Blank Check with Griffin & David - Cast Away with Nia DaCosta

Episode Date: November 22, 2020

Zemeckis and Hanks reunited once again. Another box office and critical success. Filmed over two years, Cast Away captures both talents performing at the top of their respective games. Writer and director, Nia DaCosta (CANDYMAN) joins BC this week to discuss the movie's legacy after 20 years, the different elements that make a story about one guy stranded on island so compelling, Wilson the volleyball, and of course extensive talk about another classic American film: Sully. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch @ shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

don't worry wilson i'll do all the podcasting you just hang on yeah perfect thank you okay hanks yell right there's that there's that quality in his voice where he's yelling where it's like ah come on yeah you gotta get into like the you're like into your solar plexus you gotta get it's the buzz yeah right i was gonna say it's midwestern but he's he's like a california guy right like he's not uh no no he's from iowa is that possible oh really i'm seeing california possible for tom hanks to be from iowa it does sound right maybe he moved i don't know no he's a california boy griff he's california conquered california uh his dad was the energy of that place because california is very you know runs the gamut it is big it seems closer to the bay area it's probably

like east of san francisco yeah okay okay yeah it's like it's like 30 miles east of san francisco i'm not a california person no offense to california i just like i i am an admitted novice in terms of are you guys both in new york uh we're both new yorkers yes wait a second but david i thought you grew up in london england and spent your entire life in england you didn't grow up in new york you lived in england exclusively until you have this exciting guess you're starting this crap like right away it's so fast oh my god yeah i mean david i heard you got knighted so that's very exciting hey yes the queen's honors well obe is that's like uh you're that's not a knighthood that's below a knighthood right

there's like four levels so i can't call you sir david i mean you can be good if you wanted to but it would be highly inaccurate you know like there is that brief period where ben kingsley apparently insisted on being credited as sir ben kingsley yeah but that is seen as i think largely seen as ghost usually you don't want to put it in the title the other thing i heard was that he would insist on being referred to as sir ben i don't know if he's dropped that but there was certainly a period i think where he was feeling himself after the knighthood and he wouldn't let people call him anything other than sir ben sir ben yeah like sir ben i am not i'm looking this up it says

that he was born in concord but they moved a lot and it says okay this line here because i remember going over this with richard yes by the age of 10 they'd lived in 10 houses okay so he they moved all over his dad was maybe an academic so maybe that was part of it. An etymology professor. Did you guys listen to that, I think, The Daily episode early on in the pandemic? They were trying to give people some light at the end of the tunnel kind of stuff, like some nice, every Friday a good story. And a journalist did a story about her interviewing Tom Hanks. I think she started crying or something. Yeah.

And he talks about his niceness perhaps coming from the fact that he had to move all the time and and you know adapt and get people to like him um and i thought that was really interesting and so that completely tracks yeah that makes sense he was like a career new kid so he had to develop a really acceptable geniality it's also it speaks to his weird all-american quality that like he must have just lived in a bunch of different regions at formative ages in a way that he just sort of crosses over because you're right you're like what is he he doesn't feel like he belongs to any coast um well it's just it's why you whenever you see him give an oscar speech or whatever you're like it's kind of crazy this you whenever you see him give an oscar speech or whatever

you're like it's kind of crazy this guy like never ran for president he just sort of has that vibe that that but wait what were you gonna say he's the president of hollywood though i guess um right he's um uh well i don't know what i was gonna say um oh he feels at once like completely general like and at once incredibly specific like incredibly specific he's a total like he's such a one-off in in so many ways but especially amongst modern movie stars and i know now he's like an elder statesman but even if you look at him in the class of like the 80s and the 90s in terms of the range of what he did and how odd his sort of movie star persona is because his his persona as a public figure is like president of hollywood mr nice you know

mr professional but then that isn't necessarily what he plays like by and large he doesn't exclusively coast on his charm in that kind of way there's a period when he did yeah i would say then he kind of swerved away from it that kind of like apollo 13 you know era you know the mid 90s era he was maybe and this is sort of the end of that a little bit maybe what does he do because after this he does road to perdition which is like you know oh he's making he's playing someone who kills people like even though he's a sympathetic character like right right and catch me if you can where he plays the conflict where he's the annoying character wait which one was that yeah catch me if you can oh yeah yeah yeah right where

he's the guy who's stopping the movie star from being in a cool movie yeah right and then after that the lady killers he definitely right in the 2000s he's like well i shouldn't just play like you know iconic figures of americana like forever like he's definitely but cast away is a little bit the hinge point like he goes into the movie, the, you know, like friendly sweater wearing guy that we all know and love. And he comes out and he's like,

I'm changed, man. Like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. But the beginning of the movie, he's literally just like yelling at a bunch of Russians. Like, we got to get these packages.

It's so, I was, cause I remember him. I remember what you were saying, David david like he's so like oh my god tom hanks you know his warm love lovely loving self and then i was re-watching it um this morning and i was like oh yeah he's just screaming at a bunch of russian people he's nice to that kid but then i remember thinking i had to google like what is his job like what is he why is he does he have to do this? Like, did you find anything out? Cause I feel like the movie doesn't accept that he works at FedEx. Right.

Yeah. He's like a logistical guy, like trying to shave five seconds off of everything. Right. Right. But I was like, I don't understand why he has to keep flying places. Um, I should preface all this by saying I'm obsessed with,

I love Castaway. And I'm also obsessed with the fact that, um, Zemeckis shot an entire film which is an amazing film by the way i could also just talk about that um for seven hours um and then comes back and like is a better director and like shoots other half this movie like it's crazy how many other examples are there it's so great this is kind of it uh i sent you a list of some of the movies that were open when you graciously said you would be uh willing to appear on this podcast and you immediately went like cast away because i can't get over the fact yeah yeah the movie has a gap and he snuck in a

whole nother movie in between yeah no i had to because what lies beneath wasn't available i think right it must i think yeah i actually when i was shooting um uh candy man my dp and i john guliserian we like sat down and watched what lies beneath um because i i had mentioned it for some reason and i was like no that movie's actually really good and i hadn't seen it for a while i was like no that movie's really good and it's really well shot and he was like oh no i watched for the first time two weeks ago with my wife because she made me watch it and it's amazing and then so we watched that and that was like weirdly became like one of our like references for candy man and then um and then cast away i re-watched last summer too and i was just like oh shit i love that they just travel together like i don't know man whatever you're doing come on i think that was a big part of it.

I mean, it will have come out by now, but as of the time of this recording, I have not seen What Lies Beneath, and it's one of the few Zemeckis I haven't seen that I've been looking forward to. It's very enjoyable. It was so underrated when it came out. Wait, all right, Griffin, introduce our show. Introduce the show. Let's get back to it.

Oh, my God, we didn't introduce the show yet. Oh, we never did. show. Introduce the show. Let's get back. Oh, my God. We didn't introduce the show yet. We never did. We were always terrible at that. And hey, you're already a great guest because you started talking immediately, which is what we like the most. The thing that makes us uncomfortable is when we're talking and the guest doesn't know if they should speak. And we're trying to like gesture to like you can butt in at any time.

You immediately just took the volleyball and ran with it uh this is a podcast called blank check with griffin and david i'm griffin i'm david and it's about filmographies it's ignoring me no perfect perfect uh it's a podcast about filmographies directors who have massive success early on in their career and are given a series of blank checks and make whatever crazy passion products they want. And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they crash. Baby. This is a miniseries on the films of Robert Zemeckis. We've gotten to the namesake of this miniseries podcast away and our guest today director of little woods director of the upcoming candy man nia da costa thank you so much for being on the show thanks for having me this is so exciting uh no this is very exciting i'm talking about

that that is uh so nice of you to say and uh it is the only thing that has made me question your judgment as a director but that's weird uh it's a bad opinion but um we we were talking right before we started recording because uh you and i worked together on vinyl and that uh you were an office pa and i was one of the uh absolute lowest ranked cast members you're one of the absolute lowest ranked cast members. You're one of our esteemed actors. What do you mean? I mean, I was number 40 on the list of esteemed actors on that show. One of the many problems with that show. Too many characters. Too many people. That show was so insane.

And I remember, and I have a lot of respect for everyone who made that show, but I remember being the pilot and just being like, I guess. I mean, we can do this yet again you know perfectly put everything about that show was i i guess if if they think so right yeah yeah but it was like the like the best cast like the best cinematographers the fuck even the ad like this guy like it was so and for me it was really exciting because it was my first like big like scripted show i was like doing reality before that it was really fucking exciting actually one of the reality things i did you also were involved in griffin what so i'm gonna call it reality i call it like i guess it was like one of those clips like uh talking head clip shows it was a pilot that didn't get picked

up 20 versus 30 do you remember this yes? Yes. Yes. Jesus. Wow. Like, but I mean, our interaction was very limited. I was like, Oh, that's the guy from trivia. Um, videology.

This is what we had to talk about. This is what we had to talk about because, uh, uh, you've been this, uh, humongous, uh,

rising star in the film world. Candyman. Everyone's so excited about. I, for one, I'm particularly excited that the movie is, uh, being delayed because I can't wait to see it in a theater i think that's a great decision i support it

wholeheartedly um but uh your face was like popping up everywhere and uh i had that thing where it's like if you've worked on enough shoots you sometimes have a hard time placing like yeah i know i've talked to that person i know i've worked with that person but i can't remember which set it was on and then i dm'd you and was like you worked on vinyl right that was it and you were like yeah i've just started listening to the podcast this is such a weird coincidence asked you to come on the show great but then you revealed right before we started recording yeah that you were a trivia person person and that you used to like view David and I with disdain. Yeah, we used to lament your arrival to trivia. We're like, fuck, we're not going to win this.

We're definitely not. We wouldn't have won anyway, but we just knew if you guys were there, it was going to be a mess for us. I remember there was one NYU team that was good. Like that was, you guys were heavyweights. That wasn't our team. Actually, you know what? Maybe it could have been. team that was good like that was that you guys were heavyweights that wasn't our team okay you know what okay maybe it could have been i mean the best trivia teams i'm on is usually when i only know half the team because the half i know right isn't going to be helpful i'm really bad at trivia

film trivia like i used to be really insecure in film school about not being like well watched enough and whatever uh apparently it didn't matter uh but um yeah i love trivia it's so fun we would bring so many people like to the trivia just just whatever for fun and they would leave being like that's it's i'm too stressed out like i just feel stupid now like i i get that you guys enjoy that but it's just hard and i just sit there being like, well, why don't I know this? Like it was, it was not easy trivia. It felt like, no, it was really intense. And like every week we would sort of have like five of our regulars and maybe one open spot.

And we would constantly try out different friends of ours, many of whom later become regular guests on this podcast. And they would be like, I get it. I, I can't do this on a weekly basis. This is too much. And David and I were in the state of like getting there at like 4 PM when they open so that we could have first dibs on the booth. So we came out there for four hours.

Like you would show up with your laptop, David, like write pieces or I would fucking do whatever. And then we'd be there for another four hours doing trivia yeah i would do nothing um but but here's the thing nia uh we david and i got started going we've talked about this too many times but uh that trivia is entirely why this podcast exists it's the reason david and I became such close friends. We had only hung out once before the night that we went to trivia together and became obsessed with it. And we're like, we need to center our entire lives around this.

And at the beginning, it was just the two of us. And we couldn't even place on the charts. And it was this ascension to us being like a team that could break the top three. I love it. The first time we ever came in first place. And like people were excited for us. They were like, oh, the underdogs. And there was the distinct moment after like a year when we won our like third championship in a row.

And everyone gave us like side eye. When David and I looked at each other and we were like, we have to leave. We've become somewhere else. Yeah. No, but truly we were conscious about the exact thing you're describing of like people hate us now. We're camp Mohawk.

We suck. No. Yeah. It was pretty much. Yeah. That's how we felt. We were like, no,

I'm kidding. No, it was very much just like, Oh, I'm like, we weren't going to win anyway, but, but do you guys do trivia now?

Cause I was doing like, um, uh, doing like Nighthawk on Zoom for a while. I heard the Nighthawk one was good. We keep wanting to like host trivia or like have a monthly night or something. I do miss it. I did one Zoom trivia night and found it difficult. And I don't know if it's just because i'm so zoom exhaustion right zoom exhaustion but also so like all the my my trivia strategies are so specifically built around like conferring in a huddle and and my brain had a hard time adjusting

to like being on a team with people in separate cities, texting. Oh, but on, on Nighthawk, you go into a breakout room. So you're all on, you're all on a screen together.

Interesting. Yeah. That sounds good. It's good. If you guys want to trivia, maybe we'll win. This is selfishly for me because I would like to learn trivia one day. Whatever.

Let's do it. That sounds great. Love to do it. I did want to win general knowledge trivia, which was crazy. I, you know, I, I like general knowledge trivia too i'm a i enjoy all trivial pursuits um but i'm so it's crazy that we never well maybe we did cross pass the ideology who knows it was always hacked to the gills yeah i'm sweaty in that room yeah um is it still open it's closed down right it closed down yeah um but uh yeah but but here we are we're going to talk about castaway so zemeckis so

all right so what lies beneath that's is that your favorite zemeckis or is that just kind of like the one you kind of speak up for in his you know ignoring the big boys name the big boys for me i have to look at a list of his credits yeah you got your back to the future you're robert roger rabbit i mean gump you know which is uh i agree i agree i agree with your hand gesture which i will not describe uh i will let you contact there are some big contact bands out there um of course the polar express american masterpiece which one polar express oh my god that was terrifying so much of my um when i was doing post on um on candy man whenever if we had a cg character or something i would be like listen this can't be like fuller

express bail wolf like we can't we need to figure this out also the irishman of course came up we're like we can't do it um right we're wax people um actually i won't talk about why that was important oh i probably gave away some plot points but who cares um hey i don't know have have either of you seen someone did and now i feel like there are a ton of videos like this but there's one i saw that's really good where someone just used like deepfake technology with old footage of deniro and redid the irishman scenes using deepfake technology it's so much better wow it's better it's weird how much better it is it's weird how much better it is and the performance is better

not just does it look more like young De Niro but you're like oh this is gonna fall apart when he starts emoting and the mouth doesn't sync up or whatever it totally works for me the biggest problem was the face was a huge problem the body just still

being old absolutely you know it was it was the the physical he couldn't you know whatever he couldn't make it up and and the eyes the weird blue eyes like that's the biggest thing for me though is what color his eyes are you know right exactly agreed agreed and also if you're gonna have three scenes in which he has to like kick guy, maybe just bring in a young body double for that. And he actually is kicking the guy and not just an empty part of the pavement. Right, right. Like, maybe Bobby can do full bottle for the fucking, full body for the dinner scenes or whatever. But let someone else do the kicking.

I still like that movie, though. I need to rewatch that movie. I enjoyed that one, actually, yeah. Yeah. I still like that movie though. I need to rewatch that movie. I just remember you seeing it, David. And, and I was asking, I was like the de-aging looks so bad from what I seen. How is that not a distraction? And you were like, it's bad. And it's somehow doesn't matter. And that's my whole take on that movie.

It's objectively not successful in that regard. And somehow the movie completely makes that kind of irrelevant. It's because you have so many scenes of Al pacino eating ice cream that you're like well solidarity yeah i love yeah yeah yeah um okay so yeah so what like or well cast away but is cast away as part of the hook for you just that crazy production you know I think so because my favorite Zemeckis might be it's hard actually

because after this movie does he make a good movie oh I can't talk like this about people hey I think he does but he never has a sort of widely accepted slam dunk. I feel like this is his last movie that most of the public liked that was well-reviewed and was a hit. I mean, you stick up for Allied, Griffin.

I love Allied. Oh. But, yeah, I mean, he certainly does not make a movie that is, I would say, critically respected. People like Flight. Which is pretty brutal flight is the closest allied flight was you know i like flight more than allied but i love plane crashes in movies a lot okay so i'm terrified of plane crashes and i'm terrified of plane crashes in real life me too you're terrified of planes period yeah me too right

yes okay i love the scenes. Well, I mean, so I have that where I'm like, you know, it's like, it's the thing I fear most. So, right. So watching it is super, super thrilling. But I have never seen Flight because I know that it has an intense plane crash. And I am very, this movie also has a very intense plane crash. Yeah, I love it. This one I love. I mean, this one really, this is a good time for me to be watching movies with plane crashes because i'm not getting on a

plane anytime soon so like i i might so i'm actually kind of excited for flight i i i've long avoided it for that very reason honestly flight is like very by the numbers very predictable Honestly, Flight is like very by the numbers, very predictable and like also weirdly satisfying. I think when it came out, like, and this is how I feel also about What Lies Beneath, because I feel like if What Lies Beneath came out this year, well, not this last year, we'll say, it would have been like, wow, how great. This is really exciting. Like, what a great movie. It came out sort of at a time when lots of these kinds of movies I feel like were getting

made, but lesser versions of them. So it was hard to pick them out whereas like flight i feel like if it came out when fucking what lies beneath came out people would be like oh wow look at that you know castaway is a particularly wild movie to watch in that kind of way but i i do feel like i i mean i'm looking forward to re-watching flight my memory of it is I was so amped for it, primarily because like, oh, Zemeckis finally put down the fucking mocap shit and is making a live action adult movie. Working with a huge movie star again. Right. Yeah. Right.

And then the concept in the trailer just seemed like, oh, this is interesting, kind of like morally gray material. oh, this is interesting kind of like morally gray material. And then I felt kind of disappointed when the movie becomes, as you said, a lot more kind of conventional by the numbers after maybe the first 30 or 40 minutes. Yeah, 100%. But the plane crash is incredible. And I feel like Zemeckis is very much a filmmaker where there's like clearly a hook to each movie.

That is what got him excited about making it, whether it's a story hook or it's like a sort of technical thing, a technical thing, a structural thing. I mean, it really feels like for him, the hook on this was a, how do you make a movie where you have that little dialogue?

You have that much isolation, that much silence for that long. And B, I just think he probably fucking geeked out at the idea of i could shoot half a movie wait a year and then shoot the second half no one gets to do that it feels like that was the whole appeal to him yeah that just he and hanks at this point individually but especially the idea of the forest gump guys are reteaming yeah could go into a studio and say like here's what we're gonna do and they had to say yes what did tom do in that besides lose weight and grow that

crazy beard was he just not doing anything in that time or correct yeah it's a good question america's biggest movie star just kind of sat on the bench for like a year wow right because yeah the movie before this is the green mile and then, he doesn't make a movie again for two years until Road to Perdition, O2. So, yeah, he really did throw everything into this, basically. And it was a huge hit. And he got an Oscar nomination. And, you know, it was not a bad idea.

What did he win for? Philadelphia, Gump? And Gump. Philadelphia and Gump, back to back. Back to back. And then the wilder thing is it's like he has the big nomination

then Philadelphia and Gump back to back wins then he gets nominated for Apollo 13 Saving Private Ryan Castaway and then this is his last nomination

for 20 years. He did not get nominated once. And then it's that Mr. Wilson's work. Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers. Right.

All the movies he didn't get nominated for are, it's a bananas list. Interesting. It's interesting. Yeah. Wow. No Captain Phillips, no Bridge of Spies. He's really good in Captain Phillips. Like, I don't enjoy how much I liked Captain Phillips.

I really don't. I mean, one reason you liked it so much so much though is because of how incredibly good he is he's so good those the two leads i mean are i mean him and um barcode unbelievable um such a great you know it's funny i mean i shouldn't talk about peter berg right now because we're talking about robert zemeckis but there's certain directors where always time for bird you're like i don't it doesn't really matter if your movie is bad like i just will enjoy it because I like the way you do the thing and weirdly Peter Berg is that for me which is seems crazy like to say out loud it does not seem crazy at all I think Peter Berg is a great example of that like even when I dislike his movies I like his movies yeah yeah

he just has a way about him that they all vibrate on the the same frequency so you're just like yeah this is working because it is what it is yes um yeah we we went to the post i'm just looking at hank's movies sully obviously stuff for sully sub for the just movies that oscar would go for yeah yeah just hard to look at interesting but also another good plane crash. Sure. This is America's number one Sully podcast. You're entitled to your opinion. You just need to know that we simp for Sully. That we're Sully bootlickers.

Do we love Sully, actually? Oh, we love Sully to the degree that people think it's a bit. People think it is a multi-year bit. Once every six months, there will be a thread on the blank check Reddit, which is, can someone explain the Sully bit to me? Right. Because no one believes you like it this much. People just replying with like, he saved 155 souls.

Like, I don't know, what do you mean by that? There was a forest water landing. You want to make it human. Right, right. Wait, who shot Sully? Who shot Sully? I think it was probably Eastwood's guy, but's let's let me double check oh yeah tom stern who which shoots all oh i know what you mean that's sort of like very grayed out look of all those eastwood films also

every light that is available is on in every room uh yes that's what i remember i was like what he does the weird like desaturated with fluorescent lighting yeah it's like what which a lot of it feels to me like his whole i i don't want to waste time on setups i only want to do two takes like just honestly yeah i've heard some funny stories about that which i will not share but um i mean even tom hanks i feel like has talked about clint eastwood's's rapid style of directing. What do they work on together? Sully!

Oh. I literally... I know. Seriously, sorry about that. Oh, my God. I think that's the only one. That's their only... That's the only one.

That's why my brain went down. I can't think of another. No, yeah. Hanks, some interview he did talking about working with Clint Eastwood, he said that he doesn't say action or cut. Like, everyone's just sort of set, people call places, and then he's just sort of sitting there, and then Hanks looks over to him, waiting for him to say action,

and then Eastwood just kind of goes like, well. Like, he just sort of throws his hand out and says, well. I believe he says, go ahead. I think that's the story. And then at the end of the scene, there he just sort of throws his hand out and says, I believe he says, go ahead. I think that's the story. And then at the end of the scene, there's just silence. And then he goes like, that's enough of that.

And he asked him like, that seems like the most passive way to direct a movie. And apparently it's because of all his time working with horses that when people would yell action or cut horses would get startled and it would fuck up scenes wow that's so funny yeah you did you do you remember that time and then i swear i'll keep this on track but like when but i feel like when like everyone was talking about like lady directors are being ladies and directing and i feel like so many women were interviewed and it was like how do you run your set and like like a couple were like, I don't say action.

It's just very masculine. And so like, you know, aggressive. And I just say like, let the spirits take you or whatever. And it was such a big deal made out of this. And I remember just thinking like you found like the two female directors who resist this. And now it feels like every woman, this, you know, like floats onto set and says whatever your heart wants i just like it was so weird and i find but i maybe they were all talking about clint eastwood i don't know but i don't i don't know why you would make movies if you didn't want to shout action i mean

people can do what they want but like to me that seems like the biggest thrill the ad does right sure right you don't even do that i like to sometimes if i don't like my ad but no i'm just kidding but also why why direct movies if you can't talk through like an analog megaphone and wear the little like post boy cap backwards exactly that's exactly what i do this is i i have this question for you because you are very much like a rapidly uh rising female director in the industry, which means, you know, you get discussed within that prism. Like, what is it like to be a female director? How is it different? You know, do you feel like I wonder you talk about something like that, right?

That piece. And I've been lucky to work with almost 50% female directors. Oh, dude. Just by total chance. It's not like I have any hiring power over the things where I'm number 27 on the call sheet. But also doing a lot of TV where more female directors work and have worked for the last 15 years than features, unfortunately. And I don't feel like there are a lot of seismic changes in that kind of way, like differences. Do you feel like a variety is writing a piece like that on like, what is it like to be a female director?

They are pointedly seeking out directors who they think represent a different female way of directing, quote unquote. I don't I mean, I think I feel like sometimes I think, well, here's what i think can happen right it's like you can you can say like here's what it's like to be a film director and then interview like miranda july and like um what's her face from transparent or what's their face sure say because they don't know yeah joe soloway no longer is what's their yeah she's non-binary now um and like they are very specific type of director unrelated to them being uh at the time both of them at least uh femmes you know what i mean so it's like um it's a bit like if you interviewed like patty jenkins and myself and ava duvernay and I don't know, like, Lulu Wang. Like, we all have pretty different

ways, because we just make different kinds of movies, but I feel like at the time it felt so much like, okay, we're going to talk about how women don't direct horror films or action films, but only talk to women who absolutely want to do those things. Sure. Okay, but then there are women who don't, but like,

I don't know i think i think people do kind of pick and choose in ways but also now that there's so many of us and so many of us still being like one percent but still better than 0.5 um it's kind of harder to like do that pigeonholing thing it's also that thing of just like i'm sure if you uh went on a harmony corinne set he would do a bunch of weird shit differently than most directors I wouldn't find myself on that set ever you couldn't pay me to go to a Harmony Korine set you don't like bacon taped to walls I can't I honestly I can't even watch kids I haven't watched kids I started it and I was like I absolutely not I can't do it we should mention

because uh Harmony Korine has come up on the podcast and producer Ben has not said anything which is unconventional for this show but the reason reason why is Ben was unable to sit in for this recording. He did bring in a backup producer. It's Wilson Volleyball. And this is not a bit that I am doing. This is a real thing where Ben charged to the blank check business account the purchase of a official castaway Wilson volleyball with the face printed on it and he has placed it in front of his laptop on zoom in our zoom window there is a Wilson volleyball in front of a virtual background of

an island and Ben is just going to leave his computer open like this for two two hours so there's some nice sunlight on Wilson's face right now actually yeah it's feeling very integrated this whole it looks lovely yeah yes okay I was just gonna say no one would try to frame any of the weird shit Harmony Corrine does as emblematic of male directors which is exactly the point you're making. Right, right, right, right. But Robert Zemeckis, in many ways, in many ways, a very traditional director, like very much like a guy who's part of the institution, grows up on like popular culture,

is part of that like Spielberg generation of TV kids who become like the populist blockbuster guys. But he does all these weird little experiments within his very mainstream films. And this movie comes about because Hanks births the idea. He said that he read somewhere about how many flights it takes for FedEx to maintain their service. And they have so many planes with so few people on them, mostly carrying packages,

going over large sort of unmanned seas every day. And so then he had the thought of like, what would it be like if one of those planes went down rather than a commercial airline where there's a much larger search, a much larger number of people lost at sea. So then he went to Zemeckis with it and i think zemeckis latched on to uh a his they were as tv kids gelling on the idea of like we grew up with this shit like gilligan's island and to a lesser extent like all the robinson caruso

adaptations where people are able to suddenly build like this incredible fort coconut radios and all this shit like no one's made a movie about what it would actually be like to sort of survive on an island for that long and like relish in the isolation and the silence and how menial the sort of learning curve would be for everything and so they get onto that idea uh you know i think pitch the movie everyone wants it uh hire uh what's his name who's like just the ultimate 90s studio screenwriter at this point william broils right who wrote he wrote a pile 13 he wrote he wrote entrapment what if there was well um an entrapment uh what else created china beach did he? Yes, he did.

He created China Beach, the TV series. Yes. But like, come on, Entrapment. Like what if, you know, a 70-something jewel thief teamed up with a 20-something jewel thief? I can't remember. Maybe there are thieves. It's truly confounding that film in that way. I remember being really young watching it and I love the movie, but remember being like he is so old he's very old and what universe although i guess her

universe because she's literally married someone 20 years older than her but that is true she did that right but i don't i don't think they have sex i can't remember i have seen i saw the movie in theaters and i remember there's a crucial uh set piece takes place because he unplugs a laptop too quickly and it sets off an alarm that that's the era entrapment came out and anyway but yes that's who he william broils comes in i believe he was uh he was in the army like you know that's it so he like whatever he's um he's right in the movie what else what else griff i mean he i guess he like scouts like fedex right like yeah figures out how that all works they get them on board right but but i think another big part of it was like zemeckis and a bunch of crew members i don't

know if this is once they had started filming or if this was a sort of uh prior thing but actually spent time on an island so they could learn firsthand, like, oh, what are the challenges? What are the things you would try to solve? So started constructing the sort of narrative around that. And I know the Wilson dialogue was fully written. Like, Brawls wrote

out full back-and-forth dialogue scenes between him and Wilson, so Tom Hanks knew exactly what the responses were in his head to play off of it. Yeah. Then they do this totally bananas thing where I guess DreamWorks was DreamWorks and Fox.

Were they the two studios on what lies beneath as well? Yes. Yes, they were. And in fact, it's like, like this was a fox movie that dreamworks took internationally and what lies beneath was a dreamworks movie that fox took internationally so they worked out some whole fucking deal that was part of i think the whole pitch was like he liked the idea i think in just a sort of competitive sportsmanship kind of way of like

could i make an entire movie within a movie? Could I have the opportunity to make a movie with this sort of like production gap? Got DreamWorks and Fox on board with like, I'll give you two big movie star films within the same year. And then the other thing was having what lies beneath in between allowed him to retain all of his key crew. Because otherwise it was like, oh, I'd shoot with people. And then a year later, I can't tell them to just stay on hold.

So he was able to promise people, I'll give you a whole movie in between. Here will be an eight month shoot. Here are the outside dates for the next 18 months of your life. Crazy, crazy, crazy. But they made two like $300 million hits out of that. They made back-to-back smash hit. He had two of the top 10 films of 2000. Right, both original movies.

I mean, both obviously based in What Lies Beneath is sort of a Hitchcock thriller, haunted house movie, Cast Away is a deserted island movie. But two just whole cloth original it's like you say you know like if this came out now people would be like this is the best shit i've ever seen i didn't realize hollywood still made these both films honestly both films because i think it's because we have so much saturation of ip stuff but it's

like people like like when i saw an original when a big original film comes out whether it's big in terms of like if it's like a drama or a thriller uh like what lies beneath like mid mid-budget or like a high budget like film like cast away like you're like oh shit like people are still thinking with their brains and doing new things and and they're also both really well made so um they are yeah there's also just something to how sparse the pitch is for this movie. There's something exciting about just like Zemeckis and Hanks had so much trust that they were like, here's the movie. He gets trapped on an island and the bulk of the movie is him just learning a series of skills. I was shocked actually when I was watching it and I was like, he got to the island. I was like, oh, how much time has passed?

And the movie is like two hours and 20 minutes it's a long movie and i was like oh only 20 minutes has passed and i'm gonna supposed to be here for two more hours and the movie doesn't feel long to me at all so it was like it's so good like the pacing is so good and like you know knocking out his tooth and then four years later and you're just like what it's it's so good like it's one as you say like the movie is really long and doesn't feel in at all it has big bookends like you know like substantial bookends that don't feel to me at least like superfluous and it's really the island action is really just two days like it's like kind of his first night there and kind of his last night there like you know it like it sort of asks you to imagine everything in between and like it's like kind of his first night there and kind of his last night there like you know

it like it sort of asks you to imagine everything in between and like it's kind of not hard to do yeah uh it's wild david is taking off his atlantic sweatshirt no shit is getting real the hot david 2020 i'm gonna be next because it's really hot in his closet this closet it's a stunningly confident movie in that like we're we're gonna dole things out so patiently we're gonna give you so little and we are confident that the audience will remain engrossed in this and the filmmaking is not flashy like he's not doing sort of Danny Boyle, like, I'm using all this sort of extreme cinematic language in order to make the sort of subjective experience of this guy being trapped here. It's very sort of like lockdown, little scene fragments,

watching gradual progression of things. Can we talk about, actually actually in the filmmaking and the simplicity of it like how some of these vfx shots did not age well at all please the whole movie is a day for night yeah i'm like staring at it like this feels bad like not bad like wrong to my eye that is absolutely the stuff that works the least they just because they didn't want artificial lighting and it would have been too dark to get any uh proper image on film they shot all the night scenes during the day and then digitally darkened them and painted out the sky and the that the sky looks the worst yeah it looks just yeah but

somehow you're still in sometimes the water looks really weird right like the clouds in the water right yeah right yeah it's pretty disturbing at times like i remember i was like i was watching like his first night especially um you're like what because it feels almost like i like my eyes are bad like my eyes can't focus like when I was watching it yes it's it looks like a weird Instagram filter it just has that unnatural quality uh to it um they also almost the entire movie is ADR'd uh because like everything on the island they said the waves were just too loud so pretty much like every line of dialogue every piece of sound yeah it's like all foley all adr it's like they shot it lost yeah yeah it's all lost though sorry um uh i was there's a very famous notorious uh press screening or

whatever of all is lost where someone got up and asked a question that went on for five minutes and at the end they were like what's your question though and he was like i guess my question is is all lost like oh my god anyway it's it's always held up by film critics is the worst q a question ever so much um yeah yes um uh but they shot it in fiji right um like a an ad maybe not and yeah an uninhabited island in fiji um which that must have been crazy my god i'm looking at it now has iguanas this looks cool are there i was wondering what natural predators might be on that island i was like are there boars like well you see this is the thing i i also there's no way that lost i don't know if you were a lost watcher i was initially yeah but you know like there's no way lost isn't just

the initial germ of it was someone watching castaway and being like oh right we're just gonna do this right and lost has boars And I kept confusing plot points with Lost. I kept being like, right, does he hunt animals? No, I guess he doesn't. I guess there's nothing going on. He just eats his fish and goes crap. Just gets his fish. How quickly would you guys...

I would die immediately. I was having this argument with my wife. But I was just like, no, I can't do the fishing. I don't think I'd make it. I don't think I'd last like five nights. And I'm alone? Yeah. Yeah.

In his exact circumstances. You can use all the FedEx crap, right? You can hopefully take advantage of some choice packages, but that's it. Oh, man. Maybe it's me being too generous to myself, but I think I'd live for a little bit. I mean, i don't think i would have ever got here's what would not happen i would not have gotten off that island no there's no way you never right engineering a raft going over those waves uh unless i was like

i'm ready to die and i might as well try you know sure right right right no but i would be so scared not just of going over the waves but like then what like exactly yeah well i guess he knows that there's a boat there's a there's a shipping lane out there right he saw a boat but it's very far yeah my thing would be like i'm ready to die i'm ready to kill myself i will at least attempt to escape like i'm sure sure yeah i i just feel like i mean i i say this a lot as a joke but it's also not a joke. I feel like my very existence, continued existence, is proof that we as a species have overcome survival of the fittest. Like, I'm someone who is not supposed to survive the elements in terms of how I am built. So I just feel like I would accidentally die very quickly.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Infection, trip and fall. Right. You'd be like, like oh let me get that stick that seems helpful right and then you cut your foot and then that's it yeah right i also think i'd be too cowardly and disorganized to figure out a way to even like build a raft so i would just be complacent be like cool this is where i live for the rest of my life and then i

think something would accidentally kill me within 48 hours that's my guess but it make i mean it's crucial that he is a logistics he's a problem solver right that's why we have that opening bookend yeah um and look because otherwise we don't buy probably that he figures shit out on this island right yeah there are two moments i really love one one for just the practical sense of it like when he's trying to open the coconut and he smashes the rock and then that shard comes out i was like thinking about the rock i was like is that how do they do that and then the cut to four years later and the spear and the it's so good tilts up and he's just like one hip jutted out

like in his wine cloth and his hands is coming down slowly it's also just like the guy is like having as dominant a run as a movie star has ever had for him to look that radically transformed that deep into a movie when he is like america's favorite it's just so fucking striking like not just that he's that skinny the hair the beard but as you said just the physicality like he's moving in a way different than he's ever moved in his life up until that point it's it's the best magic trick of the movie like it's the kind of thing like that whatever boyhood you know like movies like that that just do weird time shit you know like it's just yeah there's nothing like cutting to him looking like that and you just immediately knowing like well this

can't be fake like I guess this he just lost all this weight or you know like it just it just gets you I mean do we want to go I mean this is not a plotty movie like it's tough to sort of like go through sort of go in order

the plane crash we I think you made a very good point which is it feels like most people's version of this movie would be an hour before he gets on the plane they would be like you really need to spend a lot of time with the guy and know what he's losing and be invested before he's stranded And this movie is like 20 minutes until the plane crashes. It moves so fast. It's unconventional that of the bookends, the coda is longer than the prologue, so to speak. It feels like most people would do the opposite and would not have the confidence to have a solid 90 minutes plus on the island.

But the opening is just sort of so fast uh it's just what like the shot where he goes to her office and she's at the the um photocopier and he's just like looking at her and then the way helen hunt like just performs that that meeting like she turns around and she's sort of tired and she's stretching. And then it just feels so real. And you're like, oh, these are real fucking people. And adults. And they're adults. Jesus, yeah.

Grown-ass people. Yeah, exactly. We talk a lot on this podcast about Tom Hanks movies being about a guy who's good at his job. That's the main thing that unifies most of his films and the comics is great at his job of playing people who are good at their job but it's like right away that's the number one thing the movie wants to establish this is a guy who's a problem solver thinks through everything knows all the variables um and it's it's fun that you have the you know getting to see the package travel with the little

kid and everything but also I totally forgot that the cold open of the movie is the woman Bettina and her philandering husband her philandering husband who you never see and her

weird business iron wielding wings no idea i i also forgot that i knew that she had a cheating husband but i forgot that like the wings was like that motif yeah it's like his weird little religious icon that he fixates on yeah um yeah she's like an industrial artist that's what i took away from it right like she's just out there in texas making cool shit out of metal what's her husband doing in russia i remember thinking that i was like what's he doing there and it's because it's so awkward when the package gets there and he's like it's from my wife and then goes inside i was like what it's so awkward

but i kind of love it um I love it too, yes. And I love Helen Hunt. I mean, this is Helen Hunt's year. You know, this is, we've talked about What Women Want, which also came out this year. She also does Pay It Forward, which is obviously a big movie. Not a hit, but you know.

But like, she won the Oscar three years ago. Her sitcom has wrapped up. And she's just in four movies this year. She's just like kind of everywhere. Mad About You had ended and she was finally able to do movies again post oscar and all of them came out like within a six month period she's i mean as good as it gets the james oh my god of course i love that i love that her son in that movie has the disease that all kids have in movies which is unspecified yeah he just coughs he just coughs a lot he's got a real coughing problem um i love her in that movie i mean i have such a crush on helen hunt in all movies she's amazing she's amazing she it's honestly a good run like i feel like she got kind of a bad rap for a while

because she won an oscar and that like whatever puts a target on your back but like if you could like twist her through to this like that's like you know she makes a lot of fun movies yeah i i think there was a backlash at this point and it was a little bit of the jude law syndrome where it's just like for four months she was in every movie like it was like september october november december she had like four big movies right yeah yeah yes yeah i mean you're right i think you're right it's the dude law thing though was that really like did anyone care except for chris rock and then he made it a big deal you know what i mean i mean i don't think anyone was mad at jude

law per se but i do think it's not like, because if Jude Law had made four great movies in one year or whatever, then everyone would be like, it was just that there was suddenly a lot of Jude Law in, like, okay movies. I mean, some of them are good. It was Alfie, Closer, Lemony Snicket, where he's pretty much only voiceover, Aviator, where he's a little bit more

than a cameo, and then Sky Captain, The World of Tomorrow, and there's one more right six that was the thing i heard huckabees though it was a lot of movies between september and december i feel like david and i were both nerds who were spending a lot of time on like oscar prediction message boards in high school and it was very much a thing that people were doing jokes about yeah like if it feels like it was noted but i don't think anyone was like ugh and then chris rock crystallized it and weirdly then the sean penn reaction did more damage than

and yeah everyone was like shut up sean penn we're allowed to not like doodlaw leave me alone yeah he's just like i don't i'm just here at the ceremony i've been watching that as i don't know how old i was whenever that happened then we're being like feeling so awkward for chris rock not for chris rock but just for everyone chris rock was talking about because it felt so personal because i couldn't really identify with his emotion also because he wasn't like oh isn't that jude law and everything he literally was like if you can't get a star like don't get jude law get a star i was like damn what that right right his whole bit was like jude law is dollar store russell crowe or whatever which was

yeah it was a somewhat aggressive way to frame it it was so awkward i honestly i don't i don't think i don't like any either time that chris rock um hosted the Oscars but I think I love his Chris Rock stand-up I think he's a fucking genius at it but both times I was just like I don't know what we're doing here together Chris I think it's one of those things where like the years leading up to that people were like why don't they just get Chris Rock to host the Oscars he seems like he'd be great for it he did it no one was super happy with it everyone forgot that he hosted and then five years later people were like why don't they just get Chris Rock to host the Oscars he seems like he'd be good at it it's like he did it before it's like no I remember that we should let him do it again yeah and then the same

thing happened yeah the second time I remember being more underwhelming I don't mind the first Rock host my mom was the hugest fan of it. She, every year after Chris Rock, was just like, they should bring Chris Rock back. I don't know why I'm looking at this guy right now. So maybe that colored my opinion. It's such a weird job because people don't want a host who's too fawning, but they also don't want someone who's too critical. And he's a little bit too cutting.

And Neil Patrick Harris is the opposite direction, where it's just doing a magic trick on stage who's been a good who was a good host like recently i think there's still lots of points for blackface but absolutely he certainly did when everyone was like he's back the legend is back and he like opened with blackface and it was like oh boy can we say hey maybe absolutely and away? Hey, maybe not. And Tintinface. And Tintinface. I don't want to rank the issues here, but Tintinface was also an issue.

It's something that we don't talk about enough. Absolutely. I know that she has recently been discussed quite a lot and has been criticized very fairly. But Ellen DeGeneres' two performances I remember being pretty solid. I think she did a great job. Steve Martin is the best best modern oscar host i guess what are we calling modern anymore that's my point steve martin has now been long enough that i wouldn't call a modern ellen was the best of anyone in

the last 20 years because she kind of tapped into like what movie like what people actually want to walk to oscars for which is like the excitement of like we like movies a lot actually and like the excitement of the people who might win them and i remember that little video she did in the beginning with um everyone sort of like woo and like jennifer hudson was like don't i look good y'all or something i don't know i just remember being like oh this is fun like and now everything after that i've kind of hated i i think she struck the right balance and and i think there's also that thing i remember someone saying about billy Crystal in the years after Billy Crystal when everyone was like, bring Billy back. And then Billy came back and made us all rue the day we wish for that.

But in the years, I remember people analyzing why Billy Crystal was so much more successful than other people. And they said, like, because he was at just the right level of, like, being a Hollywood insider while also being, like, a comedian and having, like, a little bit objectivity. Yeah. But there's something about, like, if someone feels too far removed from that world, you're like, I don't know. Like, should Seth MacFarlane be making jokes about nude scenes, you know? That was so disgusting. I was like, how dare you it is crazy it is crazy that that happened and like i like of course he got like his like jennifer lauren to be like we're in on it he he but it's like you shouldn't have to be in on someone

literally talking about your porn hub scenes like it's crazy like oh anyway someone recently like texted me being like i'm not like misremembering this right like that happened like in this decade yeah yeah it was disgusting i was like this is i was like this is a crazy world um maybe i'll have this is the standard uh i don't know if i'm gonna be able to direct a film it's time to deal with these bobo's seth mcfarland's oscar hosting performance almost made you quit quit the quit this industry so the cast was amazing uh cast was amazing we do enjoy it it's got a great clean crash wait what were you gonna say griff no no no just i i the opening setup stuff uh i i feel like the uh the the dinner scene with the family is so good.

I mean, because you have him showing up to see her at work. There's really good, just like two movie stars, two good actors who are able to convey an entire history of a relationship in their body language very instantly. As you said, Nia, just like the way way she turns around the way they look at each other she's just like she's not she's just exactly the kind of person you would want to stay alive for as corny as that sounds like yeah you know and if she was like whatever you know like not like she's the perfect sort of like she just feels like a real person she's the most like famous charming type of person who you're still like well this is a real person yeah it's funny i remember like as a kid you know i was 11 when this movie came out when helen hunt was having her sort of like banner year and i remember like feeling that this movie like totally fell off a cliff when he gets back to land and sees her again and i remember feeling

similarly about what women want uh when she enters the movie and like what women want 100 180 i think everything before she enters is intolerable the movie becomes somewhat good once she kind of takes control of the narrative and her stuff for me. And this works a lot better, but I do feel like there was that weird resentment of like, Oh, all these movies where like Helen Hunt comes in and reality comes crashing back into these like sort of fantastical premises. That's so funny.

I think that was a common hit on this movie. Like it's so good, but it's the Island stuff is what's good. And rewatching it. I'm like, I don't think the island stuff is enough. Like, obviously it's, it's very impressive and it's very involving, you know, like, and maybe there's just that sort of like cinematic, like endurance thing where it's like, how long can you make a movie with no dialogue with just, you know, him talking to a volleyball? Like people are just sort of into that sort of like the critique of like Wally or whatever,

like, you know, come on, make the whole movie, just him cleaning up garbage. Like people like, because the reason why you like it is because you got just enough of it. Not because you need to have the whole fucking movie.

That's, that's exactly right. They, they, they don't know. They wouldn't want a full course of that. Yes. That's also for me,

the brilliance of this movie is just like his sense of balance is so correct in all the island stuff. Not just how much of it there is in totality, but also just when the time jump happens, how long each scene is. Like it essentially is scene fragments for 90 minutes. You're just getting these little pieces with these jumps, whether it's a short jump of just the progression of a fire or a slightly longer jump of him moving to an entirely different task. Like, when Lady Bird came out and there was the inevitable, like, second wave backlash to how beloved Lady Bird was, and I remember a lot of people, like, were throwing out the, like,

well, how hard is it to direct this movie? Like, it's silly that we're putting this up for Oscars. It's like a high school comedy. It's not that hard to direct. And I, which is stupid. But I remember the best rebuttal I read to it, I think, now I'm trying to remember who it was who wrote this, but just sort of explained, like,

it is not sort of, like, bravura, you know, sort of explained like it is not sort of like bravura you know sort of like technically complicated filmmaking that is usually lauded but it is deceptively difficult to make a film like ladybird where most scenes are 30 seconds long like that's another movie where it's a year of her life and it takes all these jumps and the difficulty of that is you're sort of doing like all filmmaking is pointillism but it's super extreme pointillism where you're like these scenes don't really have coverage there's no way to edit those fragments internally it's all about having the right judgment of what angle are you at and what is the length of the action of Tom Hanks using the rock to try to break the coconut.

How do you direct that performance? How does the actor have the right judgment? How's the director cover it the right way? And then how do you edit that properly? How much or how little do you want of each of those things? And it is just like these, these very small puzzle pieces that build really, really well.

Yeah. My favorite little vignette is him in the fire. He's like, I made the fire. I have made fire. Exactly. It's just like such Tom Hanks-ishness. But it's also that thing that makes the movie work so well it's because like you want to watch him do this you want tom hanks to come back too yeah it's also i think why like a movie like um this is so off base not off topic but a movie

like um you've got male works when like you should really hate him so much um because he he like ruins his woman's life and then it's like in exchange i give you myself but i love that movie and i think it's because you you just tom hanks has this thing about him where it's just he's you want to watch him he just works i don't know it's that ineffable movie star thing. I mean, like road to perdition, his next movie after this is just like, this guy is a murderer. And I disagree with this, but the complaint that some people have about that movie is he's too likable. I can't accept him as being dangerous,

even though you see him kill people. He just has that fucking thing. But I also feel like it's such a good study in the power of withholding stuff from the audience. When you go that long without him having dialogue and also you've watched so much of Tom Hanks sort of being a husk of himself. Yeah. Being so silent and so defeated and so stressed out and scared and angry and sad when you get a classic sort of tom hanks scene of him dancing around a fire and being funny and charming it feels like such a fucking victory because you're like yeah yeah tom hanks is still in this and then

then all of a sudden he's like crazy blonde hair and right you know he's a silent fish assassin who has like a statue erected to the time he tried to kill himself on the island like that's like it's and and it's because of hanks that that jump works too you know like if it's a regular or whatever it's maybe it's a different actor we see them as a skinnier person we're like okay i get but like to see hanks like that just sort of feels a little more shocking the movie's two hours and 20 minutes and there's 24 minutes of score and seven minutes of that is the end credits so there's i mean very very little music for a guy who uses a lot of music yeah well and also for a movie that lacks dialogue for so much, like you'd think like, well,

yeah, well we'll have this score that kind of like, you know, that can like fill things out. Like, well, don't worry, we'll rely on that.

And he's like, no, we can't rely on that. Like we can't rely on anything. That's gonna put the audience at ease about it. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah.

I mean, he's taking away most of his tricks. He's like, he's a guy who's had a lot of movies with like quotable witty dialogue, you know? Great comic chemistry and energy between actors, crazy set pieces and special effects. Like it feels like this is sort of him

doing his like dogma experiment in certain ways. He's been doing that, sorry go ahead. No, with the weird gambit of the you know split in half production what were you gonna say no just i feel like and this is something i appreciate about zemeckis is like i feel like he's just kept doing that like okay now i'm gonna do like this mocap thing now i'm gonna do like this kind of movie now i'm gonna like he's always like challenging himself and and that's something i like a lot about about the castaway what lies beneath castaway of it all is like you're like watching someone who's like knows how to do what he's doing really well and it's sort of

like maybe i'll try this right exactly and that's what i really appreciate about him even when i'm like oh my god polar express is terrifying to me on a spiritual level um i mean it's it's why i'm happy that we're doing him and uh we were talking with a friend last night and she was like are you are you worried about any of the movies coming up because often especially if we're covering a long filmography we're like oh that's gonna be a bummermer episode or just I don't want to rewatch that movie. That one's boring. And the movies of his that I dislike are all just so weird. And even just like on a level of why was he doing this? Like, what was the thing he was trying to challenge himself with by taking on this project?

I've been watching so many interviews and shit with him, but also like about him and uh i forget what it was on the special features for but there was some interview with spielberg where he said like i think it was spielberg who said it but like he's a guy who really thrives from conflict uh and uh he needs to feel like he's fighting against something. He's like kind of incapable of getting complacent for better or worse. Fascinating. And repeating himself. And then he, I saw him say in this interview where he is like,

you know, there's this double edged sword to becoming successful and respected, which is then people don't really question you as much. He said like after back to the future people kind of trusted that i knew what i was doing and i hated that because i wanted people to question me i want to have to fight for my ideas and i wanted to be worried that things might not work and when you're surrounded by glad handlers it's it's a big issue and he's like it's paramount that you have to surround yourself with the right people who you know are critical and also challenge yourself doing things that might not work

and he's like a great example of that a dude who is clearly very willing to make movies that could completely blow up in his face yeah and i mean even even flight flight was did that make enough money it was sort of like money yeah it was like a solid hit not like yeah you know forrest gump sized hit or whatever but like i think it was made relatively cheaply considering yes the star power or whatever and it like did well again tangent but flight was actually one of the movies that made me hire james badgedale on my first film uh because i didn't know the legend iron man three and he's so good in iron man three those two performances i was like oh yeah okay he's it's interesting because right because he initially i feel like when he emerged played like kind of like because like he was like on 24 right he was like you know in like shows like that he was kind of like a stocky guy he's in the departed you know and then in flight in iron

man 3 he's kind of like skinny and wiry and weird like and so it's like oh he's this guy actually has like some tools he's a fucking chameleon he's amazing he's so good i love he's like doing like the jeremy davies part in flight. Like it's... Right. And yeah, apparently he fought like really, really fucking hard for that role. Oh, wow.

I know. I remember seeing some interview with him where he talked about how badly they didn't want to cast him because of that perception of who he was.

And so he like lost the weight in advance to convince them that he could do it. That sounds like that. He did a bunch of reads. Right for like one scene with a character who's never even named but he's so yeah good now uh also iron man 3 rips it's the

best marvel movie up until this point oh you know like i'm i don't love all the marvel movies but i'm marvel trash my friends call me i will watch them all i don't care like i love i grew up with marvel like i just i'm there same but my favorite ones are the ones like iron man 3 that kind of like deconstruct like the superhero thing but also that talk about like oh this guy has ptsd and is having panic attacks and that's why that's fucking interesting yeah and so is about like talk therapy like it's like this guy flew into a black hole he needs to deal with it we stay in iron man 3 almost as much as we stay in sully on this i can't even engage with the idea that they're on the same level

two american classics two american heroes two american heroes i mean look iron man iron man 3 also saved all the people aboard that flight there they have there's like 12 of them but yeah the barrel of monkeys the yeah which I love yeah wait what was Zemeckis' last movie his last movie was

Welcome to Marwen oh dear yeah and his next movie uh which will be out by the time this episode comes out

is his remake of Roald Dahl's The Witches with Anne Hathaway yeah I saw that trailer written by the legendary trio screenwriting trio his remake of Roald Dahl's The Witches. With Anne Hathaway. Yes, I saw that trailer. Written by the legendary trio, screenwriting trio that we all know and love so well,

Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo del Toro, obviously. Those three guys. Kenya Barris? The three credited writers. Kenya Barris, Guillermo del Toro, are the screenwriters of The Witches. Did you guys watch black AF? Uh, no,

that's the one where he plays himself, right? That's the, the Netflix show, right? Yeah.

Did not watch that. It's a struggle. I don't think you need to, uh, I, I got, uh,

an audition, uh, a breakdown for that show. And I didn't go up for it just because I had made a decision for the sake of my

sanity not to play personal assistants anymore. It was one of those. But just seeing the breakdown I was like, really? This is the thing you want to do with your overall deal? You want to be the lead of the show? It's very strange. I mean,

I think everyone thinks they can be Larry David and truly it's not possible. He's one of a kind yes yeah he truly is and even he has bad seasons of curbs so like let's live in reality everyone you know what i mean by the way griffin um do you ever worry about all the shit you talk on this podcast and absolutely constantly are you kidding me yes i have probably torpedoed my entire career uh so in in certain ways i have less to lose but also uh far less security uh no it's look it is it is a thing that i have made uh my peace with to some degree uh but it is definitely a thing i've been conscious about that i have sort of made my choice. I also feel like... These are the couple things I tell myself.

One, I have such divergent tastes, as proven by my love of Sully, that almost anyone I've ever shit-talked on the show, there's probably at least one thing they've done that I love. Like, I really, with very few exceptions, talked on the show, there's probably at least one thing they've done that I love. Yeah. Like I, I, I really, with very few exceptions, uh, couldn't find at least one thing where I would wax poetic about that to them. Um, I also find that, uh, a lot of people in the industry, uh, such as yourself, uh,

but, but also like people who are, like, executives at studios or directors or screenwriters or showrunners or whoever who listen to the show. Some of them who become guests. Some of them who very much don't want to come on the show and say anything

potentially damning about anyone else but will DM privately. I think get that. That, like, it's not a negative show. Yeah's all like love based yeah that we praise so much that even if we're like that thing's a fucking stinker it's not like we're just

dunk town yeah for sure but i worry about it constantly yes and to some degree i think my career is over thank you i think about that sometimes when i because i i genuinely have um i don't know if it's like i don't care because i do care but i generally just will just say I think about that sometimes when I, cause I, I genuinely have, um, I don't know if it's like, I don't care because I do care, but I generally just want to say things. I'm like, whoopsie Daisy. Um, I support it. I mean, I prefer that to, you know, how most people comport themselves. Very wisely have sort of like gotten off of Twitter. Uh, I was like, I can't engage with this right now also because my tweets like i'll hear about them from execs so like yeah we saw

that tweet so we really wanted to make sure we did this i was like oh lord okay which is also a great tool but like i'm like sure at a certain point you wonder if it's worth it like risk versus reward should we talk about this movie yeah yeah let's talk about that okay one thing we didn't talk about the plane crash let's get into it because i love which is such a good plane crash just just not my number one nightmare because it's maybe one reason i'm less afraid of this one just because like when am i ever going to be on a fedex plane i mean you know like it's not the the true nightmare of like being in your chair and then just being told like brace for impact or whatever also those planes will drive will fly through things that commercial flights will never fly through because yes they don't have to worry

about commercial flights yeah yeah they don't have to worry about bouncing people around right yeah which is that also freaks me out god imagine just flying one of those things like absolutely not but i think that was hanks's whole idea i mean he was like the whole spark of it for him was like these planes operate differently and fly over different areas and it would be harder track yeah um what were you saying david sorry um well just just like the little details like the way you're sort of seeing you know how fucked up everything is out the window but you can't really you know like you're just seeing glimpses like the the focus on the guy hitting his head like which is such a bleeding out you know mundane injury like it's literally a put your seat belt on injury like and yet it's so it feels so insurmountable like it just like you're just like this is they're not going to be able to

deal like this is it this is it's over i love that moment where where and this is the moment i always remember from from it it's when you see the actual water and i always think it's earlier than it's going to be and then it's always later than it than i that i remember but just that like the whole sequence is amazing because you have the moment where he like wants to get his the locket as opposed to the the um life jacket and then the guy's like sit down do that do this do that and then he hits his head and then he's just standing there looking out of the window and then when that water shows up oh holy fuck that's the thing it's that moment where it's like there's no avoiding it the plane is going into the water whether or not you die now

there's there's no pulling up for this. It fills me with so much dread. It is fascinating that I feel like the reputation at the time was like, oh, you have never seen a plane crash sequence this visceral, this terrifying, this technically advanced. It was sort of cited as a high watermark for plane crash terror. And then 10 or 12 years later, both hanks and zemeckis are like i want to make another crash movie yeah i think um this one is better than sully's sorry um actually well here's the thing about

sully's plane crash so this plane crash is amazing because it is and this is what I I enjoy about uh I think about both is that for my like anxiety about planes is that like you can survive but also like people know what to do and watching someone calmly like know what to do is like that's that's the only reason that's all I get out of Sully is like you just tell me what happened exactly in the real world but like with some drama and in two hours you know and then griffin i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i i just have to correct you it was not a crash it was a forced water landing it was it was a forced landing 100 but i think it's like okay no that's inarguably the best part of sully like i don't know a single part look i've made so

many people watch that movie and a lot of them don't like it but everyone agrees the fucking crash is stunning and and so much of it is just that's such a different energy you've ever than you've ever seen of him trying to continue to check off all the boxes once the plane has landed his management of the crisis is the most stunning thing it's also just the type of shit that hanks is absolutely best at as an actor and is the same muscle that this movie uses really well yeah i fucking love it i love the moment in the bathroom where he's taking off his uh band-aid right before yes and he's like ah it's just such a great it's just so well done and that's what i love about

something we've all done yeah we've all yeah yeah yeah it's it's also just as a kid like any movie like this would fill me with so much anxiety and dread like i would just any movie where it's like based around a crisis something going wrong the pressure cooker or like horror movies in particular thrillers i i would want to see them and then i would sit there in so much dread of when like the shoe drops and the movie becomes like a fucking uh you know boiler room and like relishing that like oh oh it's a scene where they're like at a family dinner and they're like making cute banter and they're comparing their planners and this is like

nice character stuff the moment when he's in the bathroom with the bandit is such a nice character thing but I just I flash back to me being 11 years old and just being like fuck this is the last second you're gonna get of this shit like get ready the rest of the movie is gonna stress you out enjoy it while you can oh yeah oh man the tooth right like we've

talked about a lot of the island stuff but there's just like you're just so stressed out immediately by like any any little thing like like the tooth his tooth hurts and you're like, oh, fuck, 20 minutes from now, that's going to be a problem. You see, I don't know, there's that early shot when he washes up on the beach and the packages are washing up. And I just immediately start having that anxiety like, dude, you got to get the packages. Dude, dude, wake up. You got to get the packages.

They're going to go away. You just immediately are so stressed out by any interaction with any object and zemeckis is such a big uh setup payoff guy like back to the future is all based around setup payoff but like really cleanly set up and explained and visualized so you can't miss it and this movie lets you fill in a lot of the gaps he doesn't hammer things too hard in the setup like even just the i i like that helen hunt's character is also really busy and focused on her career that it's not a thing where it's like oh she's just waiting that he is leaving waiting at dinner and he spends the

entire time on the island wishing he had spent more time you know it's like they both were mutually that's what made them attracted to each other all the shit where the families are making fun of them for not getting married and like how excited they are when the beeper goes off there's such a nice moment where she looks at him and you're ready for her to go like, like, you know, do the sort of classic,

like other woman sigh. And instead she just goes like, okay, so let's figure it out. Where do we celebrate Christmas? It's in the car. Okay. Like the fact that they're,

yeah, yeah. That they're both equally haunted by the fact that they couldn't slow down and appreciate it when they had it. But it also means that the stuff like the, the the toothache he sets up similarly subtly like he just he does it one time he does one beat at the dinner table they go is it something with the food he goes no and then it takes like an hour for it to come back in again but as a movie watcher you know god damn it now he's crashed on the island and the fucking tooth

is going to come into play yeah you're just sitting there in dread of when the tooth becomes an issue and that's like the most harrowing part of the entire film dude yeah because then it makes you think about like all the things that you have to go get regularly checked out that like well if i were an island this would just be the worst like all those cavities would just end up being a mess and blah blah like oh you know thinking about george washington's wooden teeth you know i'm just like wow that could be me if i were on this island right it's like he you only have to set up one medical issue like that and watch him solve it in the most grotesque way even though the scene itself is not that bloody it's very visceral and upsetting yeah

it's just that it's like eye stuff gum teeth stuff like just the idea of anything touching them you just immediately tense up in a movie yeah because you just know how much the nerves are number one worse but this scene hits me in the way that i stuff usually does i still you said oh i said to forky to my wife um uh nia i'm married to forky i literally was about to say did you say forky which is uh congratulations thank you thank you so much thank you david thought that toy story 4 looked bad and that Forky looks stupid. And he claimed that Forky was a war criminal. And I bet that he was going to like toy story for, and like Forky. And so we made a bet in which I said,

if he ended up enjoying Forky, he had to marry Forky. And also my wife just doesn't want me to say her name on the podcast. So now we just call her Forky, but no, but she, I was, we were watching and I was like, i mean she you know gary you know he's gonna take his fucking tooth out with a yeah with an ice skate and she just looked at me and she was like i can't even know

that that happens like not only am i not watching that scene i'm mad that you just told me that that is a scene like that's how visceral that sounds oh yeah it's the worst it's so telling of his storytelling instincts though that like he does that he falls to the ground and that's when you cut to four years later because he knows like yes that's the peak you're gonna hit of this first stage and now that you've now that you've seen him do this you can in your mind fill in how he would handle any similar crisis across the next four years he's like graduated too like okay survival level two yeah right right his xp has gone up you know like he's got it and so you can just cut ahead to him now getting like the new the new skin where he's exactly fucking caught

and got long locks right that's literally like red dead redemption there's subjects cast away redemption too oh man they should do that rockstar should do a castaway game that'd be chuck nolan should be a playable character in fucking mortal combat or some shit right yeah um i i yes went on this weird rabbit hole i was yeah I went on this weird rabbit hole I was looking at like IMDB trivia facts for the movie you know which are not always really reliable and there was

one that said there is a scene that was in the theatrical and VHS versions of the movie that was then cut out for the DVD and later streaming and home video releases in which you see him try to commit suicide and instead

you only have the scenes where he talks about it and where you see the rope later. And I was like that feels unlikely that it was in... I actually was going to say I think I remember that scene. So here's the weird thing. I remember that scene so here's the weird thing i remember that scene too but i was like why would that be cut out only at the dvd stage especially since this was 2000 it would

have come out in dvd and vhs at the same time yeah why why was there like not a test screening version but why would he have recut this movie after the fact and it not be like a known thing so i went down this whole rabbit hole there was like a whole mandela effect thing on the internet where people are arguing over whether or not that scene ever existed and people are saying like i had the memory you have the memory i viscerally viscerally remember a scene in which he is at the top of the mountain at night he hangs himself from the tree the branch breaks he falls to the ground it's haunted me it's haunted me and then i watch the movie and there's the scene where you see him pull the rope up and there's the scene where he says to the guy

at the end that he tried suicide and the actual visual of it was missing and people contend the scene never existed it's not on any deleted scenes. You can't find it anywhere. There's no alternate cuts of the movie. It's just that the suggestion from those two scenes places the image in your head so vividly. That's crazy. And like as much as I still want to say like, no, it's the fucking Berenstain Bears. And I saw the scene yeah this

is the kind of really great filmmaking yeah that's the whole power that this movie traffics in is that you fill in all these gaps from the couple of things you do see it takes so many loops that happened to me with the hours where I so I love the hours. And it's not that I invented a scene, but I just misremembered a performance beat. And when Nicole Kidman's on the platform, she's like, I'm going to London, bye bitch. And her husband's like, dude, like you're not well, like please come back home, whatever. And she says, my life has been stolen from me.

And I always remembered it as a yell, like her yelling, like my life has been stolen from me. And then I rewatched it a couple of years ago and she like literally like whispers it, but it was, I guess the emotional impact of it was so intense for me. Like when I watched it, when I was like 12, that I was like, I remembered it always as like a scream, like, cause that's how I felt it. And I was just like, holy shit. Like, how did I just misremember that? So I'm like, I'm not surprised at all that, um, that scene doesn't exist. Cause i remember watching castaway when i was older and being like oh that scene i thought i remember the scene differently that's there's so many so many people saying that well yes that's

true but doing this podcast also i feel like that happens to me all the time where i'm like getting ready for a scene i remember really well where i'm like god this scene rules and then it either maybe barely exists at all or it's like you say tonally completely not what i remembered but i remember the emotion of it and that's what i remember we went to see uh armageddon at drive-in last week uh the blank check crew in uh semi-adjacently parked cars and i was in a car with my brother and and his girlfriend or good friend and um that neither of them had seen the movie before and so like i don't want to miss a thing hits the the earlier strains of it when the animal cracker scene is happening and the two of

them were like that's it that's the only time they use the song in the movie and i was like no get ready they're buttering you up they they bring it back for maximum impact and i was so fucking certain that the song played under spoiler when he does the final like over video feed goodbye to live tyler i remember bruce willis giving the hero speech like he pushes ben affleck back into the thing the song starts playing. He comes on the screen and he says like, I love you. You know,

you're my son, whatever, all the hero shit and the music's playing under it. And I was just like, why, when, when, when does it happen?

And of course it's the fucking end credits over B roll of their wedding. It's over the certain, certain that it played under that scene. Yeah. Right. That's crazy. Yeah crazy how that happens isn't it yeah yeah cast away guys are there other well wilson we haven't talked about i mean i guess there's it's it's funny that that just became the meme from the movie like it is so effective like i still still feel crappy when Wilson goes away. I do that at all.

I've done that throughout my entire life. I don't know if you guys like that, just like anthropomorphize things that I have like in my, you know, right. Like pencils or fucking, I'm sorry, David,

you don't know if I do that. All right. Look, I'm just giving you guys extrapolate of proof. Extrapolate based on everything you know about me and my obsession with Toy Story. Yeah, I anthropomorphize the far too many objects that I own. It's the one thing

in this, I'm like, oh, I would do that within a week. Like, I would have a whole cast of characters, I think. I think it's the only way I could deal with it. Yeah, for sure. 100%. Right. There's the last man on earth sort of heightening of this bit where he makes like an entire supporting cast of like i don't know if either of you watched that show i saw the first few episodes i watched yeah yeah yeah will forte

has like eight different uh like balls and pieces of sporting equipment that he paints faces on they all have different names and he has like very complicated multi-part conversations with them and it feels like they think that's a comedic heightening of it but in reality i think that's a more realistic version of what someone would do they would not settle for one ball right but but the Wilson stuff is just it's so elegantly done like everything that you you could describe it to someone and it would sound hokey of like oh his hand is bleeding he picks up the ball then he looks at it the handprint kind of looks like a face he paints it he names it wilson because of the thing but like the scenes are so well written and so well acted and it's it's an area in which the movie gets really patient and actually spends

the time to like slow down and show you the build of him starting to personify wilson um i mean and it's like the joke in bridesmaid that like her lowest point in the movie is her on her mom's couch watching the wilson scene and sobbing hysterically right yeah you know that it's like an ultimate like you think it's stupid you're not gonna fall for it and every time you get a lump in your throat when wilson gets lost at sea oh so good that's such a great moment too also just for like the mechanics of the plot like the like more and more of the island is like slipping away as he gets closer to to the real world right yeah absolutely and that's also it's that's closer to the real world. Right. Which I love. And that's also, it's that's when the scores kick in for the first time.

It's like, he's fully leaving behind that movie. In my memory, Wilson got blown away or whatever. Like, and I forgot that it's, you just watch him leave. Like he just sort of like bobbles away and Hanks goes into the water and you're like,

you just sort of know like, no, this is, it's like, he can't do this anymore. Like he's got to say goodbye to this thing. And there's that. It would be great if he showed back up with Helen Hunt with Wilson under his

arm and was like, this is Wilson. Yeah. Or, or it would be great if when he gets to land, Helen Hunt is like, uh, I,

I actually got married and Wilson's her husband. Wilson somehow got to land. I met this guy like a month ago i married him like a week he just got here but it was a quick whirlwind romance he's gone for five years right four five years and she four or something like that four years and then she ends up married with two kids or one one kid she marries her dentist so it's another dental uh you know in in dignity she marries chris knopf right right the dentist that he never saw enough that he never had his teeth looked at by perfect casting christoph is perfect casting where you're kind of like i

guess if tom hanks isn't around this guy will do do. You know what I mean? Where I'm like, yeah, he's sort of. You're like, I don't like that guy. Well, there's that too. But you're also like, something's off. Right. There's something slippery about him. Right. There's that thing. Cause you don't want to be too charmed by whoever she's with now.

You want to have the romantic sentimentality of like, she should leave her husband yeah right yeah i mean it's just i mean the whole end of this movie and also like maybe when i saw it when i was a kid i was like man i don't get this shit this is like and now i'm just like the whole time i'm like man what the fuck would you do like what would you do like i i hated all this shit as a kid and it's weird because i was certainly a very sappy sentimental kid and i was not like you know a boy who was allergic to to romance or emotion in movies in that kind of way but i remember just thinking like oh like what like the movie gets so fucking overstated and the only area on which i think the movie really does i i think the the

speech he gives to nick sergi about like what kept him going is a little bit overdone i think i don't think you need it upwards i don't think i don't think you need the speech i think that's the one area where he kind of does the spielberg thing the thing that often plagues late period spielberg where he just doesn't trust that you get the message of the movie and he has a scene where someone spells it out or he does a visual metaphor that hammers it in too hard or whatever it is yeah and it's also interesting to me that like you know hanks gained weight for the first chunk of the movie right so he was bigger than he had ever been before so that there would be a more striking contact contrast when he lost weight and then was pretty much more

cut than he ever had been before. And then they took like a little break where he like, you know, shaved and gained a little bit of weight back before they shot the stuff back on land. But that one scene, that one monologue, he looks a little plumper

in that. I just noticed even then when they cut app from that to him back on the road trying to deliver the package with the wings that he's back to looking leaner. I wonder if that was a late reshoot because they didn't, they felt they needed to have more closure.

Hammer something home. Right. I truly, yeah. Having gone through the studio system, uh, um, movies would be so much better.

Uh, if we get the limits. Yeah. Honestly, I mean, I just, like, it's just like, if reshoots aren't allowed like you know movies no no reshoots are amazing no reshoots are amazing um you're talking about notes i'm talking

about notes from yeah because there are some execs and i think i'm working with them now who are great at like wow like to the point where i'm like, what, why can't this just be everyone? And then there are some where you're just like, we don't have to even have the same taste in movies. So why are you giving me notes on my film? You know? And it's, and I think that's the sort of thing. It's like, you have to figure out when you're like directing, like, and editing, like, okay, what's a you problem? What's what's a me problem like what's you being a little daft and what's me just knowing better you know and it's a hard hard balance but like that for example it's like maybe that scene is good for the people who like literally are like

what i don't know tell me more but in terms of like the movie being just like good and solid and like growing into understanding the movie like we all did you know from being kids to adults like oh it would just be so much better it's anyway it's like a weird half measure because the movie does end with this sense of open-endedness and i feel like that ending works for people people like still talk about that ending all the time of him at the literal crossroads it's not subtle but i think it's effective and i think the helen hunt stuff works and i almost just wonder i think the helen hunt stuff works because she's a good actress and like it's effective. And I think the Helen Hunt stuff works. And I almost just wonder. I think the Helen Hunt stuff works because she's a good actress. And like,

it's just such a mental whammy to consider. Like, you know, what if you like the, the weird guilt that she would feel like having given up on him, even though of course she's getting, you know, like just that,

like it's, that's Twilight Zony enough for you to just be so invested in. Well, I like the Penny lost stuff. Like I'm such a fucking sucker for the Penny Desmond plotline on Lost. But the realization of just like, God damn it. She was looking for him the whole time. Like it's so much worse that it's like not that.

Oh, she remarried. She moved on. But she tried so hard to hold out for so long. She was actively trying to believe he was going to come back, searching for him, and then finally broke. That's the thing. Right. That's so heartbreaking. And it is like a very messy adult ending.

I love the way they do it. Right. But she's got a kid and she's got a life and it's also something like there's no way they can go back to what it was before they're both fundamentally changed by this thing now it's really permanently affected both of them i wonder if it was just a thing of like the audience needs to hear tom hanks say he's gonna be okay so that they don't worry that this guy's gonna be depressed for the rest of his life he's just right yeah yeah yeah castaway 2 is him in therapy absolutely and dating i recommend it for everyone anyway

and dating dating who patina that's the uh the nice austin or not austin a nice texan artist oh so absurd i think i think tom's performance in the in the book and the end of the film is so good um he was really three very different people yeah so he's haunted without seeming like sort of overactive about it yes that makes sense yeah i i really think because this is the year that russell crowe wins for gladiator and that was so much a sort of like star anointment here we go new leading man gladiator wins best picture also i love gladiator but continue i i just like the next year is a beautiful mind which even if gladiator is a better film than beautiful mind beautiful mind is

very much like russell crowe skill very i don't know how that performance ages but like there was even the threat at the time of like right right people thought oh is it gonna be a fucking hanks thing where he wins two back-to-back years because he just had two juggernaut movies and it was unavoidable there's a part of me that wishes that hanks had won for this and crowe had won for hanks hanks would have won for this if he didn't have two oscars yeah i don't think there's really much question for just because because physical transformation is just something they value so much like yeah and the fact that hanks did it feels like sort of especially crazy because it's like it's the dude you could just play nice guys yeah for the

rest of your life like you didn't have to go lose 60 you know like i feel like it's the dude you could just play nice guys yeah for the rest of your life like you didn't have to go lose 60 you know like i feel like there's just that weird like they kind of bow down to anyone who does for a year the biggest movie star in the world was like i'm gonna spend a year just getting skinny and growing out a caveman beard so that i can finish filming a movie it's like the antithesis antithesis of uh joaquin phoenix doing it for that absurd documentary yes yes where everyone was like don't waste our time like this you mean talking about the documentary film of course i still haven't seen that movie is it good well uh uh in the words of our scorsese i i get it i see what you're doing there that was so wild whereas they were like well it's produced by scorsese scorsese was like

actually uh i didn't produce it like my name's not on it initially and he just retained it yeah right and then they were like did you like him he's like yeah i get it i got what it was i loved when everyone was getting all like verklempt about him being like oh i don't understand or like those marvel movies or the superhero movies and i was like what do you need him to like these four did you think he liked them like that's the thing do you think he's like you think you know ant-man and the wasp it's just like you know like what did you expect martin scorsese to start saying like what like what are you looking at scorsese to validate your comic book movie love that's the fucking thing i feel like the three of us are very much

on the same page where it's like marvel trash is the best way to put it here where it's just like look look look i like i love that shit and i love lofty cinema and i understand the conflict between the two of them i don't need him to tell me that it's okay for me to like Iron Man 3. I like Iron Man 3. It's irrelevant. I'm doing fine. I like Iron Man 3. I like Martin Scorsese.

I like a lot of other shit. It's fine. It's fine. Not everyone I like has to like everything I like. That's not for them. I don't know if you had this, Nia, but just like being around... Oh, did you work on the pilot or were you only on the series only on the pilot okay okay so like during the pilot I just constantly like without seeming

like a hanger-on would just try to position myself in earshot of wherever he was whenever there was downtime because it was just like i'm so curious what his opinion is on everything like i was just so curious to hear him drop more souls and anytime there was like a complicated setup and like cannavalli or whatever had the courage to make small talk with him and ask him for his opinion on stuff it was that kind of thing where i was like i want to know like does he like fucking pixar movies like what does he think of borat i'm not gonna be offended if he doesn't like something I like. I'm just curious what popular stuff he likes and what he doesn't.

Exactly. Yeah. He's just like he's an elder statesman. Like it's just like information at that point. You don't have to take it personally. Totally. Totally. And just to clarify, his attack on was so much more brutal because he did not even see the movie

right yeah i i get it i see what you're doing here i don't need to be part of this also it's basically like you know like a juiced up kings of comedy okay comedy so i think that's also kind of funny that's his i i get it i understand what you're doing i did that before i don't need to do it again. Have fun. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I've literally like,

anyway, whatever I can, I made the same fucking movie. Yeah. Uh, also happened in a round table interview sitting across from Todd Phillips, who just had to sit there and nod his head. Oh my gosh.

Um, yeah. So I, I, I find it fascinating that Todd Phillips did. It is. Wow. wow uh to your point nia of of how good hanks is in this last sort of third of the movie um this is all the stuff where i'm like given the fucking oscar this is like yes him just sort of like staking his claim of like i'm

one of the all-timers where the way he plays all those scenes that could be so hackneyed of it. And they do like this beat like four or five times. But him picking up the crab leg, seeing the lighter, you know, flicking the light switch on and off. Like all his weird having a difficult time readjusting to society, but also just being fascinated by, right, these things are so easy. These things I took for granted. And what a battle it was for me to get to sustainability with all these things. The part that is so heartbreaking for me, you have that shot of him in the hotel room where it's just the lights flicking on and off and you can't see his body. And then it cuts to the other side and he's lying on the floor with the switch and he's put the stopwatch on the

bed and it's like oh right this guy wouldn't be able to immediately go back to sleeping in a bed at this point he is conditioned to feel comfortable sleeping in a cave he needs to recreate the setup of what that felt like for him until he's comfortable enough to sleep on a comforter yes 100 it's so you're just like fuck like there's a long road ahead of you sir like yeah it's it's totally um it's like this thing where it's equally like the triumph of like human adaptability and how you know we are actually incredibly resilient creatures but also like everything leaves a mark totally yeah there was controversy i mean on a relative scale but i feel like people complained a lot at the time and people still cite this as an example of like oh the trailer gives away the ending all the trailers for castaway

had the scene with him in the plane and nick sershi saying we had a funeral and he says what was in the casket like and and people were like why would you put that in the fucking movie and zemeckis's line which i kind of so funny agree with he's like first of all we've done so many like surveys on this people want to know they want to be told exactly what they're getting they pretend that they don't but i've been in these fucking meetings with the market research and the focus groups they always respond better and this is an expensive movie with one guy on an island and the other thing is like it's like fucking mcdonald's like people want the comfort

of understanding what they're signing up for um but but the other thing is and i i haven't heard him say this he said like it's tom hanks in a movie about a guy who gets stranded on an island he's gonna make it back no one thinks he's not gonna make it back right yeah like i understand we could lie to you and pretend like it's ambiguous but people fucking know it's a big studio movie i'm adding in a lot more fucks um yeah i'm like, oh, Zemeckis really went in there. I do think to some degree this movie would not have been as big a hit if they didn't reveal that in the trailer

because it makes it easier to watch the struggles knowing he's going to overcome. As you said, the movie becomes about like, oh, it's like the human spirit, how much we can conquer anything. It makes it more family appropriate and a christmas or christmas movie obviously like versus like this is gonna

be an intense fucking grind of a movie it's not the fucking revenant yeah exactly exactly exactly right they kind of needed to telegraph there was gonna be a happy ending in order for audiences to sit through two hours of silence and ice skate uh root canals and shit um what would the revenant version of the ending happy ending be what he just he sails to another island and there's just like a pyramid of skulls and then he looks right at the camera i don't know i was gonna say the end of the revenant he looks right at the camera i i do think it's almost i almost applaud it where i'm like damn that's your head actually that's so funny he looks right at the camera hugely exhausted by

that movie i was like let's give them their fucking oscars and go just take your oscar and leave hardest of agrees i call that movie art house jackass yeah i'm just like boo boo and i'm obsessed with interme too i love him i think he's brilliant and like i love i just i love like basically all those movies like whatever but um but i remember watching that being like just please give leo his oscar maybe he'll relax like leo needed to relax leo fully needed to relax and look you watch like once more time in hollywood and you're like great have some fun you can kick back now pressure's off get it girl that's all i will i will confess i only saw the revenant one time and i remember finding it a total grind and not really digging it at all i occasionally think about it um like i'm mostly about like the sort of first half hour with the big battle and like

all this landscape and i'm like man maybe i should watch that again like i bet it looks good like you know i've been thinking like but anyway i have not yet i have no desire to ever see it again it's the ultimate i get it i see what you're doing there movie for me that's the one where i would say that at the round table and then you're out to say who would let this guy in at the round table you'd be like seize him get his ass out of here all right guys i have to i have about like 10 more minutes before i go yes i was about to say let's play the box office game because uh yes i was uh uh this movie was a humongous hit i feel like it broke records for a christmas release at the time um and it was one of the highest grossing films of the year i remember because i grew up such a

box office nerd my dad telling me it had either the biggest three day or five day for a christmas movie at that point in time wow i mean i'm looking at the number and it's not insane uh it did really well like i mean like the movie made uh how much money jesus i'm sorry one second um a movie made uh 420 million dollars worldwide like i mean like you know it was a huge hit it opened to 28 and then the next week it made 33 or whatever you know so like remember when that used to happen yeah yeah that sort of christmas thing of like oh yeah this movie's just gonna stick around. And make your mind on the first weekend? Crazy.

It's the third biggest movie of the year after Mission Impossible 2 and Gladiator. Oh, okay. Worldwide. Wasn't Grinch? Grinch might have been the biggest domestically, right? Because that thing was not received worldwide. No, the rest of the world right? Because that thing was not received worldwide. No. The rest of the world had.

The number two film at the box office Christmas 2000, Griffin, also features Helen Hunt. And What Women Want. It's What Women Want. She was in the number one and number two movie. That's hilarious. No wonder they were like, get rid of her. Yeah, exactly. She owned

Christmas. Alright, so that's what we've talked about How the Huns stole Christmas is what they should have called it Well exactly Number three Griffin By the way you correctly guessed Grinch is still in there Grinch is four So the Jim Carrey Grinch

The Ron Howard Grinch Number three It's an actor you like. It's a sort of like a fantasy comedy drama. I don't know. Fantasy like family drama. 2000s fantasy family drama. Is it The Family Man?

It's The Family Man, which I saw on a plane with nicholas cage and taylor leone i remember it being bad uh kind of kind of crummy it's a brett ratner movie i was gonna say i'm not gonna stand for it too hard but how exciting it is it's like it's like he's rich he's like a rich evil guy and he wakes up and and it's like oh what if i'd like married my high school sweetheart and i have a nice family right like that's it right like that's the whole movie yes i think it's a sweet movie it is the most unratinary ratner film uh and kind of an uncaged cage as well right like it's a cage. This is my big take on it as someone who was trying to watch all the cages. It's I think the time he most successfully played just a normal person.

Right. Usually when you ask him to just play a guy, that's when he sort of short circuits. I remember a scene where he like argues with his like gas station buddies. He like works. i don't know he like has some blue collar job and they're like saying that the nets are gonna win the title and he's like the nets and then they all look at him he goes the nets are due the nets are due that's the only thing i remember out of family man of course that's the only thing i remember that poster um you're here he's standing yes yes it's very similar to his poster for the weatherman another movie he made oh yeah that's a movie i love i know you do all right so number four is

grinch number five is a fairly high concept rom-com that i recently re-watched and it holds up big movie star rom-com it's a stupid movie what is it take the gas i think is it sliding doors it's not sliding doors that is a very high concept of rom-com that is the highest concept of rom-com so it's a lower i do not know if i do not know if sliding doors holds up i have not seen that movie in a long time i saw it like maybe seven years ago and i was like love need to rewind um okay uh it's sort of like i don't know i mean it's a to be clear it's a silly ass movie um big movie star house not shallow how not shallow how you're you're in you're in the gueneth zone get out of the gueneth zone yeah Get out of the Gwyneth zone. I used to go away from the Gwyneth zone, yeah. You know, think darker

hair. Is it a Julia Roberts movie? No. No. Is it a Bullock? It's a Bullock. Sandy Bullock. Bullock. It's a Bullock high concept. It's a movie that shouts out the day after my birthday

in its most iconic line. Sandra Bullock, number four at the box office. High concept. Summer birthday, right? Miss Congeniality? Miss Congeniality. Oh, wow.

What's the perfect date? April 25th. Yeah. Not too hot. It's not too hot, not too cold. Exactly. All you need is a light jacket david you threw me off because i don't think of that as a rom-com me too yeah it's not really a

rom-com i don't know how i guess it's just a comedy it's sort of hard to describe because i almost said action comedy but it's like it's not like there's really action yeah yeah she just it's like it is an fbi agent yeah yeah it's like a cop comedy it's like right it's like a cop pageant comedy that is romantic overtones i re-watched it i love it it was it's just like you know kane is locked in like everyone's just having fun you know what i mean like it's just it's just it's just sort of very easy to, I mean, Heather Burns is fantastic. Oh, the great Heather Burns. Was this its opening weekend? This is its opening weekend.

It's opening at number five, and it's going to have huge legs. It really stuck around. Because I remember everyone thinking it looked hacky, it opening low, and then three weeks later, people were like, that movie's actually good. And then it ended up making $100 million. It just stayed and stayed and stayed and grew. And then I feel like it's only grown in estimation, and then they made a second one and immediately

went, that was the mistake. We shouldn't have. Yeah. I've never seen the sequel. It's really not good. The only good thing they did was hire Regina King, and then that's after that. It's really not good. The only good thing they did was hire Regina King, and then that's after that. Armed and fabulous.

Anyway, so that's the top five. You've also got Emperor's New Groove. You've got Dracula 2000. Never forget. With Gerard Butler as Dracula. That's a tough one. What if Dracula was in 2000? You've got Vertical Limit with Chris O'Donnell

uh Climbing Mountains you have Crouching Tiger beginning it's you know that movie like Cinderella life hell yeah that's when I was like Asian film what's going on over there let's check it out yeah I was just like oh oh I see they make the best movies in asia i had no idea well this is fun that was when my like um my john woo chow yun fat like life started and then like in high school it was like bong joon ho in korean film like after right after that and into college um oh man you guys should do a bong joon ho like i'm obsessed with him as everyone i've ever met but we he was in our march Madness bracket where we like let people vote on which director we're gonna do and we were expecting that he was gonna win and Zemeckis uh beat him which which was kind of a surprise it's the only

time that's gonna happen that was based on exactly I do love Zemeckis but yeah we'll we'll do Bong uh at some point no question um yeah uh what was the thing i was gonna say oh out of curiosity what is crouching tiger up to at this point the last weekend of december six million dollars it's got what was it this is its third weekend it has it's and it's gonna make 128 million dollars like so it's like these are just like there's so many box office performances in this 10 that just don't happen anymore like castaway opening to 20 whatever and then making more than 200 plus and making 200 miscongeniality opening at five and ending up at 100 million dollars like yeah i miss when movies had time to breathe yeah sam yeah and really god like even like titanic went from made more money every

weekend pretty much for and it was in thursday like six months until like freaking april yeah yeah it's amazing um all right we're done thank you so much for being on the show i'm like so excited i hope this is like good i hope this is a good episode it was a great episode come back anytime yes i'm starting a podcast actually really should be hilarious yeah it's so niche so uh along with my korean um i love korean film i started watching like korean dramas when i was like 17 um and then like for a couple years like stopped around when i was like 1920 but then the pandemic started and i was like, Oh, I have time for this, these long ass episodes.

And then my friend was talking to her and we were basically long story short. We're doing a K drama watch podcast. That is awesome. That's also, you know, find your niche, right?

Like that's what podcast should be like, just something that people are obsessed with. Exactly. It's so silly, but I'm very excited about it. Uh, keep your eyes peeled for that and uh i very much look forward to seeing candy man in theaters me too yes i mean absolutely i'm not

gonna watch it again i've seen it too many times but i'm excited for everyone else to see it um in theaters has that been i mean wait to end the episode but like i i can't imagine what the last uh six months have felt like for you with that movie like being so close to coming out and all the ups and downs of that yeah it's been a crazy year uh it's been really insane but thankfully like enough people could see it so i can get my next job and you know move on with my life at least until it comes out so it's been it's been good uh that's awesome um look forward to it look forward to uh pestering you into being on the show again um and also pester us to do trivia um yeah and i want to pester all of our listeners to rate review subscribe and i want to thank

and for good for social media and montgomery our theme song Joe Bone and Pat Rounds for our artwork go to blankies.red.com for some real nerdy shit and patriot.com patreon.com

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blank check for blank check special features we're watching the alien movies doing commentaries on them and tune in next week for

the polar express hey all aboard for the weird the weird shit is coming here we go is coming polar express yep with Jim Carrey The weird shit is coming. Here we go. The weird shit is coming. Is Beowulf after Polar Express?

Then Beowulf. Yep. Then Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey. It's all kinds of stuff. Oh my God. He makes a little glassy eyed Christmas sandwich with a slab of Beowulf in the middle. Wow. Right. What a weird fucking dude.

And as always, for the record, we still just have a fourth window on our Zoom screen that is a Wilson volleyball propped in front of Ben's computer.