The director’s episode: how tech makes movies

25:02Like, oh, we want to be like what a bunch of young Canadians would be like in this situation. And then technically I'll talk like Adam McKay's The Big Short was shooting in a style that we really liked because we wanted to be observational like our previous films, very much in a documentary space, but with much longer lenses. And this is maybe getting overly technical, but in order to do that, in order to shoot handheld documentary style with like 500 millimeter lenses, which are gigantic. Oh, wow. Yeah. You need to shoot in a certain way just to get these cameras into these spaces. And so we stole a lot of technical stuff from that movie.

25:41Did you watch all the tech docs? There's a bunch of sort of well-known, old school tech documentaries, especially from the 90s, the sort of Pirates of Silicon Valley, all that kind of genre. We watched them all. And I got to say, Pirates of Silicon Valley was a major reference. And so was that documentary about GovWorks. Do you remember this film? No, I haven't seen this. It came out. It was about the dot-com crash. And it was about a company that made paying your parking tickets online possible. They were the first people to do that in a certain region. And that documentary was a major influence in terms of the culture of what we were seeing.

26:17It's an amazing documentary. But then also, even before that, most of our references were documentary references because that's sort of the aesthetic we were going for. But the Penny Baker film, The War Room, which is about the Clinton Carville campaign, specifically in the South, that was a huge influence on us. So, yeah, we watched all of that stuff. And I love those films. And I like those documentaries specifically are like major, major touchstones for us. And so what we were trying to do in our movie is create that same feeling of you are there and the camera doesn't know what's about to happen to varying success, I would say.

26:50But those were our big references. And it's why I love talking to tech journalists so much, because it seems as though they've seen a lot of the same stuff. Pirates of Silicon Valley is great. I want them to make more stuff like this because, again, I think it's an era that although we are getting these like giga movies about this kind of stuff, whether it's the Uber movie or the Theranos movie, I guess these are series. Yeah. But there is an era that I feel like is slightly forgotten. And that's that's the mid to late 90s where we really were transporting from a much more technical, like oily, tangible product into an entirely digital product.

27:25And that's the era that I really love. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's super different now, obviously, because all these companies are so big and so buttoned up. And it's like, if you want to be in the room with some of those people, you have to get through, you know, 85 ,000 marketing executives. Yeah, it's impossible. Right. And then the lawyers will make you sign away your entire life. There was kind of that moment then that it was like most of those people were actually doing it because they thought it was interesting, not because it's like the thing you do after you get an MBA, which is what it is now.

27:50Dude, you know, I think there's an amazing movie out there about Bezos in the 90s when he's driving around in that shitty old car trying to figure out the future of Amazon. And the movie only takes place between like, you know, 95 and 99. And that's it. Like, I think that there's a movie there that people would love. It would be a bit like Eight Mile about Eminem. So you never see him. Jeff Bezos in a hoodie. Well, right. You never see him get rich, right? You never see him. You just see the struggles. If Bezos were smart, he would try to find a way to secretly commission that film because right now he him and Elon Musk are seen as like Lex Luthor, like the most psychotic evil people on earth.

28:32And I think something like that would be able to really rehabilitate him in a way that that could be really good. Again, super low stakes dude in his car just trying to figure out how to sell cat food online. That's a good idea. Make that movie. I'd watch that movie. I can't. I can never reenter this space. It's over for me. I got to do action movies now. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to see if we can bring back director's commentary in a big way. We'll be right back.

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30:21When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

30:56At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

31:33Welcome back. So the streaming era has been really great for lots of things. More access to movies, no driving to Blockbuster, no rewinding anything. It's all good stuff. But one thing that we've lost in a big way since the DVD era is special features. Deleted scenes, blooper reels, alternative cuts. All that stuff is just nowhere to be found now. Sometimes things will end up on YouTube or as weird nine-hour black-and-white square things on HBO Max thanks to Zack Snyder. But mostly they're just gone. And the one that we miss most here at The Verge Cast is director's commentary. There's really something wonderful about watching a movie and then essentially watching it again while the director whispers in your ear about all the stories and Easter eggs and fun stuff happening in the movie that you're watching.

32:17And now there's just not much of that anymore. And we wondered why. So Andrew Marino, our producer, went to find out. And now he's back to fix everything. Andrew, welcome. Have you figured this out for us yet? I think so. No, I don't think the streaming services have not figured it out yet. Okay. So you've basically been trying to answer the question of like, what happened to bonus features? Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah, particularly director's commentary, because that's something you don't really see at all anywhere on streaming services. But recently, there was an announcement from Netflix.

32:56We had an article on the site. Glass Onion is getting a director's commentary on Netflix. Hello, this is Ryan Johnson. I wrote and directed Glass Onion. You probably know that because you went to the trouble of getting this in-the-home theater commentary track. So I think that was a little misleading, actually, because have you watched this director's commentary? I watched it last night because you told me to. and it was both an extremely cool and extremely frustrating experience because on the one hand it's like cool to have a director talk you through the movie that they made right that's the whole point of director's commentary like i love it it's delightful to just sort of listen to someone talk about the movie that they made especially if it's a movie you enjoy by a director you care about right i loved glass onion the first time i saw it i think ryan johnson's great director that was awesome.

33:47The user experience of it was just garbage to me. Like it's not a director's commentary track on Netflix. It's a podcast you have to watch where he counts down and then snaps his fingers when you're supposed to press play. So here we go. Three, two, one. And I buffered for slightly longer. So I was like a half second behind him at all times. I couldn't pause the movie and go pee because then the podcast would be off. It's just like the whole process of this drove me nuts despite the fact that like the stuff he was saying was interesting this is exactly how i feel okay good i went on my ipad to go watch the director's commentary of glass onion and i was looking through the other audio options like with the different languages and stuff and i was like where is the director's commentary so i had to google it and yeah i had to go to spotify and play it at the same time which like he said if you have to leave to go to the bathroom or something You have to pause both of them at the same time.

34:48My favorite part of the whole thing was there was a moment in the actual commentary where like, I forget what it was, but there's some detail and Rian Johnson goes, oh, you can just see right there the tape recorder fly into the bag, by the way, if you want to rewind and or maybe don't, you'll mess up the timing of this. But and I was like, this is the point, y 'all. We did it wrong. Anyways, this was exciting to me that there are actual director's commentary being added or even thought about. but yeah it's not in the actual streaming services the only streaming service that i've actually seen this in is the criterion channel which sort of makes sense right because it's like those are the people who buy dvds and blu-rays also and that is kind of the only place these things still live to some extent like if i go by blu-rays does some of this stuff still exist are there bonus materials still out there they're just only in that one place and i guess on the criterion channel right like it's not a netflix it's not on hulu it's not on hbo max it's not on disney plus it's not a right paramount plus it's not on peacock there's movies that i loved growing up like back to the future and i've seen two different versions of the commentary on that film and none of them are available on any streaming service i couldn't even find them on like itunes or apple tv or whatever to buy the part of why this is so interesting to me is that it seems like this would be the most obvious way for any of these streamers to differentiate themselves right to say like okay there's tons of content everywhere but we have the bonus stuff like we're the ones who got the director to do this stuff we have all the deleted scenes we have the blooper reels and the blooper reels for everything have seemed to end up on youtube so like we're covered there feel good about that but all this other stuff just seems to either be hidden or have totally disappeared But you went out to figure out like why this is actually going on.

36:38What did you discover? Is there like a simple answer for what has happened here? I think the obvious answer is that there's some sort of money involved in the answer. So I talked to a few people about it, one of which is Julia Alexander, who Vergecast listeners may remember. Longtime friend of the show. What I can say about the director's commentary is that it has effectively shifted. She's now the director of strategy at Para Analytics. So she has a lot of insight about where streaming services are spending their money and what type of media those companies are focusing on. So when I asked her about this, this was the first thing she told me.

37:16The only thing I can potentially think of is that they have internal data that shows there is not as much interest in pursuing this. So if you say to the director, hey, we want you to film a commentary that we're going to add on top of this as a bonus feature, it's going to take an additional day's worth of work. That goes into a labor cost, although it would not be super huge, but that takes into account additional cost. You're going to put on the streaming service that you're then hosting this piece of entertainment for. They may have done the cost analysis and determined actually our viewers aren't necessarily interested in this.

37:50It's a waste of time and potentially a waste of investment for us. I guess that tracks. I mean, we do definitely watch movies differently than we did when we were buying DVDs in the sense that you don't make an event out of it. You just sort of sit down and find something and press play. And if you don't like it, you go watch something else. And you're not spending as much time and energy with movies because there's just so many other things to watch. I guess I buy that logic. Yeah. Julian mentions this as well. When you used to go to a video store and rent a DVD, you had days to watch it. it was the movie that was on your mantle.

38:27They pick up the DVD case. They turn the DVD case around. They're looking at what's on it, right? There's all the beautiful package design. There's just a different type of value that we put on that experience. Then when you're kind of just searching through something and you put something on and you have the ability to just hit back and then go watch a totally different movie in less than 30 seconds. So let me come at this a different way then. The versions of these things existed on lots of movies like you're about Back to the Future has this stuff. And yet, you can't find it anywhere. It's not making more people buy Back to the Future DVDs.

39:00I suspect everyone who owns a Back to the Future DVD, A, listens to this podcast, so hello to all of you. And B, is the whole list of people who is ever going to buy a Back to the Future DVD. So what's the upside of not having them at all? There's this giant back library of cool stuff that just seems like it's going to die on Blu-ray discs. Yeah. The thing that I think is a big reason is licensing issues. It might make sense that the Criterion channel has commentary on their streaming service because they also have physical distribution. So maybe the rights are included in that sort of package.

39:34I asked Criterion Collection about it, but they declined to comment. But I did talk to Julia about it. There's always licensing it. The music industry and the film industry and the television industry is complicated from a right side. There's like 80 different parties that own 80 different facets of this. So that's definitely part of it. If, you know, the title is a focus features film and they're trying to figure out who owns the director's commentary to that that they did 20 years ago. They're trying to figure out how to incorporate it. You're going to run into some rights issues. This just sounds like sports licensing to me, right?

40:06Where it's like you can watch certain clips on Twitter, you can watch certain clips on Instagram, but if you embed the tweet on your website, the rights change. And then if you want to watch a game on your phone, you can, but on your TV, you can't, but you can airplay from your phone. And it's just like, I can sort of imagine why, especially if going back to what Julia was saying before, you've decided that this is not necessarily the most valuable thing that you would just sit there and be like, you know what, this is not even worth the legal paperwork to do this. Right. And it might make more sense for these companies to just like make their own content for their streaming services.

40:40You see this on like Marvel shows and Star Wars shows. there's like a making of special on Disney plus Marvel Studios director by night a behind the scenes look at werewolf by night now streaming only on Disney plus they're literally like propaganda for the movies and I love them I don't know they're they're like long trailers but I find myself watching many of them and not watching the movie which is weird yeah and that seems like the trend now but it's proven that there is audience is what we see with kind of Disney and even HBO Max to an extent taking this opportunity to do a couple of different things.

41:17They'll either do the docuseries. They will do podcasts. You see it with like Succession. You see it with other shows where they're like, we're going to do an official podcast. That's effectively taking the show creator, director and writers and getting them to do director's commentary. But then they can put it on YouTube and Spotify and Apple. And because they have whitelisted programming and they whitelist advertising, they can make additional revenue off that from other sides. Okay. So this helps explain the glass onion thing too, right? Where Glass Onion is a thing made for Netflix all the time.

41:46It's not a movie that existed 20 years ago that they have some sort of licensing window to. It is a Netflix-funded, Netflix-distributed production. And so all they have to do is presumably pay Rian Johnson a little bit more money to do this. Yeah, so I asked Netflix about this, and also if there was a specific reason to why they put the commentary on Spotify and not the Netflix app. All they could tell me was the director's commentary was also available on all platforms where podcasts can be found. I mean, fair enough, but I would just point out that one of those places is still not the Netflix app.

42:22Right. so the thing that that makes me wonder though is whether the directors want to do director's commentary anymore because you would think somebody like ryan johnson like the takeaway i got from watching glass onion again listening to the track was he seemed like he was having a very good time right right like it he talked way too much for the whole time yeah like i ended up having to mute the movie and literally just watch the movie on silent while i listened to the podcast because I couldn't do both simultaneously. So like way overshare that Rian Johnson. But he seemed like he was having fun, right?

42:55He's just talking about the movie and it like made it an enjoyable experience. And it made me wonder, like, do directors hate doing this and are glad to have a reason not to? Do they miss doing it? Like, did you talk to anybody? I did. So I actually talked to a director that works with Netflix, Mike Flanagan. I did commentaries for Oculus, for Ouija, Origin of Evil. I did commentaries for The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor on Blu-ray. So he's made a lot of horror shows on Netflix. He mentioned Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, Midnight Club. He's all on board for director's commentary on streaming.

43:30I've been shouting about this on social media for a number of years. I don't understand, especially commentaries, because streamers have the ability effortlessly and for free to add that as an additional audio option. They translate these shows into every language on the planet. They very, very easily could add one audio track that includes a commentary. Yeah. So even a director that works with Netflix is frustrated that this is not happening. He says his fans are always asking for director's commentary and bonus features from his stuff. I get tweeted about it every day. So at least once a day, there is an inquiry about whether or not one of my shows is going to be released.

44:14When Blind Manor came out, it was an avalanche of people wanting to know where the deleted scenes were. I think it's absolutely on fans' minds, and I interact with it all the time on socials. All the time. This makes total sense to me, right? Right. And this is like we talk so much about fandom and how people interact with culture now. And it's like if you want to make something that people care about, which as we've talked about in the Verticals before, like Netflix is one of many companies in desperate need of like good IP that people give a crap about in order to do all the stuff it wants to do.

44:44One way to do that is to just get people super, super deep into it. I also his point about audio tracks is really interesting because what I was going to say is that maybe people have just never thought about changing audio tracks. And so the idea of like burying it in a menu, nobody would ever find it. And what's the point, but he's kind of right. People are getting used to doing that. Like that's a thing people understand because of the way that things are being translated because of how dubbing works that like, I think he's right. You could just put it in there and people might find it. Yeah.

45:13It's so much easier now to change that stuff instead of back on the DVD. It was like, go back to the main menu. Sometimes it was just a completely different video. You had to just turn on instead of just like turning it on and off. But yeah, like he said, he did commentary for Haunting of Bly Manor, Haunting of Hill House, but it's only available on the Blu-ray release. So Netflix funded a show, did the director's commentary, and then only put it on the Blu-ray. Yeah. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, Andrew. That is like, what an incredible, like, deliberate middle finger to anybody who wants director's commentary.

45:49I mean, if you think about it, like, hey, if you want to listen to the director's commentary, pay 40 bucks for the, I don't know how much is a full season of a show on Blu-ray, you know? Something like that, yeah. So they get the 40 bucks from the people who actually want it instead of just putting it on the app for the people who are already subscribed. So then that makes me think maybe the next turn of this is that as DVDs and Blu-rays slowly kind of continue to die, the discs continue to go away. All that stuff has to live somewhere. Like maybe they might as well put it on their streaming services.

46:23Yeah, I know. If you go to like Apple TV or iTunes or whatever it's called, you can get some director's commentary digitally. It's not on every movie that I know has it on the physical release. There's like a bunch of discussion on Reddit about someone trying to listen to the director's commentary for The Batman, which you can get on iTunes. Okay. And that's a relatively recent movie. So yay for continuing to do director's commentary. But you're only able to listen to it like on Apple devices. Oh, God. And there's a great line here from someone on Reddit who bought the director's commentary through Apple.

47:04The video is also terribly spiced together. The audio will continue as normal, but the video will freeze upwards of 20 minutes and then will sync with the commentary momentarily, then freeze again. I got so frustrated that I set up my iPhone onto a Bluetooth speaker with the commentary, then watched the 4K HDR version on my TV. which is connected to a soundbar, and tried to sync the two. This is almost exactly what we did watching the Glass Onion commentary. This actually makes the Glass Onion thing seem like a delightful product experience. There's a lot of stuff going on in the discussions.apple page about people trying to play audio commentary on Apple TV purchases.

47:41This is the kind of thing Apple, in theory, as somebody who sells movies, because I can see it being the kind of thing that if you're just streaming them, you're like, well, we don't, you know, accrue any extra benefit from that. But if you're Apple, you're selling these things, people own them, you would think that all these extra features, which exist, would be a reason for people to want to buy more things. Like, yeah, I don't know. I'm running out of reasons that this isn't a good idea. Like, I wonder if Julia's right, that it's just a lot of licensing and everybody's just like, ah, we don't care.

48:11Let it die. Yeah. And now people are just like, gonna go and torrent this stuff. Totally. I've seen a bunch of message boards of people asking like, hey, do you have rips of this commentary for this movie? Good. I support that. It would just make me very happy in a certain way if Apple wanted to get really litigious about people using the director's commentary when it refuses to actually care about the director's commentary. Let's pick a fight on that one. I'm into that. Yeah, and now people are just taking it in their own hands. There's a podcast called Commentary Cast that will just invite the director on the show and just do the whole commentary while they watch the movie.

48:48Oh, wow. And then you can go and listen to it and sync it with the movie. For those that are new to our podcast, Grant, this week's guest and you are going to be having a conversation while watching the film. And if you listen to the cue at home to hit play, you can watch along or just listen along at your own leisure. Mike Flanagan was the one who told me about this, actually. He did commentaries for his movies Hush in Gerald's Game on podcasts, similar to the way Netflix did it with Rian Johnson. But this has no involvement with any movie studio. That's really smart, honestly, because that's also the kind of thing that could live outside of all of these ecosystems in a way that's really useful.

49:25Because I would think part of what's challenging for like Back to the Future is where you stream Back to the Future seems to change all the time. Right. And so the idea of having like a stable place to listen to the thing, even as the place you watch it changes, might be a good idea. And it means people can do all kinds of different stuff. Like, what if we got to a place where it was kind of like the alternative sports broadcasts you get where it's like, I want to listen to these people talk about it or these people talk about it or people from different perspectives. Like, maybe there's a whole giant genre waiting to be unlocked here.

49:56That's a great point. And maybe it makes the most sense to put all this stuff on Spotify. It's just such a crappy product. It's such a crappy product. It's so bad to watch. What's hilarious is there's some bootleg DVD commentaries on Spotify that people just ripped from. Really? the physical release and put it on spotify i was recently listening to the dvd commentary of super bad on there because someone just uploaded it i have no voice in the scene if you could tell my i'm really hoarse you scream through a lot of the movie this was the i got i got food poisoning when we were shooting at the school this was the last day see this is the kind of thing where i'm like i love that movie i haven't seen it in a long time and now i'm gonna go watch it again with commentary and this is what every streaming service should want me to do like this seems so straightforward to me.

50:42It just kind of blows my mind. So is the Glass Onion thing a harbinger of good things to come? Like, should I take the fact that it was a big movie with a big name director and they did a director's commentary thing as a good sign? Has it done well? Do we have any idea if this is the thing anybody cares about? We'll see where this goes after Glass Onion, if there'll be more being made. But Julia did mention that like, as less and less of this stuff comes out, there will inherently be less and less demand for it. Yeah. You're kind of seeing this beautiful game of chicken and egg where the studios and the networks and the production companies are seeing that there's not as much demand for this type of commentary.

51:20So they stop making supply for it. And as the audiences age up, the audience that comes in that never grew up with director's commentary doesn't know to seek it out. And therefore, there's no demand to increase supply. And Mike Flanagan has even seen this lack of demand for director's commentary on the Blu-ray side, too. Quite bizarrely, I did not do one for Dr. Sleep. And that had a robust physical media release. And they weren't interested in a commentary track on that. There's a behind-the-scenes talk and there's a director's cut. But they were like, no, we're good. What? So, okay, so that to me is the clearest evidence so far that these folks just don't think it's additive in any meaningful way.

51:59I mean, and I guess to some extent, that feeling is now, like you were saying before, it's being replaced by the official companion podcasts. And the rewatch podcasts make me think of all of this, where it's like, I can listen to two of the actors on The Office, tell me stories about every episode of The Office, which is close enough to a director's commentary. It's sort of spiritually the same thing, just kind of out of sync, like literally and figuratively. And I wonder if that is going to be the closest kind of next generation replacement we get, because those are hugely popular. And they're like close to serving the same need, but not quite the same.

52:37Right. And a lot of these directors are on Twitter or social media talking about their work. That sort of replaces the director's commentary because you have such a direct interaction with the fans. And like someone could just ask you a question on Twitter and answer it, you know. and ryan johnson does this all the time on twitter too so okay let's come back to the product experience of all of this because i think even if we allow for the best possible version of this right where the thing that is great about director's commentary where you sort of get to understand how the film was made and what went into it and how it all works and like just listening to the glass onion one and seeing all the times when he would talk about like the structure of a shot yo yo ma so he's not here he's we shot his part months and months after we shot the scene so jess was just looking off screen there at nothing and there are all these moments where it's like it just sort of teaches you how to watch movies in a very cool way but let's assume in the best case scenario all of that gets replaced in new and different forms i still feel like i would pay five more dollars a month for something that is synced with the show that actually like works as I'm watching the show and isn't a whole separate podcast I have to seek out on my own and then sync it when they clap?

53:52Like, isn't there a version of this that goes back to like, I just want to press play, but also learn all this new stuff? You would think like that's a technology problem. I think we'll get there eventually. There's so much competition in this space. So maybe there's some innovation coming. So like, but somebody like Mike Flanagan, like, what does he think about what happens to this feeling for movies now. Like, does he miss this being gone? Does he feel like it's being semi-successfully replaced by rewatch podcasts and official companion stuff? No, he does not see that as a good replacement. He does think that movies should be able to stand on their own without the context of a director track under it.

54:35Sure. But there is a great artful benefit to director's commentary for people who love film and want to get into making film. There's something about archiving the experience of the filmmakers, the actors in real time with the film or with the show that is immeasurably valuable to people who want to learn about how to make movies and can be incredibly entertaining in its own right. They are exponentially enhanced anytime you're brought in to the process of how they were made. And I just think that just for cultivating a respect for and a love for filmed entertainment, we need that. It's just invaluable.

55:17And I wish we got to do more of it. I really do. I think he's right. I completely agree. And if it means bootleg Spotify uploads, I'll take it. But it just doesn't feel like that's the best answer we could possibly have here. No. Andrew, you've answered all of my questions. I don't know if you've made me feel any better, but thank you. And please send me that super bad link because I'm going to go watch that movie as soon as we hang up here. Oh, yeah, will do.

55:45All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and talk about this new on screen, on screen kind of movie and how to make a movie that looks like a bunch of screen recordings. We'll be right back.

56:27Thank you. Thank you.

57:29Transcription by CastingWords for SaaS access governance, and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150 ,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. Plus, 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow IT. Learn more at 1password.com slash Vergecast. That's the number 1password.com slash Vergecast.

58:20Welcome back. Over the course of the last few years, a handful of TV shows and movies have explored what feels like a new genre, on-screen storytelling. I don't just mean a story that shows a lot of screens. I mean a story that takes place entirely on a screen, where everything that happens happens inside a window. The movie Unfriended did it. Can we get rid of this person? I don't know. Is this here the whole time? This is probably a glitch. The movie Profile did it. I created a fake profile. Posing as a young convert. Even Modern Family did it. What's the best first-person shooter about genetically modified space marines?

58:56Hello! But the two best examples of on-screen storytelling I've seen so far are a movie from 2018 called Searching. We'll handle the ground investigation, but as a parent, you can help us with who your daughter talks to. And a sort of spiritual sequel to it from this year called Missing. I'm not giving up on my mom.

59:18There's got to be a way to find her. I need you to go to this hotel and ask for their security footage. They're both movies about trying to find a missing person. And by the way, I promise I'm not going to spoil any more than that. And like the titles kind of give that much away. You're going through Kevin's email? You need to let the police handle this. I tried, but we're running out of time. Who are these people? The technical term for these is apparently computer screen movies. And I find this kind of moviemaking totally fascinating. It feels so modern. It's like if someone in your life was missing, wouldn't you spend most of your time on a screen trying to find them?

59:56It is also a really weird storytelling device. And when it's not done well, it does get really old really fast. But I wanted to learn more about how these kinds of movies get made. Like, tactically. How do you make a computer screen interesting to look at for two hours? Is the future of moviemaking just screen recordings because that's how we live our lives now? So I called up three of the people involved in making Searching and Missing, and they gave me a crash course in how all of it works. There's Nick Johnson. I am one of the writers and directors of Missing. There's Will Merrick. I am also one of the writer-directors of Missing.

1:00:32And Natalie Kasabian. One of the producers on Missing. All three of them told me that when you start making a computer screen movie, it's completely different from the very beginning. Even the script itself looks totally different. I remember on searching, Anish and Sev, who wrote that one, they sent me what was like a Word document, like an outline, a treatment. It wasn't even really a screenplay. Because how do you take, you know, what do you do in the interior Facebook window, you know, within that, like it can get kind of clunky. so on that movie we realized like yeah in some ways writing a screenplay would be a disservice but then when it actually came time to like breaking the thing down my mind just as a producer was like I don't even what are we even shooting like what are we shooting versus what are we creating so we did go well I say we I made seven and each translate that like treatment word document thing into final draft form and I share that anecdote because I think it's representative of the whole making of these movies.

1:01:35Like there are parts that are very similar and there are parts that are very different. So did it end up with interior Facebook screen, by the way? Like, is that stuff that's in the script for this? We sort of slugged separately in bold. We would do the normal headlines and then we also would just slug in all caps bold the application we were in, which gets a little shifty when somebody's switching back and forth quickly. At a certain point, there's no way to write it down perfectly. But the computer screen element definitely was part of the initial concept of this idea, along with the characters, you know, along with the story.

1:02:07I think part of the reason we wanted to even tell a missing person story is that seems like a uniquely good movie, you know, to tell through screens. And every scene along the way, it was how do we show this through screens? If we can't, how can we imply it through a completely different scene? It was core to the idea. Why do you feel like a missing persons movie is the perfect setup for something like this? The answer to that question, I think, goes back to searching, which was in Seven and Nisha's initial pitch of that movie, they were looking for something that was like the best genre for telling something on a computer screen, because they were basically tasked with telling a computer screen story.

1:02:45And that was it. And it was very open-ended. And what the genius of what they came up with was that a missing persons detective mystery movie, you're looking for clues. And I think they found like the perfect little vehicle for that, because in searching, David Kim is searching through Margot's laptop that whole time. So it's also, it offers this like kind of really interesting tableau of a character's personality that you get to see. And you're also able to just throw a bunch of clues onto the screen. So it's like a little sandbox, I think, for the audience to dig through and find all these clues.

1:03:20It's one of those things where the format perfectly matches the genre. One of the things I kept thinking about watching, searching, and missing is how many character choices you have to make about technology in the most fun way. Is the main character a Mac person or a Windows person? Would they use Facebook? Are they the clean desktop type or the messy desktop type? You can learn so much about someone just by looking at their home screen or their computer desktop. And I would think you would have to figure all of that out ahead of time. Will told me that, yes, there is a lot of that discussion, but also the truth is you just have to cheat a little bit sometimes in order to tell the story.

1:03:58Apple has an app called FaceTime that we can conveniently leave open in the background to show June's face at all times. So I think they won over our characters being Apple people just for that, so that we can kind of cheat and see their face. She doesn't use Facebook, though, because a lot of young people we know of today don't anymore. So there's still a lot of character work there. Yeah, I mean, those were things that in the script level we were always talking about. And also things were rapidly changing, you know, the rise of TikTok. Obviously, Facebook became more and more irrelevant for people of June's age in the time since we made searching.

1:04:36We even had like conversations all the way down to the finish line of how many unread notifications does this character have? You know, like Will and I, for instance, I've got right now, I've got 131 unread messages in my messages. And our editor was like, you are a psychopath. We did field research. We started like texting people between 18 and 20, like siblings, cousins and whatnot. Because we're like, we're not even, we can't even relate anymore. Yeah, yeah. So like every little detail in this movie always came down to a conversation of does an 18 year old actually use this? Would they actually do this?

1:05:10and like Natalie said, reaching out to our siblings and younger cousins to try to make sure we're accurate. The one that just kept jumping out to me is like, there are very much two types of people in the world, like messy desktop people and tidy desktop people. And it's like, it felt right that June was a messy desktop person, but I just threw out the time, I just kept seeing icons behind her apps and being like, just use sex, just clean up the app. It's fine. Just put the icons over there. It's all gonna be fine. That's a really good example of like using the screen as production design for a movie like this because she is messy.

1:05:39that informs her personality. But then also as the movie goes on, we had like, I think, maybe 10 different layers of desktop clutter that we kept layering on so that you're literally seeing things that she realistically would have screenshotted as the movie went on. And it just gets more and more cluttered and kind of informs her psychological state, which is just this anxious state. Like I said before, it's a weird process. But eventually they told me, you get something that feels almost like a normal script and then you get on set to make the movie. And there, Natalie said, it feels more or less like a normal movie set-ish.

1:06:15In terms of the actual set, it's totally like all the positions that you would imagine on a traditional film, they're all there. I think where it looks a little bit different is, you know, the camera's locked off. Sometimes the camera is like much smaller. I think we used a red for like one or two days, but we shot on like, we shot on iPhones occasionally, not always. The confines of the actors in the frame, I would say, are like where things look different. And oftentimes you have one actor acting against a computer. Was there a computer there or was it just a camera that you had to pretend was a computer?

1:06:47There was like a camera rig that our DP, Steve Halloran, and his team created that was essentially like a dummy MacBook with a couple of lights on either side. And then a DSLR, the A7S, Sony A7S mounted on top. To get really technical, we were shooting at really high ISO and then stopping down a really like F11 and upwards, F8 and upwards, so that we had really deep focus. And that was one thing that we watched a lot of, you know, movies that tried to recreate FaceTime and the dead giveaway is always that shallow depth of field. Yeah, there's not a lot of bokeh on your webcam. Yes, exactly, exactly.

1:07:23And so we needed a lot of light and we're shooting at high ISO. And so we needed a camera that really wouldn't completely fall apart at the high ISO. And so that's kind of what we were doing. And I think the one challenging thing from a directorial perspective on set, I would say, is that you don't have coverage. So everything is more or less a one-er. And it was a quick shoot. So we were shooting out a lot of pages. And so you're almost blocking everything like a stage play and trying to block things within this very narrow confines of the frame. and then mentally as you're shooting in this big wide trying to, in your mind, create the coverage that we'll eventually create later on in post.

1:08:01So I think that was probably the biggest challenge for us as directors. There's also a lot of tricky bits with eyeline where, I mean, the actors, they not only have to like bring all this emotion a lot of times by themselves, but the eyeline of your eye looking around the screen doesn't play in the movie quite like it would if you really looked at that part of the screen. You actually want to have their eye way closer to the camera than it would actually realistically be. And then when a character's on a FaceTime call, the eyeline rules are suddenly completely different. You switch into like a 180 rule situation that is not the same as where their eye would actually be on the screen.

1:08:38And so there was a little bit of trial and error and testing, trying to learn where characters should even be looking. And on searching, we had an entire movie to try to learn the rules of the eyeline. and somehow on day one of Missing, we screwed it up. And then we ended up flopping that footage and then we learned from that and then we were good the rest of the way. The actual shoot, it turns out, is only a small part of the process. Natalie told me that with Missing, they shot for about a month and a half and then spent two years editing because you can't just screen record, unfortunately. Not if you want the resolution that they had in order to be able to move around and zoom in and out on the screen.

1:09:15So you have to start from nothing. I think the analog is like our computer screen in a wide is our set. And then we're just shooting it. We're blocking it with the mouse. We're production designing it with all the icons and windows. And then we shoot it with a digital camera. Not one shot in the movie is screen recording. Like everything is built custom, like pixel by pixel, basically. If anyone out there is trying to make one of these, you just you just have to start with really rough screenshots and just throw it together, cobble it together, and it'll look blurry and terrible. And then you edit, and then you picture lock, and then you do your graphics.

1:09:50I thought you were going to say for anyone out there that wants to make one of these, just don't. Don't. Don't do it. I'm just saying, though, they have made two of these movies now, so they must like doing it a little bit. And the funny thing is, I think making a movie like this has gotten a lot easier since 2018, even just from a storytelling perspective. In Missing, a huge part of the movie only works thanks to a ring camera on the front door of the house and a smartwatch with a camera and a car's reverse camera and Google's location tracking. The surveillance economy actually turns out to be kind of an amazing storytelling tool.

1:10:25I think when we got the treatment, there wasn't that Google tracking thing yet. They were tracking her through a credit card or something, Will, if I recall. And we were listening to a podcast to live and die in LA and they were using, I think, cell phone data tracking. And then I always have had my Google tracking turned on. I've always liked that map, that kind of diary of where I've been that day. And so that started getting our brains, like, you know, the gears turning about how could we incorporate that into it? It felt like tracking such a prevalent thing now and the pros and cons of that, that we had to get it into the movie.

1:11:03So yeah, that was one thing where we were very happy that existed because that formed the backbone of basically our entire act two. The outline for this movie was written as a treatment by Anish Chagantin and Sava Hunnian. And I know that as part of their process in that initial outline was to sort of list out like what are things we didn't do the first time. The watch made it in at that point, some security camera stuff. I think we added the car reverse camera. Oh yeah, that was a good one too. There was a lot of brainstorming of like, what is something that we haven't seen? I know a couple ended up on the cutting room floor, but part of the fun of this movie is getting as many things in as you can, as many ways of seeing things through screen as you can, just to show how pervasive that stuff is.

1:11:49The wildest part of this to me is that almost all of this tracks. There are cameras everywhere. Very little of it feels forced or wrong or like they had to fake it to make the story work. There was one moment where the team did kind of cheat. I actually didn't catch it watching the movie, but Nick fessed up to it pretty fast. She's recording on her watch and the picture is showing us what she's seeing. I don't know if a watch would show you generally, this is so, so specific. Generally, the video streams to your phone and you record it on your phone. And there was a whole beat in the script, I kid you not, where we wrote, She downloads this app onto her phone so that technically we are seeing all this on her phone, but it's actually through her watch.

1:12:32But then that's a perfect example of something where it's like, if you take it to its logical conclusion, if you really want to do hard realism, it's actually more confusing for the audience. Because then you're seeing, well, why is she downloading this thing on her phone? Why are we on her phone, but she's on her watch? So that's something where literally, if you're trying to surreptitiously record somebody, you're not going to pick a watch that has the literal video that you're taking of her on your watch. It works in the movie and no one so far has has pointed that out yet. And that's what I was wondering if you're going to point out.

1:13:02But I buy that watches have pretty good battery. My watch has like a 30 day battery. It doesn't record video. So, you know, it's plausible. All I just kept thinking was like this battery would be so dead by now. It's true. That's probably true. That's probably true. But anyway, one of the moments in the movie that stuck out to me was this big dramatic scene where the character is trying to find a crucial piece of information and it builds and it builds and the music swells and the whole climax is her entering a password. On a screen, that's the drama. Like, that's the moment. I raised this moment to the team because I thought it was so funny watching it.

1:13:39And they thought it was very funny that I noticed. A lot of the fun of Missing is turning really mundane pedestrian things that we do every day into these massive cinematic set pieces. Really, literally what we're talking about in the edit room is we'll be trying to convey an idea and we'll say, hey, you remember that moment in Jurassic Park when you saw that puddle? Like what's the cinematic, what's the screen equivalent of that? And so we're just taking cinematic like tropes and visual beats that we love and trying to find a clever way to do it with typing and a password and mouse clicks. It's the loading icon, right?

1:14:14Yeah. Like when the ring comes in and it's loading or something, there's like, and we cut away, there's like that beat of tension of like what's coming. You know, it's just always thinking about that. And that's, that's what makes the movie fun. That's like that magic trick. When you sit down and you're like, how are these guys going to make this entertaining? And then we managed to just keep stringing those beats along, hopefully. Right around the same time I watched Missing, I wound up re-watching this great video from the YouTube channel, Every Frame a Painting, all about texting in movies and the ways that filmmakers are trying to find new ways to make text appear on screen without making you stare at a phone for seconds at a time or without immediately dating the movie.

1:14:52It's an interesting conundrum. Texting is kind of visual, so in theory this shouldn't be hard. And yet every time a filmmaker cuts to an insert of a phone, you can hear the audience yawning. So I brought that Add up to the team, too. Movies like these exist in such a specific moment with specific technology, most of which will be ludicrously out of date in just a few years. I mean, even searching features Facebook heavily, and nobody uses Facebook anymore. They basically said that's true, and you kind of just have to lean into being a time capsule. My hope for it would be that people, you know, when they watch it in 20 years, they don't have to doubt that what they're seeing is what it actually looked like, that we managed to, even on like a graphical level, capture it accurately enough.

1:15:39I mean, it's going to age. It's going to age in very obvious ways, but I think very good ways. There's timeless movies, and then there's movies that are cool because they're of their time. And yeah, the hope is that this is the latter. We joked very early on on searching. I think when there was like a software update or something, we were already so deep into posts, we couldn't. I think Facebook updated and we were like, well, we've done eight months of work, so we can't like undo everything. And we realize in that moment, I think maybe Anish said this very aptly that like we were making a period movie while we were making it, like where it became a period movie during the making of the movie.

1:16:16So like we just accept that and realize that we're capturing a very specific moment in time. And yeah, like Will says, hopefully it's cool. This kind of movie is still pretty rare, but I suspect it won't stay that way for long. You're already seeing so much content morph to the screens that they're on. I mean, vertical video is taking over the universe, right? I'm 100 % sure that we are going to eventually get a high-budget theatrical movie shot entirely with TikTok filters. I don't know how to feel about that, but I'm pretty sure it's coming. Honestly, I'm surprised there's not more of this yet.

1:16:47And Nick actually said he is too. I think a lot of it is that it's just uncinematic, or it's been deemed uncinematic, because there have been so many attempts to make it cinematic by putting text on the screen and doing all this stuff. And it's just, at the end of the day, visually not that interesting to watch someone text. I think Uncut Gems is a great example of doing it really well, where you just kind of point the camera at the thing and see them text. And it all comes down to just interesting situations. But I think we've been scared to write that stuff in because it maybe just isn't visually that interesting.

1:17:20And then on top of it, technology has created a whole host of issues with the cops showing up. You can always call the cops now. You can always call somebody. And so it just becomes this intruder in your story that you have to constantly try to explain away. But hopefully as we move forward, because technology is such a huge part of our life, it's a fact of our lives, you can start to craft stories around it and not just use it as like a plot point or something to avoid. The last thing I asked before we got off our call was what might happen in another five years when they make searching to or missing to or we found him or whatever it's going to be called.

1:17:58I expected them to talk about AR glasses or drones or whatever other cameras might come out. But first, Will and Natalie brought up AI. I do think the whole AI thing is going to be crazy and it's going to be the real deal. The technology will just increasingly become more pervasive. And so more and more things like a Zoom wedding will become acceptable to see in a movie. So the storytelling opportunities will continue to grow, I guess. The way to show that cinematically to me is like always going to be the question mark. And I think that's the hard thing to crack. Like, how can we present this new whatever form of tech or this new setting or world, but like still make it cinematic and not gimmicky and like bring the audience in?

1:18:38I'm excited to see that. Which is why Nick said things might actually be getting worse, because one very important piece of computer screen storytelling is under serious threat. I also think this franchise dies when the mouse disappears. When we get to the point where, because already mobile makes it really hard to tell stories. That was a big struggle for us. And if we do eventually get to the point where we're controlling the mouse with our eyes, or we're not even, the concept of a mouse isn't even necessary anymore, for instance, you know, I could see that going away. It starts to get harder and harder to tell those stories.

1:19:11I'm sure someone could find a creative way, but the existence of a mouse is pretty critical to this movie. Yeah. But as long as computer mice still exist, and I hope they exist a long time, I hope we keep seeing more computer screen movies. It's a fun way of watching stories that feels like life now. Missing and Searching are both out now. You can find them both streaming, and I highly recommend both of them on a dark, scary Friday night. Even if I do still think it's totally insane that a smartwatch battery would last that long. It's going to take at least five years before I buy that storyline.

1:19:45All right, and with that, we are done with the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who talked to us for joining the show today, and thank you, as always, for listening. I hope we didn't spoil any movies. Please send me mean emails if we did. There's lots more from all of this conversation, especially with Matt Johnson at TheVerge.com. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes, but as always, read TheVerge.com. It's a good website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or movies you feel like I should see, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:20:14Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas and feelings about movies. We love getting all of your questions. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Google stuff and Microsoft stuff and chat GPT. And it all just keeps happening, folks. We'll be back. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

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