Blank Check with Griffin & David - Holy Smoke! with Kyle Buchanan

Episode Date: February 13, 2022

Is it nobler to try to pee on camera and fail than it is to not try at all? Does Harvey Keitel’s performance in this film only work when he puts on a dress? What the hell is going on in this movie?! David’s Fest Friend Forever Kyle Buchanan (author of the forthcoming “Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road”) joins us to answer those questions and more as we discuss Jane Campion’s bugnuts exploration of power dynamics - 1999’s “Holy Smoke!” Come for the Winslet career breakdown, stay for Kyle’s “amazeballs” anecdotes about Campion on the international festival circuit. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com

Blank Check with Griffin and David Blank Check with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Check Okay, Tampax Tool, I'm gonna give it to you right up your ass. All this man-hating shit for a start? Oh, she criticized me. I called her a man-hater. I know what you want from me.

You just want a youthful pussy transfusion. Preferably one you can take home to show the menfolk what a beautiful post you got to piss on. Jeans pressed, cowboy boots. Is that a uniform for individuals, is it? I want a podcast. God, this is really challenging your accent uh your accent game griffin this miniseries it is i also feel like it's i mean she's she spends some of the movie in a zone between British and Australian. Is that fair to say?

I would say that Kate Winslet is always in a zone when she's doing an accent. Would you agree? Right. I love her. But she's always kind of walking a line. I'm not great at accents, period. Australian accent, maybe the one I struggle with the most. This is hard because I'm like, but am I doing an impression of Kateate winslet's australian accent or am i just doing my australian don't a lot of australians kind of spend their lives in a zone

between british and australian am i immediately alienating the australian kyle say it say it say it i'm with i and like this is the thing i don't want to alienate our aussie listeners and i know that's a slightly that's a sort of whatever uh unfair opinion maybe of an english but like certainly it's like we're all walking lines with our english language accents i suppose right australian canadian british i don't know uh it's just funny that winslet has done so many accents over the years and never been a good accent person right wait i disagree i think she's okay in it i mean i don't know i can't speak to the versatility no we're look this is i think this is the point david's making she is an actor who i almost always loved even if i objectively think her

accent work is iffy let me throw some accents out i'm gonna throw some out okay so there's the life of david gale that was up to me a famous one still never seen right i know no one's no one remembers the life of david gale but she's doing an american accent in that movie that i remember being very crisp uh often her american accent is fine like you know eternal sunshine or something i think look i think eternal sunshine's a masterpiece i think that's probably her best performance. I would have given her the Oscar that year. I do think her American accent in that movie is overly crisp. She does have British accent.

Doing American, everything is just too precise kind of thing. It doesn't even necessarily fit for the character. But this is my exact point. She is one of those actors where she fucking overcomes it. Steve Jobs, another example of that accent. Steve Jobs. All over the place, that's a great performance but i don't need an accent to be real i don't agree i agree this is what's fascinating about her is there are people whose accents are bad in a way that

is distracting and takes away from it and she is always able to overcome perhaps the lack of technical accuracy in her. It's an old Hollywood thing. She's doing a voice. And you're like, that's fine. The reader, she did an accent in the reader. I think the accent's good in the reader, but that's a crappy performance at a crappy movie.

She also did Australian in The Dressmaker, which is a very wild movie. She did it opposite of Hemsworth to a Hemsworth space. And it's kind of a Campion adjacent. I mean, that movie shares a lot of Campion collaborators. Yeah, Jocelyn Morehouse directed it. Yeah, right. I mean, yeah, is that Winslet's rule?

She's like, if I'm going Australian, the movie's going to be completely bananas because that movie is bananas. I feel like there's another one I'm forgetting now. Is there another Winslet accent I'm not thinking of? What's her Titanic accent? That's sort of that mid-atlantic kind of accent yeah her titanic accent is beyond reproach come on i love it i love it but she's playing in that she's playing kind of like you know a hoity-toity rich so it's sort of like that. But we all agree she is one of these actors who kind of defies logic where you never, ever can ding her for the accent. You can be like, yeah, of course, I mean, the accent isn't great, but it like never

subtracts from the performance at all. And then there are things like Mare of Easttown where people are like, she kind of nailed a tricky accent. She really did a good job with that accent. That's the one I was thinking of, Mare of Easttown. No one fucking gets that one right. And she got it right you know i would even venture to say that if there's something that's slightly exaggerated

or unexpected about where she lands with the accent it's in pursuit of character even that crispness to her american accent in eternal sunshine there is a little bit of like you know she can be curt so why not yeah yeah but maybe i'm reverse engineering no i think it's weird as you said david movie star shit where you're just like sometimes that it is bizarre and illogical which things matter more or less than other things in a performance which things overpower you know but enough about has. I mean, that movie is like an incredible... If I ever had to teach acting at any sort of school, I would just screen House of Gucci every single week

and just dissect the different types of screen performances and approaches, too. Look, let's dive into it, because I think... Wonder Wheel, she's got a terrible accent in there. But no one wants to remember Wonder Wheel. No one escaped a love. And Romance and Cigarettes, she's got a terrible accent but no one wants her no one escaped the love and romance and cigarettes she's doing a similar sort of thing right right maybe full brooklyn she should never go i guess i guess that's her one which is often true you know for

ready actors this is what i'm realizing this is only the sec no third winslet i'm sorry of course third winslet we've done titanic and sense and Sensibility and Holy Smokes. We've done like her first two Oscar nominations and then maybe her first big whiff at Sir Weissman. This is her first post-Titanic performance. Hideous Kinky, she filmed pre-Titanic. So this is her first, like, I'm done with Titanic, this is the project I'm picking. It's pretty fun to consider.

This and Hideous Kinky back-to-back are fascinating and I feel feel like we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about wins like career shit in this episode more than we did in titanic or sense and sensibility but but this is a podcast about filmographies directors but also actors sure we can talk about kate winslet's filmography here uh but it's primarily about directors who experience a massive success rely on their career and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce baby i'm griffin by the way hi david you're getting fast yeah i could i couldn't even i saw you you saw you were trying to do it different right yeah uh it's a mini series on the films of Jane Campion.

We've been going camping. It's called the Podcastiano. That's right. Another accent being tested for me on this miniseries. And today we're talking about Holy Smoke. And here's my two-word review of this movie. Holy shit. This fucking thing.

Yes. And introduce our guest our guest today of course from the new york times and author of the book that has just come out or is about to come out it's about to come out when this drops in mere days blood sweat and chrome the wild and true story of mad max fury road kyle buch long overdue. Thank you for coming on the podcast for the first time. I'm so excited to finally be here. Thanks for being here, Kyle. I miss you. We were just talking festivals. I know.

We're always crossing paths at the fests. It's like I go to summer or winter camp in the case of Sundance every year, and David is my festival buddy that I see. It is nice. It's nice to wait in line and then go to the Uncut Gems party. Then it's too loud and I complain. Kyle tells me,

stop being such a stick in the mud. Or whatever. Or eating Eccles pizza at Sundance while we're waiting in line for the next big movie. I don't know. I love all that. Me too. It's fun. It's like summer camp, like you said. It's movie camp. You guys are FFFs?

Film Festival friends? I was going to say Fest friends forever. Oh, that's cute. Yes, we are. Kyle, Mad Max, of course, is a movie we've covered on this podcast and then we've talked about was sort of like intrinsically tied to the genesis of this podcast and figuring out what this podcast was and i feel like uh i always cite is less like that's the best example of an

entirely successful blank check movie in the last 20 years right just like every metric i mean yeah very much so and and one of the most like unlikely incredible blank check movies you know right one where it wasn't just cashing a check it was being like completely overdrawn just to make it yeah right it's it's a really crazy story and it's one of you know well no but this is the point. I feel like a lot of the making of the movie has been somewhat mysterious for a while. Like, I'm very grateful that you've written this book now. And that's so thorough, because I feel like there was a weird cloud of mystery around it. George Miller explaining meaning of things and sort of his creative intent. But like, there's always been such confusion about like, how the fuck did this get made? And then little things would come out like, there wasn't one injury. And you're like, how did this set operate on a day to day basis? Yeah.

Yeah. And the way it operated was really crazy. And yeah, that cloud of mystery. I mean, this is a story that stretched on for like two decades. And a lot of the people that I got in touch with were like, how did you even know that I was involved with this? Because that had never come out before. It also was a movie

that for 15 years felt like, well, obviously that will never be made. And then once it was being made, you're like, well, obviously this is going to be a disaster. That was the thing. There's no way. This thing feels fucking cursed.

And it's like so many movies we've covered where it's like the person refused to give, it refuses to give up the idea that everyone is telling them the universe is telling them this is not going to work and the fact that it's just such a complete triumph in every way and it's a movie that has only continued to i feel like gain legacy and esteem it's just going to like every single year increase in stature. Yeah, 5000%. And it's exactly what you said, Griff. Like, I feel like I walked away from the from writing that book, and hopefully the reader does too, really thinking a lot about the sort of

like, steely, idiosyncratic belief in yourself, you've got to have to be any sort of director, especially George Miller making Mad Max and, you know, not giving up over 20 years and countless act of God obstacles that were thrown in his path. But like really anybody, you know, whether it's him or Jane Campion or any of those other sort of like, you know, wacky, unique directors from that side of the world, like they're not making conventional films. And to get conventional people to sign on to those films can be a real challenge. Yeah, I mean, the movie we're talking about today, Holy Smoke is a wildly unconventional film set in Australia by someone who still has a bit of a blank check uh more than a bit of a blank check um but portrait of a lady is in that weird zone of like the you know someone

has their big oscar breakthrough and then the next movie everyone goes like well this thing's just gonna have fucking nominations dripping off of it and then it like underwhelms a little bit right so you're sort of in that state where people are like are they a one-off are they never gonna have a movie that connects that hard again or was that movie just sort of like you know uh not a filler rebound or whatever but you know what i'm saying uh and then this is just such a wild pivot away from piano and portrait of a lady which at that point are like the two movies that are maybe solidifying an American audience minds who Jane Campion is and what type of film she makes. I would be so curious to hear from your listeners who started chronologically with the podcast who know, okay, if you're capable of doing Sweetie, then there is a through line from that to Holy Smoke. I mean, this is what I love about the way we structured this podcast.

The gifts it ends up paying out is just like most people I think are watching sweetie having seen the piano and going how the fuck did the person who made the piano make this but if you've watched that first at least chronologically in this sort of rewatch run and then you watch piano and portrait and then you get to this you're like well this makes more sense now it is as you said all the things you just said about mad max like a wildly idiosyncratic movie made by someone with supreme confidence in their vision, despite probably a thousand external signs and warnings that like, maybe you shouldn't do this this way. Yeah, and it completely baffled so many people when they got it, because you just wouldn't expect it from the person who had made Piano and Portrait of a Lady. I mean, there's so many things about this movie that I think baffled people. One is just the whole idea of like wackiness being harnessed to something thoughtful is not a combo that you usually get from Hollywood.

And I also just think, you know, people were coming to their conclusions about who Jane Campion was and she threw them a curveball. But she is like, if you meet her in person, she is kind of a lighter, funnier person than you might expect if you just know her from the piano and all that. Super fucking goofy. All these special features I've been watching, commentaries I've been listening to. She's one of these people and i find very often uh the most serious minded sort of artistic thoughtful psychologically grounded filmmakers are a lot funnier than you'd think they'd be and the people who are deathly serious and humorless are usually the people who make significantly less interesting movies the first time i ever such a champion in the flesh was 2014 at the Cannes Film Festival. She was the president of the jury that year. And it was at an after party for the movie Foxcatcher. And she was dancing her ass off with Channing Tatum to the song I Follow Rivers. Like, that was my first actual in real life impression of her. And that was a good one because it's's like okay jane campion is never exactly what you would expect and i remember even even knowing that um at the venice

film festival this year not to sound very fest friends forever about all this but um but i went to a party for power of the dog and uh kirsten dunst was not there so i was talking to jane i was like are you expecting her is you think she's coming anytime soon? And Jane was like, yeah, she's just putting on her dress. I just saw her in it. And she looks amazeballs. And just Jane Campion using the word amazeballs, you know, again, it's just something that you wouldn't expect. Because so many auteurs of this stripe. Either they take themselves seriously.

Or we just expect them to. And she doesn't. There is that kind of lightness and whimsy. In her own sort of like personal bearing. And you don't always get to see it in her movies. But when you do. It can be fun and unexpected. Yeah like James Gray.

Makes incredibly tortured movies. And then you watch or listen to an interview with him. And he's like a Borscht Belt comedian. You know, they're all these people like that. Yeah. I'm reflecting on her can now. I forgot it because that was sort of a low-key canon way in the Winter Sleep one, which is like a trying film, in my opinion.

Not a bad movie, but it's, you know, a three-hour, 15-minute Turkish drama where not like a ton happens and it was up against some pretty like sexy movies and it was sort of right it was sort of a mild surprise that it won right you're saying this is this is the bright star year no that was the year the year she was jury president oh sorry sorry sorry god uh okay you know like it was up against clouds and sills maria and um uh mommy and uh goodbye to language and foxcatcher obviously and uh what's the other uh two days one night i guess oh and mr turner yeah i guess a lot of prior winners like maybe that was one i don't know

i don't know it was isn't that didn't they give like the special jury prize split to mommy and goodbye to language and Goodbye to Language? And Xavier Dolan was like, fuck this shit. How dare you lump me in with Godard? He's fucking old. I mean, he's older than Xavier Dolan. I'll say that. He is, in fact, a little bit older than Xavier Dolan.

Kyle, you were at that can. I just remember Winter Sleep being sort of everyone, everyone being like, oh, okay. That happens sometimes. I mean, sometimes you have jury precedents where it's a strange consensus pick. Like you wouldn't have expected George Miller to pick Audiard's D-pan as the palm winner. But sometimes it just comes down to, as the oscars sometimes do something that feels more consensus rather than daring um you know if you get the right jury then the consensus is something daring and then sometimes you just never know you hear all sorts of stories afterward though i love hearing the stories whenever whenever they leak out um which is sort of once in a while but uh i just

love the idea of the movie that is so different from what the director would make. That's always fun. The Spielberg blue is the warmest color thing, which we've already brought up. Well, Cate Blanchett was a weird one. She gave it to shoplifters, though. That was so cool.

I don't know. But anyway, the narrative. I think it applies when it's a director. Exactly. It's a consensus pick, not a, you know, just the jury president, obviously. And Campion couldn't give it to herself that year for having Dirty Dance with Channing Tatum,

although I would have. You know, that's modesty, that's rules, but I still think they should have let it qualify somehow doesn't it feel like she could do incredible things with channing tatum as a leading man yes i mean now that she's in this mode with benedict cumberbatch yeah channing is one of the few leading men who is really good at interrogating his own sort of sense of masculinity look i know everyone's going to recoil from me saying this, but Channing Tatum as Phil Burbank in Power of the Dog, I'd watch. And I think it actually

would be good. Channing Tatum and Jesse Plemons as brothers, I'd buy that. I'll say this, I also think Channing could have pulled off the Jesse Plemons role. Oh yeah, 5,000%. Kyle, we usually say 100% on this show.

5,000% is stepping us up me and my my sense for exaggeration um i'll start dialing it down no no no keep it up to 4 000 next time but david to to what you're saying i think uh ceylon at that point in time was like a filmmaker who uh had his champions and there's probably a little bit of like a conjury wanting to put a stamp on him and going like okay he's officially important but also that does feel like to a smaller degree the kind of film you can see campion watching and being like i could never make anything like this because his movies are like so controlled so bleak so sparse like she cannot make a movie that devoid of weirdness and of details you know i mean watching uh re-watching holy smoke just like little throwaway details like the parents having a waterbed or a cockatoo perched on an ironing board you know like

where do they come from i love it oh yeah there's like a sheep that they put like snacks on when they're having a party i noticed at one point which fucking rules the first like 30 or 45 minutes this movie are like full on sweetie and then it essentially transitions into being more of a drama but a drama that still has these weirdo gonzo elements that are just played pretty straight. Yeah, like a gonzo romantic drama, I guess. But also, everything you learn about the making of this movie, it does feel... I mean, she's well known for a very sort of loose style on set, where she's like, well, let's try this.

Let's try it. It's not like rigor. And this feels like one of her loosest movies in that regard a lot of sort of rolling with the punches and going where the actors want to go is sort of what i've found in the research like which makes sense because it's a character psycho you know like it's the two of them locked in a room for a lot of the action like it makes sense that and they're very very performers. They're very different generations, all that. I think also if you give him the chance,

Harvey Keitel will not resist turning any and every scene into some sort of acting class exercise, which a lot of this movie feels like. Like, it's like the acting coach is in the back of the room going like, go further, see what you can find. And he's like, absolutely. I can't wait to go for it, right? Like, Harvey Keitel will always go as as wild as big as you want him to he's putting a spelunking helmet on

with a light and he's just going deeper and deeper i'm gonna i'm gonna say something controversial maybe we should table it till later but because because i don't want to front load because i really do like this movie a lot but i kind of think that har that Harvey Keitel is very unsteady in it. I agree. Like acting exercise, I feel like he is not dialed into that character until she puts a dress on him. Then it starts to work.

Then also the cultural image that he comes in with, that baggage starts to pay off. But in the early going when he's, you know, I mean, when they say, oh, you could persuade anybody to do anything i'm not even persuaded that he's that is the problem that he is that person at that point when he comes in and we're being told like this is the a plus cult d programmer he's a cult exeter

exeter yes he's an exit strategy what kind of title is that but like there's nothing about his vibe or his sort of strategy in the first half of this movie where i'm like yeah this guy definitely knows what he's doing and does it all the time which is weird his value in this movie is more as like a pop cultural object named harvey kytel you know like the way that it's subverting what she does with him in the piano and also building upon it she sees a real sensitivity to him that I think interests her but it's almost too sensitive in the early going like I kind of wanted a little bit more like bravado machismo and confidence and I didn't feel like i was totally getting that from him and also winslet is never less than a total hurricane force right in this movie no matter how she's what she's directing

that energy toward and it's just like no contest whatsoever when you get the two of them together when it's like that she will eventually not not even eventually overpower him but even within a scene sometimes see i i think i like the kytel performance more than you guys did in the sense that i like the performance in a lot of ways i'm not i'm not completely dissing the performance no no no i just think he worked for me in the initial introduction as like a a superficial representation of like mr slick right this this sort of like riff on the wolf and then i think like the middle hour plus i think he totally loses his grasp on the character until the end that you're talking

about weird when he comes in he's like this is it baby give me the money give me the big bucks i am here to deprogram then he's like i don't know should we like watch a movie about other cults that's a bummer you know like i'm gonna take your sorry i'm gonna put it over there see what you think of that like it just the confidence is not oozing off of him in the way that I maybe wanted to. He is Harvey Keitel. He is wearing sunglasses. He's got that going for him, for sure. The look is great.

The look is great. The all black, the little fucking Van Dyke. I guess I had this breakthrough watching this. It's like, what's the thing about Harvey Keitel as a performer I've never been able to put my finger on that makes his performances so odd, whether they work or they don't? And I think a part of it is

he might completely lack any capacity for voice modulation. Like, aside from the fact that obviously he's got such a fucking strong accent, you know, and such a strong, like Brooklyn vibe, right. All that shit. I feel like Harvey Keitel delivers every single line in every single movie at

the exact same volume. And sometimes when you're asking him to be like really intense and high status, you're like, can you give it a little more? And sometimes when you're like Harvey, I need you to go gentle. It sounds like he's yelling.

You know, like it just feels like he delivers every line at sort of this exact volume. I'm Harvey Keitel. Let me tell you a secret right now. I think it's Kyle. I don't know, Kyle, how you are generally where you generally fall on Keitel. But I am looking at his production production credits his imdb in between the piano and holy smoke he was in 24 movies and and only one like one one of them is like get shorty like you know like a couple of them are tiny roles but most of them are big like he just was everywhere after a long career

after like you know obviously like his early stuff and the duelists right you know and stuff like that you know like after a long and steady career that peaks with like the bugsy nomination thelman louise and the piano and reservoir? After that, he was just in everything and was working constantly. It's hard to remember. Culture was saturated with Keitel in a lot of shitty movies or movies that didn't go anywhere, but also some good ones.

Where are you on Keitel, Kyle? Well, now when he pops up in something, you're like, Harvick Keitel, where you been? Which was not the experience in the 90s. In the 90 it's just like i mean some of these you know rising sun monkey trouble i'm not reading them all but you know pulp fiction smoke and blue in the face obviously clockers which he's great in from dust till dawn cop land fairy tale a true story where he plays harry houdini uh you know like you know and then like finding graceland

which is like some other elvis movie where he plays out like and then a million other things that i've never heard of right you know like seven one the year after this is you five seven one he plays uh satan and little nicky i mean he's good right uh You know, I think there's a part maybe of just, like, it took him that long to finally achieve that sort of status that, like, Pacino and De Niro and his contemporaries had had for so long. You know, like, he obviously, like, kept working in the 80s, but it's like he was doing a lot of, like, James Toback movies that didn't really make

an impact, right? Yeah. He obviously does Last Temptation of Christ, which is big, but it's such a controversial movie. Like Two Jakes is like a fucking belly flop, you know, getting dubbed in fucking Saturn 3. Like a lot of his good movies don't really go anywhere. And then he has some notable flops. And then, yeah, you just look at it. You're like, 91, Thelma and Louise, Bugsy. Huge hit. Finally gets his sort of, like, career Oscar nomination. Then the next year, Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant, Sister Act. And then the year after that, The Piano.

It's just like, okay, finally, you're in paycheck mode, Harvey. You finally have raised your quote. You're both in successful, like, populist films and Oscar films again. And then then yeah, as you said, he just fucking dines out. Okay, but I do think part of it is that he was very, he wasn't, I mean, maybe with the studio movies motivated by that paycheck and cashing in, but he was eminently castable in small indies for all of the 90s, which is why he does appear in so many of the movies that we associate with that 90s boom you know to even do reservoir dogs and to keep doing those kinds of films is why he worked that much and pacino and de niro were not doing that right there was reservoir dogs thing a crucial right that's

like you know one of the early sundance successes that's one of the early 90s indie boom movies and he's not only the star but he's why it happened him like lending his name to it was why it got money yeah so then right he becomes sort of uh almost an indie movie mascot maybe we should do smoke and blue in the face on the patreon i know your dad produced those movies yeah the great yeah um there is i think sort of this mythology to the fact that it's like he was like scorsese's guy right it's like he was like Scorsese's guy, right? It's like here's like the great American filmmaker of a generation. He found this fucking guy and he became like his avatar for years. And then he sort of goes on to, you know, De Niro becomes more the face of everything and whatever.

But it is this like I think filmmakers starting out developing their voices. He becomes a guy who sort of like helps you get your grounding, you know? You want Harvey Keitel in your first couple movies. Yeah, and even though I do think that he's sort of like tentative and ill at ease in the first part of Holy Smoke, when I was trying to sort of mentally recast him with other guys around that time, I thought, well, but would any of them kind of bring what he brings when he's in a dress and begging for her at the end of that movie because then

you're not just playing with him in the movie you're playing with him in all those other movies that's the guy who's in the dress and you know outside of like de niro there there are a few men of that era that would have had that much heft in that kind of cinematic image i think and he's obviously someone campion totally trusts you know and like he gets her process and he only talks about her in the most glowing terms so like in a movie like this that's obviously going to be you know working very intensely with actors in a very sort of pressurized scene like he you know he he makes sense he she knows he's gonna do whatever like whatever and and two things building off of what you said kyle one literally the image of him right he just has so much visual power aside from

his like legacy as an actor he just looks so fucking striking right which i think for like jim campion he's also like a piece of art direction you're never going to get someone who looks as interesting as him especially in the multiple forms this guy has to go through and then the second thing is beyond uh what you're talking about of sort of like what he does he does have the weight and the reputation and the the iconography as an actor but someone like de niro it would be oppressive he is not as much of like an untenable movie star uh to to where where you're not going to be able to mold him that fucking much you're never going to be able to get out of your head this is robert de niro doing this

you know whereas like this is harvey de niro doing this you know whereas like this is harvey kytel doing this doesn't put it in quotes it gives it some weird power i don't know it's fascinating movie yes let's switch to winslet though let's talk wins sure and then i want you to i we need to go into how this movie gets made because you got the dossier open. I'm kind of fascinated. I mean, I'll tell you, it's not as shocking as you might think and it's because Jane Campion made the piano.

So she just went to a little man by the name of Harvey Weinstein and said like, I want to make a movie about like a cult, you know, someone who's a culty programmer falling in love with his subject his client and harvey wine seems like sounds good i you know i don't think the move this movie was extraordinarily expensive and it was a blank check in terms of it was just

reputation like any idea it's just an idea she had you know and like that was enough because it's like hey jane campion you just made a movie that won three Oscars. You're the second woman ever nominated for Best Director. What do you want to do? And she's like, I want to do Portrait of a Lady. I want to do this cult movie. And she had a third idea that never came to fruition. The budget for this movie was $15 million, which is pretty high, I guess, for 1999.

When you think about it, obviously obviously it's got locations you know they went to india it's got yeah yeah but that's so yeah so you know but it was really just a total blank check situation of like she wanted to do this movie with her sister who co-wrote it with her and and the other factor of course is as we said she's getting the first follow-up movie from the female lead of the most successful movie of all time well you know that's true but they like it's not she was not like off like they auditioned her like you know it's like she auditioned like 500 actresses i think people were desperate to be in this movie yeah uh which you know again it speaks to her clout at that moment like so i think tons of big actresses were trying out for the role and let me find her quote about

winslet because it's you know uh it's very complimentary but uh basically once winslet came in she was like yeah this is what i want this is like um you know kytel had been her choice from the start but here let me find the exact quote do do do winslet by the way who rules have you ever interviewed her kyle no i never have she seems like a great interview i will say because all the quotes in our dossier about this movie are phenomenal like uh basically she's very candid yes right she is 23 when they're filming this movie which is mind-boggling all right so here's winslet so they brought her in and they you know they read with her and then they had her read against kytel okay and she was immediately basically holding her own and

campion says like some of the girls we saw were wonderful they loved the mind games uh they had no idea what could happen losing yourself in a power struggle with someone i'm terrified of going down that line but when kate read i knew she was the one there's a real balance of energy with them so i guess it was like she could stick up against kytel sure you know she's a very formidable opponent for him and i guess maybe some of the actresses they were seeing wasn't worth so much this is why i bring up her being 23 she feels like a fucking elder statesman already at this point where you're just like i mean we're obviously

viewing it through the prism of today right but i just even when this movie came out i was like oh of course kate winslet is commonly thought of as one of the great living actors. And it's like, she's 23, she already has two Oscar nominations, she gets two more before she's 30. I wonder, too, if she doesn't feel somewhat older or more veteran at that point, because you've just seen her opposite Leonardo DiCaprio,

who reads younger than her in Titanic. So to go from that situation to opposite Harvey Keitel, who was 60 when this came out is a real wild flip it's so wild he he looks good for 60 uh he looks incredible are you kidding for 60 he looks really good in this movie yeah um but uh but the age gap is is pronounced but yeah i mean she was as as you're saying graph she was an actress with such right she was so precocious in a way like you know obviously right but this deep in her career

which she this is what if you know she hasn't even made like 10 movies yet she's already a double nominee she's been you know like she's right she's a huge but like uh compare that precociousness with say jennifer lawrence right Who obviously has a run of getting cast in roles that are clearly meant for women who are older than her. And everyone's like, we're just going to let her play a character that should be 30-something

at 23 because she seems wise beyond her years, right? But you're always watching it going, she seems wise beyond her years. Not she is believably the person who has had this amount of life experience. Whereas Kate Winslet, I'm just like, you don't seem precocious. You seem just like completely solid and grounded and wise, period.

Yes. Well, Griff, let me ask you this. Do you think, do you buy her as 19 in this movie? This is the other thing. I mean, it's, I think she always reads older than she is. And I'm not even talking on a visual level. I do think it's, it's the reason why I think the reader is her worst performance. Because I don't think she can play on intelligent.

I think she is just too smart an actor. She can play on intelligent. I think she is just too smart an actor. And the reader is so based around this idea that she sort of is emotionally and psychologically stunted that I just constantly refuse to buy anything that's happening on screen. Right. And so I think even like you're watching Heavenly Creatures and you're like, this has to be a 21 year old playing a 16 year old. You know, I think especially for the first chunk of her career she always plays as this is probably an actor five years older than the character who is uh pulling it off well enough and then in this

case right i guess she is four years older than the character and it feels like she reads five years older than she is in real life um i mean i think you you need it because of what david said of like she needs to be holding her own against kytel uh and she she is inherently young and youthful but i think that's part of the interesting balance of casting her is that she can very easily read as more mature than him in scenes well just the whole concept of holding your own against kate winslet is a formidable challenge for a lot of actors you know i think even on mayor of east town part of the suspense was not just like you know the culmination the resolution of the mystery but watching these various men like evan peters and guy pierce kind of go up against her and and you the viewer are kind of judging like are they

worthy of her not worthy of mare but even like worthy of kind of like going toe-to-toe with her energy can you do that i think that's part of the reason that uh guy pierce is cast in that kind of nothing role i know he was like a last minute fill-in but also they've worked together before and he can like sort of go toe to toe with her and and not a lot of men can in a way that it feels evenly matched especially for a movie like this where it's so much about power dynamics and this you know battle of the sexes that's the sort of energy you want. And she, yeah, she brings it utterly. She has so much composure as an actor that she can never play low status entirely, you know? And so you need to put her up against someone who can really hold their own against her because she's never going to be able to really truly seem under

anyone's thumb, you know? At at best you have someone kind of matching her she has had a weird recent career i'm now looking at mary v's town was sort of a great big comeback for her um because i guess because like kyle is saying it's sort of worthy of her stature in that way of like you know she's playing someone with a reputation in that in that show right like she's the old star from high school like you know like she's kind of everyone she walks into a bar and everyone's kind of like you know and that worked for her and i feel like that worked for her in ammonite which is not a movie i liked uh but i thought she was good again at playing someone who's got decades of history behind her. She fucking goes down to the beach and she gets her fossils. If you want to have a love affair with her around that,

that's fine. You know, but like, but like apart from that, I like, you know, the, the,

the mountain between us, Wonder Wheel, Collateral Beauty, the dressmaker, like post Steve Jobs. I feel like. Yeah. It has been tough for hollywood to find

her these are roles that on paper you're like i can you know i can see why these appealed but like i want more for her look at the look at the run between reader and steve jobs steve jobs almost functions as a comeback for her right because it's like yeah reader revolutionary road the same year people thought revolutionary road was going to be her oscar then the reader obviously gets the nomination the category no one expected she wins right but it's just this element of like she's fucking overdue they're going to give her the award for one of these two movies this year she wins both at the globes she gets her oscar then she doesn't do anything for three years mildred pierce for hbo with todd haynes is her big passion is that when she is that when she maybe got remarried and had another kid as well?

Isn't that sort of in that period there? I don't know. Maybe not, actually. That's part of it. I think it's also that she had been working so much. She essentially did two or three movies a year almost every year. And Mildred Pierce was a big, long thing that she produced, that she

willed into existence, that she had to get off the ground. But then that same year is carnage and contagion which like she's very good in contagion but she's sort of just like supporting the group right it's like not the showy role but she's excellent excellent excellent in it and then carnage is like a weird misfire sort of all around although that makes sense right because though it was a hot play it's a big you know like that's right you know you get that right but then and then labor two years after that labor day don't forget david that she has the segment movie 43 where she goes on a date with hugh jackman who has testicles on his face i i yes i mean i've never seen it but

i'm aware which one of those two actors do you think signed on for that segment first do you get jackman because you have winslet i think it's jackman jackman yeah i think it was jackman because you want to be funny no i think right because that was that was the segment that got the movie made they produced that as a spec and it was the entire like sending that around hollywood as a reel of like look we got these two really classy highbrow actors doing fucking kentucky fried movie and off of that they got other people to sign on for shoots that was like a self-produced fucking like proof of concept thing so that is the same year as labor day and then the following year is diverivergent, Little Chaos, which she obviously does for Rickman, right? Who she just, like, loved thoroughly.

That movie's good. And then she does Divergent and Surgeon. She did a Divergent. By the time Steve Jobs comes out, you're like, oh, right, fucking Kay Winslet, like, grand dame of the fucking movie screen. And then it's back to like dressmaker's weird i did just nine i think she's good in but it's a bug nuts performance that's a weird performance in a weird movie yes i but this is my thing is insane right right i mean she's always been someone who takes really weird roles and takes on really ambitious projects so it's not like there's been a huge shift in her

career it's just i guess that the parts get different i don't know i think there's someone in her age bracket who is taking the roles that she should have been getting market corrected i mean who is in her like who are her contemporaries i will say you want someone to cry and scream and suffer then you'd go to naomi watts at that period of time right naomi watts is at least trying to horn in on her territory for a bit yeah kate winslet because of titanic will always be a major star so it is like and you know that she can do just about anything so it is like a question of like so why wasn't she getting really good movies then and to be fair she was working with directors who were acclaimed just the movie

she always sought out interesting directors yeah right she's often in she's often in a weird movie by said interesting director sure like holy smoke right um but. And then I guess she would often gravitate towards sort of dark and depressing material, like Little Children or David Gale or All the King's Men is kind of... And then even when she pops up in The Holiday, The Holiday is such an insult to her as much as we enjoy the holiday uh-huh like

because not only not only it's not that it saddles her with jack black i love jack black he's a cutie sure it's that it saddles her with no romance right her and jack black don't even like kiss until the final frame of the movie it's mostly about eli wallach yeah yeah and she's just sort of like oh this is lovely like the whole time And it just kind of feels like this weird practical joke that's being played on her. I don't know. The only time she's done something like that, and if I remember correctly from when we did that episode, did the research at the time, she sort of took it as like it was one of those things that actors get into where they're like, I want to prove I can do this. No one thinks I'm funny. I'd like to see inside that.

No one thinks I could be in a rom-com. I want to i want to loop back to the uh beginning of her career but but to your point kyle about like who are her contemporaries who are taking the parts that she should be playing i'd argue that i i would argue there aren't parts i can think of in the last five years where i'm like she should have gotten that like it might be the dearth of the roles that she's fit for if she doesn't want to play fucking nova prime you know like if she doesn't want to uh i mean she and she did her version of that in divergence certainly but like i feel like i have read multiple interviews with

actresses in her age bracket who said like when i saw it mayor of easttown i got so pissed off like that is the exact type of project and part i am begging my agent to find and she fucking got it and now i just keep on saying like why can't i find my mayor of easttown like it feels like she got the thing that everyone in her class kind of wanted i wonder too if she wasn't in the wake of titanic maybe a little hesitant to do other romantic projects. You know, in fact, with something like Holy Smoke, she's really subverting that. Because you would think, having starred in one of the most iconic romances of all time, that she'd have a few more on her resume. And she has very few more.

And some of them, like, you know um labor day are uh not great well when she's playing when she's playing romance it's like that or little children where it's like deeply depressed like she's this broken horribly lonely woman who starts an ill-advised love affair you know she never does like great sweeping romance the hot yes i mean she's they're on that poster she she is more comfortable with her sexuality i feel like that than a lot of actresses right which is the best thing about her she rules about right and odd forms of sexuality i mean like sort of in a campion way of like sexuality as behavior rather than as like titillation for audience or both i have a great quote to read from her later on that but but i also i will point out

that right with hideous kinky she did pick that project before like she made that before titanic but she knew she had titanic um so and obviously she was already an oscar nominee and she was about you know she's basically like her mainstream moment is happening and she says she took hideous kinky over a big budget movie that she doesn't name so i do think a lot of the time and that like everyone on her team was like what are you doing you know like a lot of the time perhaps there was an easier or more commercial role being you know forces of nature you know like some just kind of like total you know down the middle this is This is like a Hollywood rom-com. The most famous thing she turned down is Shakespeare in Love, obviously.

Right. Some of the other stuff she turned down that we have listed is Autumn in New York, which Winona Ryder gets. Winona and Gear. Yeah. Yeah. And Anna and the King, which Jodie Foster ends up doing with Chy and Fat. Big romances. Right.

Right. And I think it was often her being like, eh, i don't want to do the same thing or whatever well you know i mean i'm i always hesitate to do what i'm about to do which is ascribe a little too much control and foresight to an actor's career so much of the time it's just about well what's the project what kind of window do i have let me just go of course right there's but if you look at something yeah if you look at something like holy smoke it's not just defying expectations of what campion was doing in that point in her career but also obviously winslet too so it's kind of this double pop cultural force of okay you think you know us let's throw you a curveball no you're right kyle that very often is just what's the next thing i can get but she was she had a bird in the hand post titanic right she had a

freaking bird cage in a hand yeah she had tons of birds in the hand she had a fucking aviary in her hand yeah uh-huh uh i i mean it's interesting because like you know famously her and leo are both like 15th choices for titanic right and another thing we sort of haven't brought up here because i it sort of flooded back to me while watching this movie I so completely put on mine because it's so absurd now to think about but there was like so much shit at the time about her being like quote-unquote full-figured or chubby right that she did not look like other leading women where i think this was a period of time now where women were particularly skinny on screen uh but i also think she would talk about often having these

meetings where people would say like you could have this role if you lose 15 pounds and she pushed against that entirely and i think to some degree pushed against even pursuing that entire type of role but there was like people would fucking make fat jokes about her after titanic which is absurd to think about let me read this quote i'm gonna read it now because it's so good it's from a premiere magazine interview yeah uh she was paranoid that she didn't look good while making this film so like you know she was worried about that because obviously she's naked in the film and this you know about you know she's constantly in states of undress.

And then she saw the film and she thought, I shit. I look good. Kate Winslet. I honestly would describe myself physically as someone who is shapely, but slim. I mean, look,

she juts her ribs out. It's an absolute joke. I have a normal woman's body. I like having a good pair of tits on me and a good ass. If I didn't, I don't think I'd feel attractive. You just don't get enough quotes like this from Hollywood actors. I love it.

I love it. This is what's so fascinating about her. I mean, we're talking about how lofty the challenge is of trying to go toe-to-toe with Kate Winslet on screen. But her entire reputation is like, she's kind of no-nonsense. She's super kind. She's just hardworking. She's not some scary scary obsessive method actor she's very open and sort of bawdy in interviews you know she's like deflated her own persona faster than anybody it's it's fascinating because you know she doesn't

carry herself with this sense of like she's not kate blanchett she's not meryl because, you know, she doesn't carry herself with this sense of, like, she's not Cate Blanchett, she's not Meryl Streep, you know? But yet she's thought of on that echelon. Is Blanchett kind of a competitor, even though Blanchett is a good 10 years older than her, probably? Or maybe a little less? But, like, they came up at the same time in terms of prestige projects, right? So, yeah, Blanchett is a type... We got to fight about this, David. We did.

On some episode where you were pulling your rank about the fact that you were posting regularly on the awards watch forums and I was only a lurker. But that the narrative at the time was that... I'm sorry, before they had the cease and desist. That the narrative at the time was that her, the two Cates were in similar positions and by and large, despite making weird choices, Winslet on balance was handling it. Okay. And Blanchett had kind of blown it until the aviator.

Blanchett had a tough, a tough time between Elizabeth and the aviator. I mean, that that's just true. Like she was seen as the sort of, you know, it's like, yeah, I mean, we don't need to get like she was seen as the sort of you know it's like yeah i mean we don't need to get into blanchard right now but you know pushing tin the gift the man who cried chipping news bandits like you know like obviously lord of the rings she's she's

incredible but like when she had a lead role oscar project it was like the missing or veronica garran sure where it would be like kind of an also ran you know even though it had the festival release and all that like uh and then and then whatever she clicks a little later they're very different actresses obviously hollywood definitely thinks about them very differently but they were competitors at the time they were yeah there is something though about about kate and holy smoke that made me think of kate blanchett which is the scene of kate winslet in this movie where she's in the car singing alanis like scene early on wearing a bindi a great scene bindi yep much much to impact to unpack there but you know i wrote an article

for the times i think last spring uh about uh one of my favorite subjects, which is Oscar winning actresses reacting emotionally to opera, which you see in Moonstruck, Pretty Woman. Margot, Brother Fucker. And watching Kate Winslet sing Alanis in this movie reminded me of when Cate Blanchett sings Total Eclipse of the Heart and Bandits. Not a great movie,

but I still remember that scene. And then I realized, no, wait, there is, there is a cor Good performance. And then I realized... A very fun performance. No, wait. There is a corollary to this that I also love, which is Oscar-winning actresses singing in their cars. You've got Nicole Kidman singing Joni Mitchell in Practical Magic. You've got Julianne Moore singing Lady Gaga in After the Wedding.

Julia Roberts has done this in multiple movies. It's a thing. Yeah. Yeah. No. Singing along to the radio is pretty much always gonna win me over i'll say like in any movie so simple but it works right very very simple yeah exciting good uh jerry mcguire like if you know like yeah there's so many

so many great radio scenes but um okay holy smokes so yeah but can we just i i i just i'm, David, but just because we've been sort of talking around everywhere the direction of it, I just want to, like, read in chronological order, okay? Heavenly Creature's obviously her debut movie. Wonderful performance. Then Kid and King Arthur's Court, right? But that same year, Sense and Sensibility, Oscar nomination, here we go, someone to look out for, right? Then Jude and Hamletlet then the year after that is titanic then hideous kinky comes out the following year which is obviously never a movie that was going to break through but i remember there being this question of like is the titanic

bubble so huge that anything they're in now is gonna like connect i remember seeing a hideous kinky trailer where at the end of the trailer in theaters there was a card saying that kate winslet was going to be doing aol chats with fans and i was just like they're presenting her as if like she's like a teeny bopper like figure of obsession where they might be able to get them to see this movie about like a single mother going on a spiritual quest and then she makes a different spiritual quest movie that is like a bizarre sex comedy right yeah uh and then quills enigma like two movies that don't really exist christmas carol the movie animated and then like iris 2001 she's back in sort of the oscar game she has things that like miss after that, but then you're in this run of like, David Gale is obviously a fucking pan out, but then Eternal Sunshine, Finding Neverland, Romance

of Cigarettes is a pan out. Little Children's another nomination. All the King's Men is a pan out. Holiday is like a medium hit. And then she fucking wins the Oscar for the reader. Can we talk about that spiritual quest griff like yes um you know i i was trying to think back to that era how it was presented in that era and then also how we look at it this year through our sort of you know hopefully more sort of culturally attuned eyes but that really was an era of like cultural tourism by white women in india

you know not just her singing along to alana's but alana's thanking india and thank you gwen stefani with her bindi and her sorry you know it was a real thing at that time and there's a lot of movies in the i mean obviously her her co-star leo is in the beach which is sort of a movie about like the dark side of white tourism in asia like and there's a lot of other movies that are on along those like what would he call it god i'm forgetting so you know uh another day in paradise seven years in tibet no but no those movies that are about like people getting stuck in um prisons and you know come on help me out you're talking about the the dark versions

of seven years in tibet the ones that are are commenting on subverting that yeah uh uh what am i thinking of yeah i'm looking at us now return to paradise sorry is the movie i was thinking of right and uh which is vince vaughn and anne heche and joaquin and there but there's another freaking prison uh you know like thai prison movie at that time anyway but yes uh winslet those aesthetics yes they're very dominant in the 90s i think when kate i sorry when jane and anna campion wrote this movie they went to india and talked to uh like they wanted to talk to like transplants uh in ashrams like to try and get the uh the mindset down a lot of and harry krishna people and stuff like that like they were trying to figure out uh like well here she's very as campion

says she's fascinated with contemporary spirituality she's like i'm interested in like the tibetan monk who is very spiritual but it's an alcoholic like things you can't put together like that. That's, I guess, those weird clashes rather than just focusing on these very pure aesthetic goals or whatever. She said, a lot of young Israelis in India,

she said, after having served in the army. Culture tends to exist on a 25-30 year cycle in terms of nostalgia and re-evaluation and shit. Yeah. of that time a sort of contrast to gen x and and the sort of like desire to find alternative modes of spirituality and all that sort of shit like that that was a thread oh yeah yeah i i was gonna say even the like trippier scenes and all of the like vfx of the time and all of the like you know iconography that they're using in it it feels so of the moment um like yeah it's great i actually really love seeing those like ridiculous graphics now i was so nostalgic for them this movie is so bizarre because like everything about the 30 first 30

or 40 minutes feels so specific and you're kind of like huh this is not what i expected to be and right when you settle into it the movie sort of pulls the rug out and changes its whole fucking demeanor but you do have like the soundtrack is almost exclusively neil diamond love that you have this odd manic comic tone right like all these quirky characters she calls this her comedy like when she reflects on this very much so yeah are you kidding i mean like there's the first half unequivocally yeah there's there's comic beats out of almost every scene in the first 40 minutes it's you know and it's it's wild the way it's shot not just you know the the very uh late 90s-ness of the cinematography and the vibe um but you know the the matrixy green text that you'll see sometimes i just have to shout out the you know she's she's uh champions from new zealand but this movie set in australia

is going i don't think full australia not full basler man but like maybe like pj hogan level um in the sort of you know willingness to kind of push it um yeah and and george miller and we've talked about like a lot of that that weird manic sensibility of 90s australian cinema um i there's also though like i mean you talk about that waterbed moment the i don't i'm not i'm not putting you on the spot david uh but have you watched uh her shorts yet on criterion nope no haven't watched okay no so passionless moments which is her third sort of short or the second i don't remember the chronology the one she co-writes with gerard lee who she does uh sweetie with and then later top the lake with that one is this sort of black and white like collection of moments that are sort of almost like one panel comics like it's almost roy anderson

esque right and a lot of her compositions in the first 30 minutes of the movie are like that you know even just like the the parents of the waterbeds a perfect example of that where you're just like you have this like weird depth of detail density in frame where there might be like three or four different funny things happening that have nothing to do with the main thrust of what the scene's about or the dialogue you know um it's just wackiness and you know it's it comes from that part of the world i mean yeah oh very very much so. Right? I think that's why it works. It never feels mean-spirited. Not weaponized wackiness.

Right. But it's, you know, that kind of tone is unusual, especially for American audiences. In the Mad Max book, George Miller's wife, Margaret Sixel, who cut the movie, she's the editor, she won the Oscar for it, talked about how Warner Brothers wanted to cut anything that felt wacky, you know, and Mad Max is bursting at the seams with things that could be considered wacky. And it creates this kind of razor's edge of what the fuck is happening. And the same to some degree in Holy Smoke in the first 30 minutes, especially if you think you're going to get something that's along the lines of piano portrait of a lady she disabuses you of that extremely and entirely speaking of pj hogan you know yeah like her her uh wacky sister-in-law yvonne and then uh her brother tim and his boyfriend yanni like the way they're costumed the way that's all very muriel's wedding right like this sort of like

fun bunch of oddballs kind of vibe to the extended family and and and everything which is like kind of helps keeps the stakes like there's a version of this movie that is way more intense in terms of like we've got to get her out of there and we've got to like lock her in a house and like work on her right like and the stakes always feel kind of casual here like they almost prank her home and like you know and then she's almost as mad at them as they are at her when she finally discovers that like she's been basically like lured home under mean pretenses and yeah yeah it's it's goofy well even when her mother goes to kind of extricate her from india when we see kate in that scene they're not really like leaning into it or satirizing or parodying her attitude she actually seems like fairly casual

and like and happy in her sense of enlightenment and k Kate's not going too hard on what another actress could consider punchlines to play in that scene. She is very at ease. And it's appealing. And so the stakes of the thing feel very different. Because it's kind of a flip in that scene of like, oh, does she really need to be pried from this? She seems like fine. It doesn't seem as bad as what they were imagining it feels like she'll figure it out you know what i mean like even if

she does like sort of pal around with this group for a while it feels like she'll probably figure it out on her own right and like you know go off and do something different later i don't know like they're never there's never the real danger of like oh my god she's about to go you know you drink kool-aid right like you know it's gonna be something terrifying for sure campion leans on like the sort of you know satirizing how these white suburbanites feel about indian culture but i don't know that she ever pushes as hard on the pedal of how Kate Winslet's character feels. No, and Kate Winslet's character is presented to us, right, with her friend recounting to the parents her sort of getting brainwashed and sucked in by this. And that representation we see, which is sort of the story version of it, is so heightened and cartoony.

And then when you get to her and she's just kind of a person, right? Like, as you said, Kyle, like she's not playing brainwash. She's not playing like manic. She's also not playing too low key where it's like, oh, this woman's completely normal. I mean, it's one of those things like we were talking about this in the piano episode, but that so much of Campion's strength is what you were saying, David, her ability to sort of like organically develop a scene with actors, right? And I think find unconventional energy within a scene. I mean, the energy contained within any single Jane Campion scene is usually more interesting

than a lot of movies in total, whether or not the films are entirely successful, right? And she just finds moments that are bizarre, ways to throw things off the hump. But I think when her movies connect most with people, it is things like The Piano or Power of the Dog or Bright Star, possibly, where it's like, I know what type of movie this is, right? I have seen these types of stories adapted before, you know, period pieces sort of align with a genre that usually can be kind of stayed and like built around stiff upper lips. And she's imbuing it with this odd kind of life, you know, this weird undercurrent of sexuality and humor and tension, all these things that make them harder to put your fingers around and then when she's doing that for this movie where the entire premise is so complex and wackadoo to begin with and the movie is so unquantifiable in genre i think for a lot of people they're just like i i don't there's too much fucking shit going on and i also think not the harp on it but it's just you consider the rug

pole of what people think a jane campion movie is at this point right and then you get to the first 40 minutes of this movie which goes so goddamn hard and you have a percent of the audience that probably is like i'm fucking out done this is not my tempo right i don't fucking get this and then whatever percentage of people are able to reacclimate to the tone then she sort of pulls the rug out and she's like no i'm gonna now take this like pretty fucking seriously i'm not gonna remove the wackiness it's all gonna be there but i'm gonna play everything more straight and dramatically it's like they're like two different flips in this movie in terms of how she's subverting the audience's expectation of what status quo is in this film.

You know, it just, in terms of tone, it's very bizarre movie. Also in terms of sex, not just in the obvious, like power dynamics of version ways, but when we see when it's character naked,

she also, you know, peas, uh, and when we slow motion on her feet, and when we see Keitel and Winslet have sex, is a split second you see his ass uh as he's thrusting into her and i think it's something like she's saying like don't come don't come like it's a comic moment he's coming so and then don't they cut to an animal in the outback like right after that i think they do

yes the sequencing of shots i remember being incredibly bizarre there uh sorry kyle you were saying no so i mean it's like you know what you might want if this is being sold to you as a romance in the wake of titanic or even if you're sort of like titillated by the possibilities of these you know two good-looking people with great bodies it's it's not gonna give you just that it's going to smuggle a whole lot of other things into those moments. Okay, so they're kissing, right? Oh, the kissing. Can we talk about that?

Because the way she kisses him is so weird. And obviously was directed like it's almost like she's like a dog licking a face. It's so unusual to make out. She's like a dog licking a face. It's so unusual to make out. Later, she has the scene where she teaches him how to kiss and perform cunnilingus. Yeah. Step by step, which is so bizarre. But just this shot sequences is them kissing for the first time, then hard cut to his tush thrusting for like three seconds as she says, don't come.

And he comes. Right. You like just see the two lines of like her saying don't come and him going like and then it cuts to an ostrich running at full speed which more movies ought to do you can't go wrong with an ostrich cut and the ostrich is like covered in like christmas tinsel or something uh yes right and then it's right they're following in the car with the antlers on it right right it is bizarre but those things car with the antlers on it. Right. Right.

It is bizarre. But those things all happen within the span of like eight seconds and then it cuts back to the two of them naked in bed, poised, codal. This movie is wild. This movie is very wild. uh this movie is very wild um and doesn't really doesn't really care to hold its audience's hand i guess is the the best way to put that right like these swerves that happen you know that something's gonna go down but then there's like earlier scenes where like uh you know pj uh yvonne gives pj pj is uh harvey kytel a blowjob out of nowhere like you know like when they when they tell her to see him to like bring her a change of clothes she's having like a panic attack he's like talking her through breathing exercises and then he continues

to tell her breathe while she is is sucking on his penis isn't that when she reveals the drawer it's right after that yeah tape is tapings of like the different celebrities that is such a weird detail she's got like a fucking collage with fucking lawrence fishburne at the center of it sometimes she holds up magazines mid-sex but to me that sequence is very much of a piece with the themes that get revealed in the movie and maybe even a preview of them because you know even though he's telling her breathe breathe and she's on her knees you know ostensibly servicing him i watched that scene and her scene describing her fantasy being like okay this is a who who actually has the power and the agency in both of those sex scenes her she knows exactly what she

wants out of you know uh sex with uh with the guy that she's with and she goes straight to kytel knowing exactly what she wants out of that encounter too you know so it's always fascinating in both those scenes how the man reacts to a woman who has that agency you know uh the guy that she's hooking up with has no idea really i don't think about her active fantasy life and kytel is just like whatever you know this woman is throwing herself at me but it's he thinks of that as getting what he wants and it's really to me it's her getting what she wants and so it's setting up you know the the sort of agency and and what he's supposed to do with it that winslet's character has after they

start having their uh sexual um relationship i also think if this movie is about anything it's uh about the fact that uh human brains are fucking? Like, so much of this movie is about the idea of, like, brainwashing and deprogramming and people explaining their thoughts about how the brain works and how we process things and all of that. But also, so much of it is just, like, why do our sexual attractions play out the way that they do? You know? Like, I mean, you talk about another sort of expectation flip but like piano is a movie where you would not believe at the 30 minute mark that you would accept her ending up with harvey kytel as a happy ending right that that will feel like a good emotional healthy

landing place for these characters and yet you do and then this movie you're like are is she gonna pull the shit with kytel again is she gonna make me think i should end up she should end up with this woman this woman should end up with kytel who seems like completely wrong with her and instead it's sort of just constantly interrogating this thing of like their shift in which one holds the power in their relationship as you said kyle right who is sort of more uh intellectually in control versus who is more succumbing to their own libido and then them trying to like constantly make sense of it after the fact about why they even want to fuck each other but it's you know there's a real power flip you know to to these dynamics that we're talking about

that is sort of crucial to it right like to the sort of charge um which is why kytel is so well cast in both the piano and holy smoke even when he's out of place i guess because someone sort of getting power over him is pretty remarkable. Does that make sense? Like, you know, that does actually land when that happens in either movie. Yeah, I mean, in the piano, same thing. Who has the power in their arrangement, in their sexual scenes? Is it him?

Is he setting the terms or is she? Is it a negotiation? Is it fair? Are they turned on by a power imbalance? You know, these are things that obviously come up a lot in campion's work but um but yeah the way that they are presented here is very extreme not even a tasteful period movie way but in a really in your face late 90s way there's this scene at the beginning that really stuck with me where it's the guy what's the stan who's the guy who sort of helps them find kytel and organizes the like yeah the guy with glasses exactly so his monologue the end of his like big scene where he's sort of briefing

on what they need to do he says the mind's a damn mystery. Why do people believe in God? Why do people believe they're in love? Why do I tell myself every day, you're fat, mate. Today I'm not going to eat cake, butter, or bread. And by lunchtime, I've done the lot. And then it's hard cut to the waterbed and them coming up with the plan to tell her that the dad is dying.

Which her dad is her dad taking the golf break immediately by the way is a great a great move by him i love that he could barely commit to the i mean and not to skip to the end but the fact that just like in the final fucking letters it's just like yeah of course you know as we all saw coming he left my mom for the secretary my mom's here at the ashram now she's having a moment early on in the movie yeah so much of the movie is about there's these patriarchal systems and what are women supposed to do how do they find their own agency within them you know i mean whether it's the mother paying more attention to what kate winslet is up to than what her husband

is doing or you know religion and mysticism, period. You know, Keitel tells a story about, you know, the guru who just basically wanted to fuck him. And certainly that's one of their fears with Kate Winslet. You know, like, okay, is she going to indulge in some mass marriage? Is he even cute? You know, like, these sorts of things. And how do you find your way when these systems and ideas and things that even feel so pure, religion,

mysticism, etc, are really, you know, designed by man and often do have a component of just trying to kind of, you know, reassert a power structure where a man is on top and takes what he wants kytel is the war horse of this movie in the sense that everyone wants to fuck him right it's just like people cannot stop right and when you get to that guru scene where he's like he takes my pecker out he puts it in his hand he's upset that i don't come and that's why we had a falling out it's just like right you right. There's this weird exotic draw to this guy, right? And just for context, War Horse is a movie that Griffiths is referencing where everyone wants to fuck the horse. Everyone wants to fuck the horse, as we all know.

Just in case people hadn't listened to that episode. No, the thesis we established on War Horse in our episode with the great pilot Virouette is that everyone wants to fuck this horse. That's the thing that keeps the horse alive is people are like, why do I? There's something about, oh, I want to fuck it. That's what it is. And it's the same with Keitel's character in this movie. Everyone comes into contact with him as like, get weird. Oh, I think I want to touch his penis.

But if you described Harvey Keitel as a war horse, I would just accept that unblinkingly. I also think Lincoln Center could have for one night replaced the puppet with a naked Harvey Keitel on stage and the show would have worked. I don't know if it would have worked in a Spielberg movie. The Alpers would be in paradise. Yeah, I got a video of the Keitel performance. Just FYI, if you want that. I had it going. Not to zoom out too much, but sort of what you're talking about kyle right i do think that one of the central things

she's examining in this movie is that we uh society has evolved to a point where we spend so much time intellectualizing why we do the things that we do and trying to strategize about what types of things we want to do, what type of person we want to be, how we want to be perceived, right? And someone like running off and joining a cult and submitting themselves to an unconventional sort of dogma is seen as the sort of thing where it's like, you don't do that. You're coloring outside of the lines. That's not like, that's unseemly. You know, this is how you're supposed to live your life. These sorts of structures, these sorts of things, you know, having an open marriage and going to a spiritual retreat.

And all these sorts of things are seen as like, oh, are they going off off the deep end a little bit? But like the basic thing is we still are not to get too fucking like dormant philosophy about it we're all just fucking stupid animals that have evolved to a point where we've come up with all these rules about how we behave and how we function how we make sense of all of that but like everything comes down to two basic impulses which are procreation self-preservation right by and large almost everything you do is in one way or another based on one of those two things. And like these systems of power that are constructed ultimately often end up serving the people at the top of them in that way. And people look for answers

in people in systems because when you stare down the barrel of like our consciousness that has evolved so far beyond what it probably should have and we have too much internal thoughts you're just like it can't just be that i'm supposed to eat and find a cave to stay in and fuck people right there has to be more to it than that and the more you try to sort of wind yourself up and finding other things the less behavior maybe makes sense to you yeah and it's interesting thing because you know i think she the kate winslet character is sort of struggling with the idea of like does she want to be told what to do you know i mean she essentially is a even though she's rebelling against uh her upbringing it's

no coincidence that she's becoming sort of part of this spiritual retreat where she's rebranded but also part of another sort of um massive people who are all doing the same thing when we see the suburbia you know the housing tract absolutely everything looks exactly the same but when she flips things on harvey kytel who's also been telling her what to do and like you know uh has a sort of control by which he lives by. And she's the one on top. And it's a cult of one. And she's the leader. Is that what she wants?

I think primarily more than anything, she doesn't want to be her parents, right? She doesn't want to be her parents. She doesn't want to be her siblings. She's looking for a clear, alternative, distant path from that. The fact that Keitel also had his own experience in a similar sort of religious group is so fascinating because he's sort of coming out of it going like i went through this shit i sort of humored the idea that this might be the answer and i realized these people are as full of shit as anyone else. Just come back to fucking normal society. Right. But yes, she she flips it on him in a way he hasn't before.

And I think it's so telling. There's a vulnerability to the moment when he's sort of saying, like, you know, I like I used to be pretty like I used to be handsome. And it's like she just slept with him. She initiated it. And yet he's still insecure about the fact that she doesn't find him attractive like he's sort of acknowledging you probably fucked me because of weird psychosexual power dynamics at play now and whatever sort of animal magnetism i have but i want you to know at one point i was conventionally handsome you would have just slept with me because i was attractive

and she just immediately like laughs at him for that and mocks him for that. And he never recovers for the rest of the movie. Yeah. Well, she's whittling him down just in the way that he was trying to, you know, trying to break her down and confronting her with images and ideas and, you know, burning the sari and all of that. with images and ideas and you know burning the sari and all of that she's doing it in a much more compressed time frame and really hitting him where he lives which is that sense of male sexuality and and privilege that comes along with it and she dismantles it in front of him and then puts him in the dress so he takes the sari from her he she puts him in the dress the one time he really devastates her i mean he devastates her

by showing her the film in a way you know like you know she makes her feel guilty right that's a little different but when he writes be kind on her head yeah as is in my profile as in my zoom background like that seems to be the one thing that really gets through her armor in a weird way where she's like come on man like you're saying i mean like you know like like for some reason that is the most sort of spiritually damaging thing she can hear yeah in a way and it's also him expressing his vulnerability in the same way that she expresses it by like you know like she spells out help he spells out be kind like they can't even say these things out loud i don't know i thought that was interesting yeah there's a jane campion quote she said ruth is beautiful intelligent she's also

young that was a real point of entry for the character i believe youth tends to make people it made me anyway very dogmatic and very brave young people keep us honest they're so intolerant of anything hypocritical you hear from kids all the time the one thing they can't tolerate is hypocrisy which also gives them problems with the contradictory or paradoxical nature of life anything that has a kind of overlapping or complex quality to it so like that's the thing that's going to hit her the hardest is if he makes her question whether or not she is inherently kind because that is suddenly calling into question her own sense of like honesty, right? Yes. Right.

Right. Then, which is what she's aspiring to more than anything, I guess. Right. I want to just be like fucking free of all this bullshit and live a more honest life. It's interesting though,

because even though she's so relatable and I think we're meant to sympathize with her, we do see her from Harvey Keitel's perspective throughout. In fact, the film essentially introduces her to us in the same way she might as well be introduced to Keitel's character because we meet her when she's already enlightened.

We meet her through other people. We don't really get to know her for her until she's already had this enlightenment. Who was she before this? Who is she maybe underneath it? We find that out as he does, which is interesting. So the,

I even, I, the idea that maybe her spiritual quest is to be kind, or it's something that she needs to work on is not something that we go into the movie knowing, you know, or feel even very strongly. I would say in the first half hour she's kind of

unknowable throughout the entire movie now that's partly like griffin said you know that is partly just being in your 20s you are sort of unknowable in a weird way to yourself but yeah no no yeah she's she's inscrutable um i think look i really i like this movie i think it is you know a blast and so different but like it is worth you know noting that this movie went over like a fucking brick like nobody like this look this is the kind of movie that i feel like i usually fucking reclaim per miniseries like your higher learnings or whatever where it's like this is the crazy tonally all over the place unwieldy mess that i'm gonna argue secretly fucks and even for me i'm like this movie's a mess i like it i like it on balance but it is so fucking all over the place it's really hard to get your head around

kyle where are you on this movie yeah well i, I liked revisiting it because kind of, as we were saying earlier, so many people's campian introduction was the piano. And then you just sort of take things chronologically, or at least I did. And so when Holy Smoke came up, I think there was a lot that I was interested in, but also you just don't expect that from her. I didn't then. But I think a few years later i was dating a guy who really loved sweetie and showed that to me and that was such a skeleton key

and so it was fun to go back and revisit this like knowing that she already had that vibe and those interests within her and that she likes things to be messy i mean i think you know i i like messy movies if they're done with some thoughtfulness and i think the movie likes being messy even the very end of the movie where they're emailing each other about their lives which are very settled but also keeping a space for each other within those yes specific far-flung lives is a messy conclusion that sticks with you because it is messy that you know there is a certain yearning for one another who knows if they'll ever see each other again though and there's nothing open and shut about it it leaves in an open place but we really had something didn't we

you know there's that sense of just like i mean the reveal of fucking like kytel with like the two-sided baby bjorn that he's now fathered twins with pam greer and he's just fucking got dad glasses on he's writing his second novel pam greer i want to give a whole little spotlight to in a second but uh i you know i first 40 minutes i was so locked in with this and as it went on i was just like is this movie totally losing the plot and then started to like uh coalesce for me again towards the end and when you get to that moment of the her moving to the back of the pickup truck to sort of like console him i was like fuck did this movie just

wholly win me over again did it totally put a bow on it and i was like ready for the movie i was just assumed that was the last shot of the movie and then when you put that email coda on there i just felt once again unmoored i do think it is a more interesting way to end the movie i do agree with you that the messiness is for the point but i was like once again just even in the final two minutes completely thrown off from my expectations with this film it's so interesting because campion is so specific with her visual intentions and there's and with honestly any intentions her creative intentions too but even watching something like power of the dog which is very specific formally and structurally my first time through that film, and I think a lot of people's

first times through that film, you're kind of like, where's this going? What is this all amounting to? I'm so curious, you know, that she knows the true nature of the movie, but you're waiting, waiting, waiting for you to know the true nature of the movie, and you find it out. And the second time through was so fascinating for me, because every single scene is leading towards that ending. And there's no wasted scene. It's all setting up everything that is about that will eventually pay off. You just don't know that yet. So it is a very like tight, controlled screenplay in the way that it's written but it has the illusion of mess because the first time through you don't know that you know all you know is she knows it and that that can be a really

alluring thing in a filmmaker where you know that they know but your own reaction to it or your own emotional takeaway is more complicated but i think Kyle, you just identified a thing I like about the movies I usually defend that are sort of the ambitious messes from the filmmakers we cover, where it's just like they're doing something that feels so unwieldy and inscrutable, but they're doing it with a confidence and precision.

Whether or not it's pleasant, whether or not it goes down smoothly, I'm like, they know exactly what they're doing. I can dislike it or not, but they have not lost control of this. And I am just such a sucker for that clarity of vision, especially when the vision is directed at something that's kind of abstract,

you know, uh, or messy, I guess. I personally think you need the code up because I like thinking of this movie, not as their, not as their like ultimate union, but it's like a year later,

something they would both reflect on both fondly and sort of with bizarre, like being like wow that is crazy that we did that like i totally you know like you know what i mean like right the distance is good to to to include the distance but it's probably i'm trying to think of us us triple f's kyle like sitting down and seeing this at venice and walk you know being like holy shit like jane campion's new movie with kate winslet holy smoke and walking out and being like well i don't even know where to begin like you know not even maybe i i don't know how i would have reacted in 1990 but like certainly i would not

have been able to walk out and been like i totally get what that right right does this movie play like the paper boy you know right yes i mean sure in some ways have you guys done lee daniels yet no it's we've talked about it a lot series come on talk about like confident messiness i would see i kept waiting for him to make another movie and then fucking billy holiday is kind of boring right right which was sort of underwhelming yeah but here's the thing also that the title of the movie holy smoke with an exclamation point you know she directs with an exclamation point but the feeling you have as a viewer is a question mark you know it might even be an ellipsis you might just be trailing off at the end of the exclamation yeah but i also do love a movie that

has an exclamation point in the title you know the informant had an exclamation point everybody wants them had two exclamation points it's obviously inherited from the van halen song i don't have we ever gotten three exclamation points in a title uh fuck i feel like there has to be and now i'm thinking of what it is it's pat does have an exclamation point right am i wrong about is there a question mark exclamation point that is oh it's called that's called an interrobang of course and i'm not sure uh let's see i'm looking at some of these safety last that's an early one viva zapata of course marlon brando nominated them the classic movie with ants uh oklahoma of course classically comes with an exclamation point uh what else do we got faster pussycat kill kill that has three uh but spaced out there we go same with torah torah torah i just

owe everyone an apology the title of its pat does not contain any punctuation it's just that the poster is a giant question mark a A movie that has undoubtedly aged perfectly. There's the funny subcategory of like, To Wong Fu, thanks for everything! Exclamation point, Julie Newmark. Like where you have the exclamation point in the middle of the title. Stop or my mom will shoot is another one.

But I'm not seeing any triple. Someone's got to try that, I guess. Yeah. Pam Greer sidebar uh pang beer came in the movie for five minutes maybe correct right it's a brief performance probably less i think yes yeah it's one scene basically she's she sings a tune though she does sing a tune this is my thing pam greer obviously recently came up in our Carpenter series where she's in two of the late period Carpenter movies, right? One right before, one right after Jackie Brown. And we were sort of talking about why we didn't get to see the sort of post-Jackie Brown dramatic career that we wanted.

Big comeback, big lead roles all right and i feel like people push back on two things i said one of which was that she was kind of depressed to be back in genre land which is uh i think correct because that is one of pam greer's skills is i don't think she ever condescended to material right and she always heightened material and i think she likes working and whatever. But you watch her show up in this and just her being in this context. You're like, fuck, I wish more directors were using her like this. I wish she had a bigger part in this. But I also wish she had more of a run of auteurs just stretching how Pam Greer could be used in a film. She's great casting in this yes uh both in that she can come and kind of bitch out

harvey uh kytel for a minute and you totally buy that he would be like you know uh intimidated and sort of like want want to keep her right blah blah uh and she's just sort of like similar kind of age and like that you know they're from similar times. They both came up in the 70s and all that. So that's great. But yeah, I just, I kind of wanted a whole movie of her. And Kytel. You want to know everything about this one.

Having twins. I know. Like, I just, it's such a dangling thread. And it's not like she ever worked with Campion again, obviously. So like, that's too bad too. They're a good energy match and a good pop culture they are um and it's it's funny i mean basically every all the quotes like winslet's quotes about this are basically like i love this character she's such a monster she's great she was even more over the top in the script and i tried to make her feel more human but like i had such a blast watching it and then campion is just like

you know being in love is psychotic like yeah like even if it's brief and like so that's what's so exciting about like this movie for her i think is like uh her her impression of harvey kytel's character is like he's incredibly straight-laced even though he's presenting himself as a cool cat right like that's what the back half of the movie really is and of course it ends up with him in the dress with the lipstick on chasing after winslet like a man like a madman right like he he's here's the quote i'll read this line at least there's a cultural thing about the seduction of girls in their 20s i feel sad that men don't grow up with their own generation of women and learn to enjoy them and accept their aging so i guess like there

is that sort of element of like a finger in the eye like a punishment for his character like that he goes down that road but like you know she's she's having fun with it well i mean you you made the fucking age gap joke at the beginning of uh the episode but this is like a movie that is actually somewhat interrogating age gaps and not like criticizing them but it's like what are the weird power dynamics of this you know uh both in terms of how it plays out but also why that initial attraction exists in the first place um and again who has the power within those structures right if older men are creating structures that reinforce their power and give them access to younger women what power within those structures do younger women wield and how

cognizant of that power are they right Right, it's like once they have sex, he kind of transfers most of his power to her, despite the fact that it seems like he is the one who is exerting even more control in that situation. He shouldn't have come. He shouldn't have come. She told him not to. She did warn him.

He didn't listen. This movie got mixed too bad reviews really um in a year of course that's famous for all the fucking like 90s auteurs like fucking victory lapping and and also elder states right people from previous decades as well yeah so that's probably not part that's not helping the fact that this movie is coming out in award season in a very packed award season um i don't know you know david rooney my uh your film critic circle uh colleague actually gave it a good review uh in venice in variety like he actually said this is like sweetie this is a very challenging

work it's kind of a return to her early idiosyncratic style so like there were some people clicking into that sure but um i think a lot of reviews apart from sort of bafflement by like the pairing of the lead actors were we're sort of like this movie's not really about culty programming like it's actually sort of just like a battle of the sexes. I think the pitch maybe had gone over strangely as well. But that's the entry point. It's about that opening monologue. It's about how fucking weird human brains are.

And the idea of cult deprogramming, right? The idea of someone being quote-unquote brainwashed and they need to hire someone else to quote-unquote reset their brain is a vehicle to open those doors and start interrogating as much as we think we understand how our neural pathways or whatever. It's just like fucking chaos. But on that note of how it was received, have you guys seen the poster for this movie? Yes. It's a great poster. You mean the tabloidy one?

Yeah, it's like a tabloid cover. But at the bottom of the poster, you know, the sort of bottom line of the tabloid cover, it says, has writer-dire jane campion gone too far and you know i mean that kind of like controversy hyping is what uh weinstein was very good at but it is a good line to kind of think about how people responded to that film at that time it literally says like a scandalous new film it is very much trying to be like this is the movie that's going to press all your buttons like you won't believe it so yeah it is funny because sex captive in desert

hideaway young beauty seduced by macho american twice her age we paid him thousands of stuns family experts question who really seduced who like that makes it sound like it's going to be fucking wild things or something well but it might as well just say like naked titanic beauty all over herself yeah you know screw 60 year-year-old man, you know? Oh, I have to read the P quote, but no, sorry, finish, finish, Kyle. No, no, no, read the P quote. I just want to say, before we move away from the poster, because the P quote is, I mean, look,

this is what we've been building up to this entire episode. Right, I have a full bladder, so go ahead. It's also one of these posters where it's very striking, but you also look at it and you're like, what's the's the title of this movie like because of the formatting and doing it tabloid times right yeah what is this holy smoke is like it does say holy smoke twice right they're using that as like the fucking like quippy uh daily news new york post like shocking headline but the way it's formatted does not feel like that's the title of the movie anyway uh uh well yeah but also all other marketing of this film is like kate winslet standing in a desert

basically right like it's more trying to make it seem like some sort of exotic movie about you know it looks like hideous kinky it's like the exact same marketing campaign like with her midriff bear right right anyway anyway the pee quote is just that the pee scene was done obviously with a saline drip attached to her but she was like I want to do one myself and so she

tried to pee herself and as she says and the problem is of course that the wee dribbles down one leg she said she just could not arrange it so the p was cinematic she couldn't get the p in front yeah properly she couldn't um yeah she also apparently after seeing the movie for the first time with her husband jim uh we were totally stunned for about 24 hours afterwards it was almost like we had a terrible hangover that

wouldn't go away we were in sort of a daze oh my god we've made a porn film so she was quite shocked by how explicit the movie is even though it's not like explicit in some sort of like like kind of lurid porny way i would say but it is it's a very intimate movie there's a lot of everything is raw it's also the the campion thing we talk about like sexuality and campion movies is far more vulnerable because it's unvarnished you know um right it is interesting i mean we're talking about she is an actress who uh is able to overpower in her performance as a dodgy accent but i do think it's important as an actor i go to bat for the accent i think it's good in that same david rooney review that david decided yeah it says that the accent is unimpeachable i i'm not

criticizing this accent i'm just talking about the accent thing we were saying in general but i more so just winding up to this point that i think it is important for all actors to like in your development as an actor the moment when you can start to recognize what your weaknesses are you know and how to circumvent them and avoid them rather than thinking that you're an actor who can pull off fucking anything. And I think it was an important lesson that this early on in Kate Winslet's career, she recognized that she could not control her urine stream. Because you just see her never attempt that again for the rest of her filmography. That's good. You know, she has embarrassed herself again. Anyway, I'm sorry. Let's good. She hasn't embarrassed herself again. Anyway,

I'm sorry. Let's play the box office game. Stupid joke. We could do the limited weekend, which is December 3rd, 1999. I guess we should do that. We could also do its wide weekend, but no, we don't need to do that. I think the wide weekend is my birthday weekend. Is that possible? It's February. Yes, it's February. It took a while to go i mean wide wide i mean like a hundred screens it did

not go wide wide uh this movie opened on two theaters uh in december per screen average of sixteen thousand dollars at number 61 uh also opening this weekend sweet and lowdown and the end of the affair there's a lot of oscar movies coming out right now there's that movie virtual sexuality that rings a bell what's that what is that uh fuck it was like it was like a british comedy about like it was sort of like a reverse weird science it's like woman makes a man in a computer program and then he like comes to life or whatever it's like oh you make the perfect man anyway i'm just looking at new but no number one movie griffin in december 1999 do you can you just tell me what it is a toy story 2 that's right the deuce baby yeah

in its third week still number one i just figured you'd know huge humongous and number two is what was its box office rival it's an action film its box office rival? It's an action film. Its box office rival in 1999. They came out the same week. Right, right. In November. Fuck. Is it like an established action star? Yeah.

Established action franchise. Oh, it's established action franchise. In 1999. That is released in the fall. Or winter against toy story 2 yeah so like thanksgiving weekend oh oh oh oh it's uh uh it's bond it's tomorrow never dies uh it's the world is not enough okay sorry i get i'm confused it's fair enough it's the third brosnan movie the one with um denise richards and sophie marceau yes uh number three at the box office is a r-rated fantasy action horror movie with a big star sleepy hollow is on the wane no no stars on the wane okay star is on the wane uh because

sleepy hollow i know comes out the same weekend as uh world is not enough which is why we've covered number four okay star on the wane weird horror action sci-fi what were the genres you said What were the genres you said? Sort of horror, action, supernatural, fantasy. Is it End of Days? It's End of Days. Oh, man. Yeah.

Schwarzenegger. Yeah. Which I've never seen. That's a Schwarzenegger I've never seen. I haven't either. Is that Peter Himes? It's Peter Himes, yeah. I've seen it.

And? Not great. Gabriel Byrne is the devil right the number one thing I remember is Gabriel Byrne seducing a mother and daughter and they have sex in this kind of like bass relief kind of way that's yeah it's a weird visual scene weird threesome weird threesome to find in a Schwarzenegger movie. Mother-daughter, Gabriel Byrne. Kyle, I'm not saying I'm disappointed in you, but that is the kind of movie I would love to have someone tell me is secretly great.

I believe you. I doubt that you can find people who think that. I mean, listen, there's been this rash recently of people re-evaluating movies or just happening upon them on TV from that era and being like wow this is gorgeous looking and it was and yeah i don't doubt that compared to like most of the um by committee shit that we see in movies these days it's just like stunningly gorgeous

but not a great movie as i recall i'm gonna re-watch it now uh number five is another one of those kinds of movies that we're talking about it is a crime thriller it's the kind of movie that would be a TV show that would last for two seasons now and it was based on a book an Oscar play it was a programmer programmer based on a

book a huge star and a up and coming female star it's not the bone collector it is the bone collector it is the bone collector I mean the bone collector talk about exactly what I'm saying wasn't Barry Jenkins discovering bone collector

on a plane recently and it looks so good and everybody was like yeah it's gorgeous and movies these days just aren't that's Noice it's a Philip And movies these days just aren't. That's Noyce? It's a Philip Noyce film. Noyce!

Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. You've also got Queen Latifah, Michael Rooker, Luis Guzman, Ed O'Neill, Leland Dorser in a film about a serial killer? Dorser won all those. Leland Dorser's in this? That's another one where I'm like, I should rewatch that. That probably rules. Yeah. Oh, it does rule. all those leela dorsters in this um that's another one where i'm like i should i should re-watch that that probably rules like um yeah oh it does rule trust me have you seen it ben

are you just saying that off the title absolutely i've seen it the villain lives in like a fucking underground lair full of pipes it's like extremely my shit isn't the villain leland or sir let me spoil it oh boy i mean leland or sir again a villain i don't i just don't see it i think you must be mistaken uh it's just no way that would ever happen i forgot there was a bone collector tv show oh god was there well lincoln ryan colin hunt for the bone collector was it like dennis hayesbert it was russell hornsby oh okay russell horn son and fences yeah yeah yeah you know because the idea is that he is uh in a hospital bed right like he's been paralyzed or something right he's like doing everything from yeah yeah that is funny that he was that he was denzel son and fences and then he

played fucking the bunk played denzel i i think uh i think Joven Adepo was the son in Fences, right? Isn't he the older son? Am I wrong about this? He's the older son in Fences. That's right. He's a good actor. This is a weird box office, Griffin, in that it's the same

top ten as last week. There's nothing new. Really? Yeah that it's the same top 10 as last week there's nothing new really yeah it's really weird like everything new is just limited release stuff and that's it every it's toy story two world is enough end of day sleepy hollow bone collector pokemon dogma being john malkovich the insider anywhere but here that's your 10 and those are the 10 last week i i yearn hearing the variety that has the variety of that john malkovich jesus look they're they're shitty movies on that 10 but it's it's a buffet you know what i'm saying truly there are options there are there are and all these movies are doing well i mean the being john malkovich made 22 million dollars in 1999 that's pretty crazy

yeah it was usa films it was like the focus you know pre-focus yeah you know it's a depressing thing to think about that like 20 years ago the narrative was like why can't charlie kaufman crack this 25 million dollar domestic ceiling right now it's like any movie out at 25 now it's like fucking house of gucci crawls to 50 and everyone's like giving it a standing throwing roses at it being like good job keeping grown-ups in theaters that's great house of gucci would have made like 160 million dollars 10 years ago or even three lincoln money yeah yeah or even a few. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Anyway. Anyway, everything's good. Everything's good.

I'm trying to be less negative. 2022, everything's good. Everyone's a good person. Oh, I love this. Great. Is this the year of Good Griffin? Yeah, the movies are safe. Good Griff. I think the outlook is bright.

I agree. That's right. It's the opposite of Good Grief. It's Good Griff. Yeah. i agree that's right it's the opposite of good grief it's good griff yeah hashtag good griff and make some fan art of me as charlie brown but i'm happy right you've kicked the football i get make this is the fan art i want i'm fucking kicking a field goal right and all everyone's charlie brown yeah and they're like we respect you we we recognize your worth um that's great a good man burfee noobs holy smoke is great and yeah you know after this

movie you know get such a chill reception she's like all right all right i'll do something normal i'll do in the cut next that one right yeah uh yeah why are you booing me i'm right um yeah she is kyle thank you so much for being on the show thanks for having me blank check exclamation point oh we should we should change our fucking name yeah blank check blank check uh kyle you're a legend thanks for being a festival friend long overdue thank you simsy uh and yeah and everyone should fucking read uh your book because i mean it couldn't be more relevant to our listeners yeah listen i'm biased but it's really fun juicy it moves and if you want to know how hard it is to make a movie, let alone a movie masterpiece, this is, this will tell you. Breaking it down.

Yeah. I have seen several people tweeting that they read it in one sitting. Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Truly. I do think, and the response I keep getting, which is absolutely what I was going for, is that you read this movie thinking, oh, well, there's no way they'll make this. Or you this movie thinking oh well there's no way they'll make this or you read this book thinking there's no way they'll make this movie just the odds are too stacked against them even though you know you're probably reading the book because you've seen the movie a billion times but also as we said if they make this it will be

a disaster yeah when you get to the shit of like the movie is canceled because it rained too much for the first time in decades and And now the land is too green. You're like either sign from God, don't make this or get over yourself, find another way to make it. And the idea that he was like, no, I'm going to wait two more years.

You're just like doomed, doomed, doomed, get over yourself, dude, or give up. And then you're like, no,

I was wrong. He made a master. He made the best blockbuster last 25 years and as he was about to make it he started having heart problems and had to go in the hospital for heart stents like truly a million signals that any other filmmaker would have just thought okay well i'll pack it and there must be something else i can do and he never did just make my fucking penguin movies it's also just like it being the blank check off of happy feet too yeah and and their hope that he'd make three you know it's like just fucking satiate him like no yeah very much so i mean yeah you'll see in the

movie they would not have made fury road if the first um happy feet hadn't done so well it became a soup like a a real blank check situation. Although arguably, the second Happy Feet was not as successful because he had his attention split. But Happy Feet 2 is secretly a masterpiece. Secretly a fun movie. Yes. I've watched it several times.

I wonder if you'll make... Really? Yeah. I bought the fucking 3D Blu-ray and I watch it a lot. I think that movie's really fucking good and i never re-watched the first happy is this this new one is it getting made the furiosa movie yeah i mean that's the intention that's definitely happening right i keep talking to them and they're still doing it um but yeah i mean if you read the book you'll understand that delays like this are

par for the course on mad max movies are really most george miller movies anyway there's so much buy-in that needs to be happening like literally buy-in in some cases they're not cheap um but yeah i mean it's all you know the intention is to go and they have, you know, a huge new star, Anya Taylor-Joy. They have Chris Hemsworth as the villain, who I heard was called Dr. Dementus. Love that name. So George Miller-y. That sounds amazing. And Tom Perks replaced Yahya Abdul-Mateen,

the second, right? Yeah, because you know, those two are going up for the same roles. Exactly the same vibe. Yeah. But maybe did Yann Abdul-Mateen just go like, you know what, I'm actually in too many movies. I actually need to take a break.

I don't know. But yeah, I mean, I'm excited for Furiosa for the obvious reasons, but also, you know, this is a screenplay that they've had written for, God, well over a decade. They were writing it. Because at one point, he was going to shoot these back to back, right? At one point, it was going to be shot back to back.

At one point, Furiosa was going to be animated and they went pretty far down that path. But then it honestly went too far while Fury Road kept getting pushed back. So the timing just did not work out. At one point, there was going to be animated Furiosa. There was going to be real live Fury Road. There was going to be like road shows,

theme park situations. They pitched a whole transmedia situation. And of course at that time they barely got Fury Road made but now Warner Brothers is like, oh actually we will do all the other things. I would love to see like fucking monster

truck rally style arena mad max shows they tried that with fast and furious and they pulled the plug on it like really fast but mad max it would translate much better um uh kyle final question okay and you can protect your sources here i'm not asking you to give us a scoop. I'm just asking if you hold the knowledge. Okay. Do you have a sense of what the fuck a thousand years of longing is? Oh. Sorry, 3,000 years of longing.

3,000. 3,000 years, sorry. Yes, I believe the concept is that Idris Elba is a genie and Tilda Swinton is this very shut down, repressed woman. And he tells her stories. And so it kind of touches on all sorts of locations and times. But it sounds like it's Arabian Nights-like in structure. I think it's something like that.

It almost exclusively takes place in one room right? well I think they are I think they are in it but no it definitely reaches outside of that hotel room yeah

and that there might be interesting cameos in it from some of Miller's other work. Mumbles? I don't know about Mumbles. Lorenzo's oil? It's back? Cannot confirm that. The oil!

But we'll see. They just hold up a tincture of the oil. Yeah, they're just holding up the oil going like, ah, my oil! I'm Italian, don't you forget. They start vaping Lorenzo's oil. Yeah, right. 21st century.

All right. I can't wait to see this. Okay, we're done. Hey, thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for her social media and many things. That's now a reductive way to refer to her. End of these episodes. Increasingly, Marie Barty helping us make the show.

Pat Reynolds and Joe Bowen for our artwork. Lane Montgomery and the Great American Novel for our theme song. You can hear their new album extremely loud and incredibly online wherever you can hear albums. Thank you to Alex Barron and AJ McKeon for our editing.

Go to blankies.red.com for some real nerdy shit. We got a website coming very soon. It should be launching around now where a lot of these links that I spend too much time saying at the end of each episode will be centralized. So you're going to be able to go there for merch, for Reddit, for Discord, for all these sorts of things. They'll all be sort of organized in one place along with that is where March Madness voting will be happening very soon. But of course, remember, you got to go to patreon.com slash blank check for blank check

special features where we are still busting ghosts, ghosts that are becoming increasingly more and more controversial. And tune in next week for In the Cut. As we said, a very normal movie that everyone took in stride. Right. And as always, she's one of the finest actors of her generation,

but Kate Winslet does not know how to make her urine act.