you know interviews like that's like a very meaty bunch of stuff um i didn't need anything additional and and i i don't think the documentary did either i think that i actually left that interview saying like i could just do a documentary just with him uh but i didn't feel that that was the story i wanted to tell i wanted to tell the story of not just this film not just what he went through, but like what it was like to make films in the 70s, what Hollywood was doing in the 70s and how Exorcist to the Heretic was one of the first of several movies that ended an era of movie making, which, you know, kind of called the Hollywood New Wave now or Golden Age or whatever you want to call it, which kind of lasted from about 1967 with, you know, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, all the way up to Heaven's Gate, which is, you know, most people kind of point to as the end of the auteur, like era of Hollywood, where studios would give these people, these artists, you know, significant budgets, sometimes huge, but sometimes just, you know, okay budgets to make these movies that like, you know, one wouldn't have thought modern audiences would want to see.

31:16I mean, you look down a list of the great movies ever made, the top you know 250 movies ever made you know like there are a lot of them from america from about 1967 to 1980 there's a whole bunch um and because they were financed by these studios and audiences wanted to see these movies i mean i could go down this list this long list of like movies that came out of this period i mean you had the hits like the godfather but like You also had like Brewster McCloud, you know, or Nashville. Can you imagine any major studio giving Robert Altman money to make Nashville? And Nashville is, as far as I'm concerned, probably one of the 10 greatest movies ever made.

31:58It is absolutely a masterpiece. But, you know, it wouldn't have been made without studio money. That was not an inordinately cheap movie. It wasn't a hugely expensive movie, but that was not a cheap movie. You need studios to finance movies like that. and that's what's you know that's what i want to see again i want to see studios financing swings and you see it a little bit like i mean you know weapons got financed yeah you know can you imagine reading the script to weapons and being like you know this is gonna be a big hit it's like but they did they financed it god bless them you know one battle after another even mickey 17 which i personally had issues with it's like huge budget very different movie

32:41Chris Hewitt:David I'm going to let you go it's been a pleasure talking to you and best of luck with everything Thank you Chris Okay that was David Kittredge folks and Boorman and the Devil is in cinemas right now and it is well worth your time if you're a fan of excellent documentaries about flawed movies this even made me want to give Exorcist 2 a second chance Next up this week we have an interview with Podrick McKinley director of the historical drama The Wait which stars Ethan Hawke as a prisoner who undertakes a dangerous assignment to transport a load of gold on his back. Think wages of fear on foot and you're halfway there.

33:18Chris Hewitt:Jamie Graham spoke to McKinley recently and here is our conversation. Enjoy. Welcome to the Empire podcast today. Thank you. Let's start. I mean, I know you've done a lot of TV, great TV. You've been an editor, you've been a producer, but this is your feature debut as a director. And there you are going out into a German wilderness, obviously playing a part of Oregon. But I mean, it's biting off a lot. Were you ever afraid that this is a really big, ambitious movie to be my first one? Oh, I mean, every single day, every time I opened the schedule and then they said, we've got this much to shoot today.

33:57And we got that, you know, after we drive to the location and then we got to hoof it out to the, you know, to the actual spot we're shooting. And then you have this many hours to do this many scenes. I mean, every day I sort of sort of wondered why, why not just to, you know, make this smaller somehow. But, you know, once I got everybody out there and these guys are so inspirational, you know, Ethan and Russell and Julia and Austin and Avi, all the guys was just, you know, they were so game that it was like we had, we had full momentum going for us, you know? So the challenge of it being big actually, I think, galvanized us in a weird way that it was almost the impossible.

34:36So everyone had to step up and be on it. And they sure did. You know, they really did. They really did. Now, back in the day and a better day in many ways than it is now, this kind of movie would have had people queuing up around the block. But it's a kind of character driven piece. It's men on a mission. It's an adventure. You know, this is what movies used to be. but there's not many now. How hard is it to get something like this up and running? Oh, it was, if I'm being totally honest, Jamie, there was parts of me for the four and a half years it took to get it up on its feet. I would say I spent four years and two months of those four and a half years thinking this movie was never going to happen just because it would get momentum and then it'd be ripped away.

35:25And then we'd get a new opportunity to maybe try to shoot it somewhere else and get tax incentives and grants and, you know, people who foreign sales that might have, you know, got us there. And every time we got wind in our sails, it seemed like the mast broke, you know, almost every time, including I was supposed to fly on a Friday to start pre-production on a Monday. And on the Thursday, the movie fell apart again. And luckily to our partners at Vertical, they came and stepped up, gave us the money we needed to shoot it and also are going to distribute us. So I wish, you know, I wish they were queuing up around the block, but it's still still try to make, you know, the best version of this that I could and that we could as a team, you know.

36:05Definitely. Now, I know you've worked with Ethan before on Good Lord Bird, which you edited. But what was it about Mr. Hawk where you just knew he was your Samuel Murphy, your lead role in this film? Well, it's a great question because the first time I met Ethan, I'd come into Good Lord Bird late and they sort of wanted to reinvent where they'd been at that point as far as the stuff they'd seen. And that's why I'd flown back to Richmond, Virginia to shoot some second unit. And I didn't know what the politics on the set were. So I'd sort of, I was hoping to sort of be insulated from every, all the, all the sort of infighting that was kind of, you know, going on, or maybe that's too strong of a word, but the politics.

36:50And when I landed, they said, Ethan would like to have dinner. Now I can't say no. I showed up at this Cuban restaurant, this sort of hole in the wall. and Ethan was sitting at the bar and we met and we sat down at the bar at a table and we spent about three or four hours talking about movies and about the good Lord Bird and things that we liked and music and art and these things and at the end of that 10 minutes into that conversation I knew that him and I would have an extreme creative kinship and I'm sure a lot of people feel that way about Ethan because he projects so much art out into the world.

37:32But when we were done with Good Lord Bird and we got to the end of it, I think we both felt very strongly that we wanted to do something together again really quickly. And I got this script from the Fields, Fields Entertainment. And although it was a very different script, I gave it to Ethan. We saw an opportunity. We rebuilt a character for Ethan. And luckily, we not only chose a character that Ethan would be perfect, We built a character, Ethan, perfect for him. But also we got to continue our friendship and our creative collaboration. You know, I can't say enough about the man. Ethan says it's very much a kind of Paul Newman character and that he's always wanted to do one of those.

38:12I mean, that must have been great working with him with that kind of role. Well, you know, the other part was with Shelby Gaines, who Ethan had brought into the fold. Shelby, the writer, actually ended up composing the film as well with his brother Latham. he understood Ethan so well, and he understood the mission so well of the poem because of where Ethan was, what he was sniffing at that time, doing his documentary and what he was getting inspired by. Shelby had a really great connection to Ethan. So, we were able to strengthen that, the sort of spine of the film really, really quickly. And that character, he doesn't talk much and he's older than the rest of the guys, but he's mechanical and he's clever.