Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 352: Rob Schrab

Episode Date: September 8, 2019

Rob Schrab, creator, director, writer, and all-around genius joins the DTFH! Learn more about Ram Dass' new movie, Becoming Nobody, here. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by A Life Lived, an Audioboom Original podcast. This episode is also brought to you by Squarespace (use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site).

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a bag of broken wind chimes hanging from a crow-filled tree. In the garden, the blind wizard and thorious the elder. That very wizard that was blinded by the Crag Queen. Can you keep it down over there, please? I'm trying to sleep. Sorry, y'all. That's one of my neighbors. He's a skull that the wizard reanimated just

for shits and giggles. He didn't reanimate me for shitting the giggles. I'm sorry, Larry. But you know you're just a skull stuck in the hollow of a wizard's tree. An immobile symbol of human mortality, damned to exist only for a flickering of an eye. Just because you're temporary doesn't mean you can't love.

Look, you want to know the truth, Larry? Yeah, what's that truth? OK, I'll tell you the goddamn truth. I'm in love with you. All of my intellectualizing is just a desperate attempt to protect my heart, because Larry, I'm afraid you're going to break it when I ask for your hand in marriage.

I don't have a hand. I'm just a skull. You're more than just a skull to me, Larry. And I've been in love with you for years. Why didn't you just tell me this? I was afraid you'd reject me. Well, don't be afraid. I love you too.

And yes, I will marry you. Then this is the best day of my life. Well, we're tying the wizard's garden after I've left my sponsors. Have you ever wondered what it'd be like to be David Bowie's neighbor or to get in a water gun fight with Tupac? From Audio Boom and Muddy Knees Media, A Life Lived reveals how the lives of the biggest stars

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This Audio Boom original is an unmissable listen. A Life Lived is out now and has new episodes every Monday. Be sure to search and subscribe to A Life Lived on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We return to Wizards Garden. Now that you're my fiance, I would like to sing this song to you, Larry. You wrote a song for me?

The kind of the crows, the wind in my tree, the clanging of my metal chimes, brought to life by a wizard unkind. I never thought that you could love me. How can I not love you? You're beautiful. I love the sound of your chimes.

No skin, no hair, no eyes, just a skull bleached white stuck within the hollow of a wizard's tree. How was I to know that you were in love with me? I love the shape of your skull. You can't do? Of course I do. Oh! If you are feeling blue, we dedicate this song to you.

Even if your heart feels like a broken bag of old wind chimes, there will come a day when your heart and your skull are in the lies. Loves, we have a glorious podcast for you today. Creator, director, writer, and all-around genius Rob Schropp is here with us today. And we're going to talk about horror movies, and we're going to talk about one of my favorite horror movie

franchises of all time, Creepshow. I'm going to jump right into this podcast, but first, this. This episode of the DTFH has been sponsored by the beauties over at Squarespace.com. If you're looking to get into the website game, if you need to build a website faster, if you want to take your time and make something so paradigm

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When you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Sweeties, I wanted to tell you about something that's pretty exciting. The Ramdas folks have made a new movie about Ramdas and that's gonna start showing in theaters around the country and Raghu wanted me to mention it to y'all. And so there you go.

I'll have links to where it's gonna be screening at DuncanTrustle.com. It's a great movie, highly recommend it. Lots of really cool footage of RD that I've never seen before and I really liked it a lot. Also, if you're interested, we've got a Patreon that has got an hour, an extra hour long rambling thing and commercial free episodes.

That's located at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. We also have a shop at DuncanTrustle.com with lots of wonderful, blessed implements that you can wear upon the sweet, sacred vessel that is your body to show the world that you are one of the most advanced people living today. And by that, you're a listener of the DTFH. Now, let's dive in.

Today's guest is. You're gonna love today's guest. If I had to rate podcast guest, he'd be the best. Rob Chopp, Rob Chopp. You've seen him on Harman Town. He works on Rick and Morty. He's got an Emmys. He's a comic book artist.

He loves horror movies. He just directed Creep Show, which is coming out on Shutter. The ancient ones are coming from the sky. They will descend, devouring everyone, driving people mad. But until they destroy the planet, hope I'm Rob Chopp's friend. Hope I'm Rob Chopp's friend.

Welcome to the DTFH, Rob Chopp. Welcome, what do you want of you? That you are in heaven. Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the dog contrast. W-U-M-M. W-U-M-M.

W-U-M-M. W-U-M-M. W-U-M-M. W-U-M-M. W-U-M-M. I know I'm loved and I feel welcomed in anything that I do, whether it be like the people at work or my representation or whatever, but I just feel like this growing dread, this unsatisfied, well, I guess this is it, you know, this kind

of boyhood Patricia Arquette kind of, really, this is what it was. I thought there would be more kind of situation and I'm at that time where it's like, well, I've seen people growing up, you know, not necessarily my parents, but people older, you know, like in that, like just kind of resigned to, well, this is going to be the rest of my life, you know, it's not spectacular, it's not awful, you know, I've got a loving wife, I've got a beautiful home, I work with wonderful people, but the 20-year-old dream of someday I'm going to do it, you know, is, it's fleeting, you know, and it's interesting because it's happening the year that I'm doing exactly what I've always wanted to do.

So, what about that, when it doesn't count, like the fact that you're doing what you wanted to do now somehow isn't, isn't like touching that spot? It, it, it should, it does. Let me be very clear about it. So, maybe I should explain what, you know, for the viewer, for the listener. Yes. Okay, so, so Creepshow, working on Shutter's Creepshow, which, let me just interject real quick.

Please. For me, when you started Instagramming that you were working for Creepshow, it was just thrilling because Creepshow was one of like the staple horror movies of my life. Amazing. Really? When I was growing up. When did you see it? No, I, it's a, I don't want to diverge too much from what you're talking about, but it

was like, this is when you would find out about movies in the newspaper. Mm-hmm. And so Creepshow shows up, it's got, I believe it was, I can't remember clearly, I'm pretty sure they had a picture of the Creep. Yeah. They were showing it actually at a drive-in theater in Hendersonville, North Carolina. My stepdad wanted to go and he, he brought the paper to my mom and me, and there was a sense for a second, like, holy shit, I'm going to get to go see this, it was a double

feature. I think they were showing like, I can't remember, Salem's Lot or something, somewhere, like I don't remember. Maybe it was a Stephen King thing, I don't remember their songs. Right, right. But Kujo maybe? I can't remember. Salem's Lot was a mini-series on TV.

There was a movie. Wasn't there a Salem's Lot movie on HBO? Yes, there was a Salem's Lot movie. They, yes. In a drive-in? What's that? In a drive-in theater, you went to see it? I don't, it was a, I remember there, anyway.

I'll take your, I'll take your word for it, yeah. I don't know, I was too young. Right, right. I just remember it being a sandwich of scary fucking looking horror movies, Creepshow being the main one, and my mom was like, he can't go. And my stepdad felt so bad, he got me the Creepshow comic to read. So I'm reading, so I just started reading that shit in bed because it was forbidden by my mom.

And like, I should have brought it. I haven't. You haven't? I haven't. I love to see it, man. So good, so good. So when I saw you Instagramming that you were working on Creepshow, it was like, to me, I'm like, fuck, I know that guy, I need to work on Creepshow.

It really is an amazing film. It's my favorite comic book movie. I mean, what they were doing, I mean, we got George Romero, the writer-director of Night of the Living Dead, Stephen King, both of them, like one was like right after, you know, like Stephen King was just popping, you know, like he was just popping in cinema, you know. And George Romero was just coming off a run of like Dawn of the Dead and Martin and Night Riders and just doing like these really independent, like out there back when genre was artsy, you know, like they were trying to do different things.

It wasn't like it hasn't been like gone through the 80s sausage machine, which I absolutely love. Yeah, you know, I love like the Full Moon Empire pictures, like Puppet Master, Reanimator, like, let's just get it out and make a ton of these things on direct to video stuff. It was before that they were still like, we're going to try to make good, meaningful films. And they did Creepshow. Now let me back up. So Creepshow, I remember it coming out and the trailer would be on TV and they would

play it like in the afternoon after I came home from school. Wait, I'm sorry, it came out in 81, right? 82. 82. 82. 82 is an amazing year. We'll circle back to that. 82 for cinema is an amazing year.

Like just we'll circle back. But 82, I was 12 years old. I was, let's see, I was in eighth grade or something like that, would come home from school. I'm watching G.I. Joe and I'm playing around with Lego and stuff like that and hanging out. And then the Creepshow trailer would come on and they would show the creep at the window. This decayed face, like smiling and beckoning you in.

And it was such a horrifying image to me that I remember seeing it enough and making it a big enough of an impression that if I heard that music, I would go look at the floor because if you look up, you're going to see that face. Now, can you, for the listeners who maybe are not familiar with the Creep, describe the Creep is, well, most people probably have heard of the Creepkeeper from Tales from the Crypt. A lot of people mix them up. But Creepshow was first.

It was based off of no shit. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, here's, you know, Tales from the Crypt, the Robert Zemeckis HBO series that everybody's familiar with came after Creepshow. Creepshow was an homage to E.C. Comics like Tales from the Vault, Tales from the Crypt, you know, like Vault of Horror, I think was another title of it.

But it was just like these comic books that a lot of horror fans and horror people like Rick Baker and Stephen King, they grew up loving them and they were like forbidden fruit. And eventually they were shut down by censors saying, you can't have kids reading this stuff. It's like people getting their heads chopped off and just like, it was all like good, stupid fun. And, and it was, but it was considered like forbidden fruit. Yep. And anyway, it made a huge impression on a lot of filmmakers like Bernie Wright's done,

of course, then Dan O'Bannon, who did. Hold on. I'm embarrassingly illiterate when it comes to some of this stuff. So who is that? Bernie Wright's then drew the comic book. Okay, gotcha. Creepshow. You read and freaked you out.

And also, I remember going into Walden Books in Milwaukee and seeing that title Creepshow because they were selling the book in Walden Books. And I was like, oh shit, that's that book. That's that book. That's the title of that thing with that horrible face. Describe him. He's, he's in a robe, blowing gray hair, skeletal face, rotting off of it. Tom Savini sculpted the face over a real skeleton from India.

It's so, it's, and they used to do that a lot back then, like poltergeist, like all the skeletons that are coming out of the pool. Real live. No. Fucking way. Real, not real live, but real skeleton. Shit, man. Yeah, fucked up.

That is dark. That is dead. Yeah, it's creepy. Where do the skeletons come from? India. But that's just. They said they, they get them from India. You know what?

That. That's what they said. Yeah. I don't know if you've seen the thing about the, you know, I don't even, there was a, it seems like it kind of went away. But remember the plastinization craze when all of a sudden there was bodyworks and there was these plastinated corpses that had been gone, that chopped. Yeah.

Yeah. And the bodyworks, one of it, there were two bodyworks. There was, and you could just go and see like, oh look, here's the vascular system, but also they've posed it shooting a basketball or whatever. And like. It's amazing. Yeah. It's, it's, it's amazing and it's beautiful, but very macabre.

Well, and here I'll add to the macabre. So apparently a lot of those mummies, I guess you would call them are, were apparently Chinese political prisoners. And they were being executed and then sold and then turned into wax and then put in these positions. Yeah. So it would be like a person who was fighting against some regime. Yeah.

Who maybe was sort of a hero in some Chinese underground. And now they're like, I don't know, sitting in a couch watching TV with their head cut open. And so you could see their brain. It's, it's, I look at that and I go, hmm, which is worse, being buried in the ground and eaten by maggots or being in a museum somewhere where people go, well, that's cool. Maggots. Maggots all the way.

All the way. It's pretty macabre and gross. It's like, Hey, I mean, like, I mean, when I was a kid, you know, reading Fangoria and saying, Oh yeah, they used a real skeleton in Dawn of the Dead or the Crete and I went, Oh, that's cool. That's smart. That's, that's how you should do it. But it's, I mean, like, what if that was my grandfather, you know, yeah, or what if that

was me? You know, it's like, I mean, I don't know if it was me, maybe I don't know, I was big. Would your family get residuals? Do you think? They should. They should. Yeah. They absolutely should.

Now, anyway, let's get back to it. I've got off course here. Now, so let me, let me finish with the comic book because we were talking about Bernie writes it because I was in Wallin books and I would look at that book and I wouldn't buy it, but I was absolutely petrified and completely drawn to it like going, Holy shit, I don't want to turn the page. Look at this. The crate.

Oh my God. This is awful. These people are getting killed. The crate is my favorite. These people are getting killed. This, this, this, this, this fluffy character is biting somebody's face off and there's blood all over the place. The fucking premise and I definitely was about a HP Lovecraft of a goddamn dusty crate was

for Antarctica and just hit under a stairwell for a countless years in a university and a thing still alive. That's the thing that's so crazy about it is that it's like, it's in a crate, chained up there for years, still alive. And if that was made today, people would go, well, how I can hear the executive going, why today? Why is it still alive? We need to have an explanation and the thing that they did so brilliantly in all of those

is just like said, no, it's fucking it. Who gives a shit? That's right. It's scary. It's creepy. It's under the, it's in the basement. Yeah. That's where it's in the dark.

It's in the unknown. That's where the creep lives and that's where your eight year old, I don't want to go downstairs with the lights off. Are you fucking crazy? Like that kind of stuff really, really got to me. The thing about creep show, creep show and Return of the Living Dead were two big ones for me growing up in the 80s because the trailers would come on and I would be horrified but incredibly magnetically drawn to them.

Like I would be obsessed with them. Like I would have nightmares about the trailer and it would be like a VCR. Like I would watch the creep like in the window and I would rewind and watch it again. Rewind and watch it again. And it just burned into my brain. That to me is that I think I chase the dragon now for that and the frustration you start thinking like as modern horror perversion compared to what horror used to be, is it just that I've become callous and I'm not affected by it because I remember being a

kid and my dad took us to like some ranch where a lot of his friends and their kids were going to shoot guns and like ride around and like trucks and it was in Texas and there were bunk beds. It was a big ranch. There were bunk beds. The kids would lay there and one of the kids told a ghost story that was so scary. I literally became paralyzed with fear. I couldn't move.

I couldn't move my eyes and that's the kind of feeling that you know we experienced as kids watching this shit and I mean I would love to be paralyzed with terror from a horror movie again but it's probably not going to happen for us. No, you have a different type of horror when you're an adult because you know like there's no creep at the window. There's no fluffy in the basement. We watch it and it's like oh this is fucking great. This is so cool.

I mean like I don't know how else to describe this stuff other than it's cool. It's great. I love it. Romero, so like Night of the Living Dead and Creepshow and I think this does connect to the thing all of us encounter when we like get in our 40s and 50s. They, if you look at the, let's just look at the crate. On one level it's here's a fucking monster that's been in Antarctica shoved under a stairwell and a university.

On the other level it's about abusive relationships and it's about repressing your anger and shoving your anger under the stairwell trying to pretend it's not there and then look how that turns out for you. And you know the final decision that he has which is pretty much the most unethical decision ever, he just repeats his pattern by dumping the fucking thing in a lake and pretending everything's going to be okay. Well that's the genius of Stephen King is like taking a very, a very relatable emotion or a relatable solution to a problem that is not something you want to deal with.

Let's just dump it. Yeah. Let's just put it in a box, push it under the stairwell, let's dump it in a quarry. I'm too much of a pussy to get a divorce from Adrienne Barbeau because she's like just humiliates me in public and everything. The easiest thing to do is push her under, she pushes her under the stairwell into the box practically and then the great creature eats her. Remember how he lures her down there though?

Yeah. He's like, because she hated that other, she hated his friend, right? Because there's a whole subplot that's very subtly written in the script. I'll send you the script. I found the script and I've been too warm up to write Creepshow. I would transcribe scenes because it's not in like any kind of Final Draft form online. You have to kind of find like the Xerox copies of it. So I've been transcribing it into Final Draft just to feel what it was like to write Creepshow.

Fuck. It's great. You really sat down and just wow. I did that with Return of the Living Dead. Did you do this after you got the Creepshow job or before? I started doing that with Return of the Living Dead because it's a brilliant script. And then when I found out about, I was actually working on an anthology of my own before I got Creepshow that I was going to try to do with Bad Robot.

It was like the VHS Directive Video version of Creepshow. So it was like all of these kind of crazy, like Directive Video titles and stuff like that. And so I wanted to get into that mode. I wanted to feel what was it like to write a script back then during the glory days of horror. And so Stephen King, one of the best writers ever, I just wanted to see what he was doing. And the thing that I learned so much about it was, because I put him on such a pedestal,

I was like, there's like spelling mistakes in there. And there's a couple of things that was just like, well, that's a little weird or clunky or whatever. So it took away the intimidation a bit. But it also was like, this guy's having a ball. This guy's having fun. There would be just like paragraphs of like, hey, George, we could do this. Maybe it's a split screen and it opens up and it'll make it look like a comic book page.

And we could do the lighting like this. Like, I think it'll be fun. I don't know. It's your call. The dealer's choice or whatever. But he's like talking to the director about, he's an eight-year-old kid, like going, I want to make this movie. I want to make this movie.

It's going to be so cool. That's beautiful. And I love that. Enthusiasm is so important in this business. And you feel that. I could tell right now. You're like just talking about it. I miss it.

I miss it. You feel like it's like a thread, you know? And it's always been a thread, you know? Because it's something that you just like, it's so, I came to Los Angeles because I wanted to be Sam Raimi. I wanted to do Evil Dead too. I wanted to do all that stuff. I came out here and Harman and I and we pitched Monster House and we did Monster House and

then we did Heat Vision and Jack and I was like, here we are. You know, I'm doing what I wanted to do. You know, I'm doing like these genre movies and then the comedy scene embraced us because of Heat Vision and Jack. And people were like, it's so funny. It's so funny. And I was like, oh, great. I love it.

And everything that I was pitching after that and everything I was wanting to do after that was in that kind of Monster House, Heat Vision and Jack space. And they were like, no, no, no, everything. Why is this so sci-fi? Why is this so whatever? And I'm like, why is this so horror? Why is this so? And I'm like, well, Monster House, Heat Vision and Jack.

And they go, yeah, but those were really, really funny. Probably was talking about all of Harman's dialogue and everything. But I, you know, I kind of was bought into the, what I'm going to say is a lie from your representation from the business in general is like, do this, do this comedy stuff now. And then when you're a success, you'll be able to do whatever you want afterwards. And, you know, I did the Sarah Silverman program, which was great. You know, I loved working with Sarah. I loved working with everybody on the show and they, and Sarah let me do so much.

I was totally naive and I worked on many other shows, but I was forcing robots and ghosts and very creep shows stuff into, into the show that never asked for it, never wanted it. Sarah is not a fan of that. Comedy Central certainly wasn't a fan of that. So I've always been trying to get back to that. And so, wait, you've been trying to get back to the horror, to the horror sci-fi, you know, the stuff that got, and so now is really this year, 2019 is really the first time I'm here.

So it's happening. It is happening. Is it that it's happening a little later than you expected it? Yeah. You're feeling a bit of a, and, and, and I did it at the beginning of the year and I kind of was like going, well, I'm here, you know, it hasn't even aired yet. It's going to air September 26th on Shutter and that's, it's a, it's a six episode series and each episode has two installments in it.

And I, I do one of the installments, but I'm the only one that wrote and directed his own. Ooh. I know. It's pretty cool. So badass. It's pretty cool. And I, I'm, I can't believe how lucky I am.

I mean, I, I, if I talk about it too much, I'll start crying because I'm, I'm so, it's really, really, I mean, like, cause it's, it's, it's, it's been a long road, you know, trying to get to this. And that's the thing. It's like, I got led into the party and I don't want to leave. I'm desperate to get back into it. And so I, and I, and I look at it and I go, maybe that, you know, 25 minute thing might be the only thing I've ever, I ever do in that, but in horror, I hope not.

Why? Why would, to me, you seem like, it seems to me that you're like, hold on, sorry. It seems to me that you're perfectly positioned now to, let me, okay. I, I, here's the thing about being in the business as long as we've been in the business and I've been in the business a little bit longer than you're, is the, don't get your hopes up mentality is just, it's so natural. The minute something good happens, don't get your hopes up. The other shoe hasn't dropped yet, blah, blah, blah, blah.

This might be the only thing you get. Back in the day, I remember like Harman, like telling me, like, you know, because somebody was like, don't get your hopes up, man, you know, because these things don't work out and Dan was like, fuck that. Let's get our hopes up. I mean, let's, let's be happy that this is happening now. Let's be happening because if we don't get our hopes up and it doesn't go anywhere, we've never been happy, you know?

So let's get our hopes up. And of course, like things, you know, things don't work out. Things don't work out, like, but you have to like, you, it's hot. It's hard. I mean, and like about five years ago, I was working on Lego too. I was going to direct the sequel to the Lego movie. That didn't work out. And that, can you talk about why?

I could, I could talk a little bit about it because first of all, I don't want, first of all, I'm not completely a victim in this situation. I'm also not completely not, not a victim, you know, like it's, it, it, it was something that was for me destined to fail. It was just never going to work out because there was just, it was my lack of experience in feature animation. It was also lack of, I can't get into too much because it's just, it's going to just be misinterpreted, but long story short, that was really hard.

I'm still like getting over it. You mean the rejection? The rejection. It was like something that I, I was put in a position where it started off great, really great, got super great, then went boom, and then it was like, shit, no turning back. And if you research it and look at it or whatever, there was a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with me above, above my pay grade that was coming down on me and I was taking the blame for it because, you know, why not, I'm the new guy or whatever.

It was also the first time that I felt I failed. Up until that point, like anytime I worked on a show, people were like, you're the star kid. You're the bad, you know, holy shit, whatever. You know, like it was really, it was not, I was never really, you know, I worked on community for the first time and there was a lot of, huh, well, your Harman's friend. I mean, like what, I mean, you're only here because of Dan. Yeah, yeah, that's real.

And then I come in and they go, oh, you know what you're doing, you really, yeah, I care about this. I'm a pro and I'm going to give you a hundred million percent. I'm going to do that. And it's always, and I was, I felt like I was on a trajectory, like I was going, okay, I'm going to do this and do this and do this. I'm going to get Lego too. And then after that, I'm going to do Evil Dead and, and, and when I say that, and I actually

thought that I'm going to do Evil Dead right after that, you mean like a remake of Evil Dead or your own? No, no, no. My own version of Evil Dead. And here's the thing. I was offered like the second episode of Ash versus Evil Dead. But I had to turn it down because of like, there it is. I know.

There's that. So I know, I know, I know, I know, and I, and I, and I, and I regretted it. You know, I wish I would have done it. You know, and, and, and, and because this didn't work out, but, but I remember like towards the end of days of Lego too, I was talking with the then president of Warner Brothers who just saw like a screening of what we were doing and animatic of what, what, what we were doing. And it wasn't ready to show.

We were saying it's not ready to show. Yeah. Why are we showing it? You have to show it. We're not ready to show it. You have to show it. Yeah. We showed it.

He didn't like it. And, and he turned to me and he goes, is this the movie you want to make? And I thought to myself, no, I want to be making stuff like creep show. I really was thinking like, I want to make that. And it really like, like a ton of bricks. It was like, there's no way. If this movie is a success, if this movie is good, there's no way I'm going to go from this to some low budget horror movie in a cabin in the woods or whatever.

I'm not going to be doing that. Somebody's going to go, well, what about Lego three or what about the Captain Crunch movie? You know, what about, and the money's going to be too good. And it's going to be too easy to just slip into that. And my dream is just going to keep on being put on hold. It's like you got shipwrecked on the wrong genre. Yeah. It's like you're a cast away on an island of comedy.

It seemed on paper a perfect fit, but in practice, the worst. I'm not a kid's movie director. How wild did he identify that, though? To me, that that's like what I love about this business is there's this weird mystical quality to it where people in it will just spit out a thing that is some kind of like Zen true. Here, I'm going to enlighten you now by saying the thing you already know. And I'm going to say it to your face and it's going to reverberate through

you like a bell and it's not going to stop ringing in your head. Yeah, because you know I'm right. And also, you know, I can see that this is what's happening with you. Yeah. And to me, that's pain. It's agonizing. It's it's so agonizing because it's like I don't have a poker face. I feel like I wear my heart on my sleeve. I it's pretty obvious what I'm into.

I'm very simple to figure out. And so when somebody can't figure me out, it's very frustrating. It's like spend two seconds on my Instagram feed. You'll know exactly how I am or listen to me talk or just look at me. You probably figure it out. And I think that's what this guy did. And, you know, and and Phil and Chris, I have to say, are so cool. I mean, like, they're the best.

Phil and Chris, Phil and Chris, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the guys that hired me. Oh, I see. They were off working on Han Solo and they had their own issues, which, you know, were happening when they were working on the Han Solo movie. Well, I was working on on Lego, too. And those guys are great. There's I adore them. They're really fun.

So I want to make sure that nobody thinks like I had any issue with them. Or they had issue with me. It's it was it was other. I listen, I you don't sound like you're talking shit, man. I just it's not. And I don't I want I it's something that I kind of want to get off my chest because people ask about it a lot. And it's something that I'm afraid to talk about because I don't want.

Anybody of the because I met a lot of really good people, a lot of people that were really hard to say goodbye to. Like, I still I'm heartbroken that I'm not working with some of those guys. And and animation is a very insular. Yeah, deep, initiatory world, man, where people have spent their whole lives to get to positions in that place. Everybody on that film were on like their second, third, fourth feature animation film. And I was the new guy and I was very like, how do we do this?

How do we do this? So let's talk about this. Like, and I was very inviting. I I was like, I want. Every is many people that worked on the first one to work on this one. You know, I want the soul of Lego one to be in Lego, too. I really, really wanted it. And I kept hearing about like how the first one was made.

And I go, let's do exactly what they did because I want the spirit to stay alive. And it just was never going to happen that way because the first one was made in a pocket. Everybody was like, it's just who's going to. When you heard about the Lego movie the first time you were like, I roll city, man. Who cares? Yeah, gives a shit about this stuff. And then you see it and you go, oh, my God, funny, fucking great. It was no way it was ever going to ever happen again, because it was a popular thing. It was that it was it was huge.

It was it was way bigger. A lot of pressure to replicate that success. Yeah. Yeah. And on top of that, they wanted it to be a musical. And on top of that, they wanted to come out like in half amount, the amount of time. And they wanted they had it was just a lot of stuff that. I wasn't prepared to do because it eventually became down to like shit. I'm not a director. I'm a manager.

I'm just a time manager. I'm like, nobody really cares what kind of story I want to tell. Whoa, wait, go into that a little bit. Oh, OK, I got to be careful. No, no, I really I really don't want anyone to hear this and go, holy shit, you really throwing this on. Well, oh, yeah, OK, I don't I don't want that. I don't I don't want that.

Let's avoid that. Just just I'm just it it it became like just too big of a thing. You know, it just became too big of a thing and where it was like. Because I draw and I storyboard and I animate and I edit. And these are the things I love to do. And this is why I love horror and sci fi, especially like old school stuff. You're building models. You're building creatures.

Yeah, you're sculpting stuff. You're figuring out shit. I got to make a guy turn into a wolf man. How do you do that? Oh, let's figure this out. Let's get our hands dirty. Let's build it. Let's sure let's cut it together.

Let's let's add music. Let's add sound effects and stuff like that. And when you're in a when you're in a production that big, I can't because I'm not in the editor's guilt. I can't edit no way not in the animation guild. So I can't storyboard, you know, and I don't have time to storyboard. And so I'm just a guy that's going from meeting to meeting to meeting, saying yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.

And, you know, I'd like it to be like this. And it just all the fun stuff was kind of pulled out of it. And I was pretty miserable because you would you're like, it seems to me that you would want to like take the animatic home with you. Throw it in. That's how I would do your own editing, how I did it yourself. Everything I did that on community. Yeah, I did that and you couldn't do it.

Children's Hospital. I'm like, guys, I've got so many years experience doing this, you're telling me. You're asking me, we want you to direct the movie, but we don't want you to work the way you work. No way. And it's like, well, that's like saying we love how you swim fish. Will you climb that tree now? Yeah, it was totally like that. Yeah, that's frustrating, man.

Really, really frustrating. And I and I kept being being told like, well, I said, well, I really would work like this. Well, the assistant editor needs to be able to to catalog this and do this and stuff like that. And I'm like, who the fuck? I mean, like I'm the director of the movie, but you don't. The problem is because your resume doesn't have within it

some hit animation series. You can't flex and be like, I know how to do this. No, no, no. So people are like, you're you're almost some kind of weird apprentice in this system. It was a weird situation because I was like the new guy on the block totally in charge, but not in charge. Complete accountability with no control. It was it was very frustrating and really got dark.

And it was like it happened in 2000. What was it? It was happened the year like everything started coming to a head. The year Trump became president. It was like it was like it's like. It's like George Michael died. Trump became president. Carrie Fisher died.

My dog went into the hospital. My my wife's mother was really sick. We don't know what it's like. Oh, my gosh, this is everything's falling apart. It's the apocalypse. It's really falling apart. It got so dark. I'm like texting Kate. I think I want to cut myself. Yeah.

And because like it was just like this is not. This is really bad. I don't I can't do this anymore. And it just came to a head. And then when the president was like, is this the movie? When I go, I don't know. I don't. And we had a bad screening. And they they I was like given an ultimatum.

Either do it our way or you got to go. And I went, OK, and I moved out. That's great. I cleared up my office the next day and I left. And it it was really not fun. I really need now your fucking office. It was a nightmare. People are in there working and you're having to go in there.

I did it over the weekend. OK, it did it over the weekend. I was dramatic about it. It's kind of like, all right, everybody go home for the weekend. And then like Monday was was empty. I want to listen. But it the thing I want to make sure that everybody understands is that. I had like an amazing like.

Post department, you know, like I had a fantastic editor, assistant editors, storyboard artist, head of story, character, just like character designer, production designer, just gorgeous people, just beautiful people. People I just want to kiss on the mouth. Not just because I love them so much. And the biggest heartbreak is not seeing them every day. Yeah, it's really, you know, I mean, I think if we would have.

Braved it. And if we were somebody would have got off our back, if we would have came up with a great movie, it wouldn't have been what Warner Brothers wanted at all, at all. And I can't guarantee it would have been a success because nothing I like is a huge success. It's like Kate, my wife, always like whenever I'm like complaining like, oh, how come this person got this thing?

Or, you know, I'm wise and she's look at everything you love. Look at the wall of VHS tapes covering our wall right now. It's all of this cult. Nobody's ever heard of it. Just weird stuff. That's what you like. That's right. And that's what I want to be.

Yes, I don't need to be doing big Marvel movies. I can appreciate them, but I want to I want to make little tiny, you know, basket case. That's the question I'm dying at. This is the problem. I think the question is like weighing on me in the most extreme way. And also, just so you know, just you don't sound like you're talking shit at all. I really hope I know because the world I just want to make sure that everybody

that the people that think I love them, I do love nobody to me. There's nothing in what you're saying that sounds even slightly bitter. If anything, it just sounds like it was like the wrong place, wrong time. And I think it's right when I remember the first time you told me about a Lego movie. It was I did have in my brain. There was like this number one. How fucking cool. That's a huge, huge success.

Number two, it's like that does not seem like if I did, if someone's like, I will give you a million dollars if you can tell me what movie Shrop's directing. Yeah, that would land like three thousand underneath what I was if you knew me. If you really knew me because there is a ton of people said you're perfect for this. And it was all the comedy people who really were always like the people that were like going, yeah, we don't really need the bells and whistles. We don't need the horror stuff. We don't need the sci-fi stuff.

That stuff is see the thing that I'm lucky as is that I happen to be able to make people laugh. You know, I mean, I love comedy. I love this is the thing. And I think you're a lot like me in this way is that I'm a sensitive guy. I've been told my whole life, you're too sensitive, you're too sensitive. My whole life, I've been ashamed of being too sensitive. And it wasn't till like about probably after Lego that I was like, you know, fuck it.

I'm an artist. I'm supposed to be sensitive. Yeah. And so, yeah, I get hurt and I get cry and I cry. I, you know, I'll cry over a Pepsi commercial. You know, if it doesn't do a good enough job. But I'd also I laugh harder than anybody else. I get scared more than anybody else. I love more than anybody, you know, like I. Everything is up, up, up, up big.

And I think people misunderstand that and go, oh, you'd be really good doing a kid show because everything about you is big. And I'm like, well, no, I don't have kids. I don't want kids shows. I actually do really kind of edgy stuff that kids shouldn't watch, you know. Meanwhile, watch most kids shows and they are as edgy as edgy fucking gets. Yeah, somehow. They're a harp of Charlotte's Web.

You watch these things. I love Charlotte's Web. But I remember like as a kid when the special would happen and Charlotte's Web would come on and you would be fucking stealing yourself to watch that shit because it crushes you. But what this is the thing that is like bugging me now intensely. OK, OK, I've been talking to my. Aren't you raising money and making an independent movie? I don't know how I.

That's the thing is like I know how to do what I do. But I'm an eight year old boy. I don't understand money. I don't understand production. Um, and also I'm in this kind of I'm trying to figure it out, trying to figure it out because, you know, I'm turning 50 in November and I'm like, OK, time is finite. It's more finite than it's ever been like.

You mean in the sense of your lifespan? Yeah. Yeah. The the the window is closing. OK, so you're getting you're like doing the mind fuck with yourself. OK, like Kate, like Kate said the other day, it's like you're going to make 20 movies in your life. And I'm like, sweetie, that means two movies a year until I'm 60. And she's like, oh, George Miller did, you know, he's you are going to do that.

I think she's right. Well, I would love to. I I'm in this kind of position of. Shit. The next I'm in the I'm in this position that's really for creative, the very dangerous position where it's like the next thing I'm going to do is got to be a home run. Who told you that?

My brain, my stupid brain. Well, that's not true. I mean, you have to be empirical about this sort of thing. I know it's your and that's why I'm I'm glad we're talking about it. I'm talking about it with you. If I told you, I'm sorry to cut you off. You know, please, please, when you're cut off, if I told you. This is I love thinking about it. I read I like God.

I was like when I was really fucked up and in the dumps and failing, deeply failing. My therapist was like, take this course. It's cheesy. It's called the hundred day challenge. Someone threw a bunch of clip art together. Yeah. And it. Within it. And it is an embarrassing thing. But God damn, it's pretty great. What is this? I got it every day you watch it and the guy just tells you

it's just it's also I'm listening to this like it's the same. It's like at the David Goggins School of inspirational speaker, which is this guy, David Goggins, you know, that is it's this hardcore. There's two. I think you could you could divide self-help into two main streams. Yeah. One of them is love yourself enough to achieve the greatest life for yourself. Yeah. Some people that I think that might work for the other is what's wrong with you.

I think you've got a fucking move, man. It's time to go. Yeah. Like, what are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. This this is my problem the whole life, whether it's been like work, ideas, dating, you know, it's always been like, I'll get the next one. I'll get the next one. Yeah. You know, it's just like, oh, here's an opportunity, dude. You know, whatever you could you could put this in. Yeah. It's not perfect.

I'll get the next one. I'll get the next one. And I'm I'm like, there's not going to be a next one unless I make the next one. Well, you don't know that the reality is that you don't really believe that because if you did, you would get it done. I would get it done. So this I think it was a hundred a challenge that said I can't remember which it was one of these fucking hardcore like self-help books that said imagine and I'll just say it to you like imagine film.

So you let's say that during this, like after the podcast, we finish. Yeah. We go have another glass of wine. I say, Rob, I'm a trust fund kid. I inherited 30 million dollars with my mom past. And also I'm a verified sociopath. And I'm just I'm going to pay a hitman to kill you if you don't make an independent horror movie this year. Now, I know you probably don't believe me,

but tomorrow you're going to get a phone call and a distant friend of yours is going to be dead. That's because my man killed him and you're next. Yeah. And I mean it. Yeah. I'm a sociopath. I don't feel anything. I'm a rep. The sick, the sick thing about this is the elation that I'm feeling right now that's like, yes, fucking do this. Somebody like my fuse. Yeah. And the problem is the problem is that I'm having is that I'm waiting

for somebody else to give me permission. That happens out here, though. That's an I'm somebody and not even permission. Like I need verification of that permission. I've had people tell me like, dude, I've got cameras. I'll I'll pay for this. I was like, look, we've got distributors. We'll give you come up with something that, you know, for a million five.

We'll make the movie. Just just give me a script and I'll still go. They don't mean it. I need like a second, third, fourth person. And it's I understand that it's like there's going to be people listening to this and going, oh, God, just fucking get over yourself. I'm so sick of this.

And and that is in my head, too. What do you mean? Like someone you're just in your head. I'm just in my head. You're just not taking action just in my head. I'm not in my action. It's it's like this wake up. OK, today's the day I'm going to I'm not ready yet. Let's whatever it's it's it's it's a spiral.

It's it's trying to you're paralyzed. I am I am in this kind of lost paralyzed situation. It's like I've been told several times over this year, like. Just just write something you want to make. Just just do something you want to do. And I'm like, that is the worst. That is the scariest thing in the world to do. And I look back at my life and I've I've looked at some of my bigger creative.

Successes, not necessarily financial, but creative successes. And I have gone when it's been so easy, when it's just been like, ah, fuck it, you know, that's when I've been the most, I think, creatively successful. And it's when I go. Now, I'm not doing this isn't the the the big one, the one after this is the right. You need to like it's like you need to make a movie as a hobby. I mean, yeah, I'm going to like I remember when I was doing Channel 101 and I had like an idea that I was like, OK, this is going to be the big one

that I'm going to be doing, but I'm going to do this stupid one. Yeah, that is just going to be my first a live action thing. You know, I did puppets before an animation before, but this is going to be my first live action thing where I'm just going to just like, fuck it, who cares? And my goal is to make Dan and Jeff Davis think I lost my mind. That's that's my audience is like every everything that I write, everything that I say and do and build and whatever.

I'm going to I'm going to write songs. I'm going to do and I'm just going to do it. And the goal is to make my friends think, holy shit, you're you're absolutely crazy. And it was probably the most. Satisfying, creative thing I've ever done. And Kate, my now wife, saw it. Said, I want to go to when I want to meet this guy. And I met my wife.

That's what happens because that's I think of that as the boomerang effect. Yeah, when you throw true love out, true inspiration, creativity, it boomerangs back in it always comes back with something. Yeah, something beautiful that is like the powerful. I miss that pride. I miss that. I mean, when I went out and I did it and it was like, I'm not going to change the world with this.

I'm just going to express myself and be I'm going to be this is going to be the first thing that I ever do that's 100 percent me. Wait, let me jump. OK, so I'm going to jump temporarily. And I think this is an embarrassing role to pretend to be. But just for a second, I'm going to jump into the role of a life coach. Please. Oh, my God. So just for exactly what I need.

But first, I want to talk to you and this is going to lead into. Evil Dead 2. Yeah. I want you to think back to the first time you put Evil Dead 2 in the VCR. I saw it in the theater. Holy fuck, I know. OK, no, I know. Remember who you were with? I was with my girlfriend at the time.

Her name was Pam. I forgot her last name. How old were you? I was well, Evil Dead 2 came out, I think in eighty five. So I must have been. No, no, no, I drove there. So I was over six. I was about seventeen.

Seventeen. Seventy. So I saw it. Was the theater filled up? No. Empty theater. Yeah. Speckled. So think of the Necronomicon, see the animation. Yeah. When it opens up. Yeah. The scrawling of the pen.

Beautiful. How did you feel when you saw that? I loved it. I loved it. Then think of the pace of that movie after that. So great. How they didn't fuck around at all. They were just like right into it.

Mean, mean. It's unrelenting. And and throwing every trick in the book to make stop motion animation. Yeah, perspective, just weird. It really, really kind of taught me. How to direct. Think of that feeling. Yeah. How you felt.

Yeah. That how how how because I remember the first time I saw it. Yeah. VCR. We got that we rented it. I got lucky. I just saw it. Thought it looked kind of cool and nothing about it. I didn't read the back of it.

I didn't know anything about the pedigree of the fucking thing. I just pop it in. Yeah. I'm upstairs at Nine Greenleaf Drive in Fletcher, North Carolina. In one of the many houses I lived at sitting down watching it. The fucking the pen start the blood pen. The fucking and and I am. It's like, you know, one of my favorite drugs is nitrous oxide.

Yeah. It's a gray high, but it only lasts for a second. Yeah. But this is like nitrous oxide that lasts for the length of an entire fucking movie. Yeah. I'm elated. I'm like, I don't think I was going to cry, but it was that level of pure joy. That this thing existed in the world.

And, you know, for me, you know, like in the divorce parents and just like, you know, a weird just those little those those islands of pleasure and freedom and inspiration are everything to you because they show there's something out there. There's other people that are making shit. Yeah. And it inspires you for your whole life. It's so it's such a great. I mean, like the first Evil Dead is really good because it's just a bunch

of 20 year olds with a camera in the woods, making it's cool. Moss and it's actually pretty horrifying to the second one, a little bit slicker, but it's still fun. The thing that Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell were like, they're like, we wanted to do comedy. We wanted to do like Jerry Lewis movies. You know, we we loved comedy so much, but we knew horror would make a profit. So we got into think of the mirror scene. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

He's like trying to okay. And then he we were reaches out to me or grab himself. He's like, you just cut your girlfriend's head off with a chainsaw. Does that sound like I'm transcribing that movie, too. I'm transcribing like Evil Dead, too, right now. But I just this is my inspirational speaker part. Imagine if that movie didn't get made because Sam or Campbell or whoever got paralyzed in that ray of love that now shines through living rooms forever

didn't shine through because it got blocked by paralysis. Because to me, it seems like that you're you're you're thinking too much about much, you're you're you're thinking too much about why to do it for you instead of thinking why to do it for all of us. I know you want it. And you have the experience and you have this is here's the other thing. I'm not trying to go trip you into it. But in something to me, the whole age thing.

No, that's not that none of that shit registers with me. To me, it's more along the lines of there are a bunch of fucking teenagers out there who will deeply benefit from your horror movies that you're going to make. They're going to benefit not because there's some inspirational message necessarily or because of this bullshit, schmaltzy shit. They're going to benefit because you are one of I would say a very small demographic of people who have a love of horror that reminds me of me. I grew up on Fangoria magazine.

I got I got I would I got in temper tantrums because my aunt Isabel, who I was staying at with during my parents' divorce, would not order like a six hundred dollar mask from Fangoria magazine, which mask? Which do you remember? I just remember in the commercial hundred dollars. It was made three hundred back then. It would be all I'm saying is I would lay in bed reading Fangoria magazine. I got my mom to take me.

I didn't understand what foam rubber was. So I got my mom to take me to buy foam rubber at a carpet store. I ended up with just foam. It's easy. I would do the same thing. I would get like latex and glue to my face and cotton balls. And but do you remember Salem's law? And I know this. I there wasn't there's a Salem's law at the movie.

And in Salem's law, the movie, there are Fangoria magazines everywhere. And it was a wink and the kid was like sculpting shit or something with masks or something. And it was a wink to all of us. Yeah. And and I the thing you that's that's the thing that I. The thing that let's let's bring it back to creep show because that was the thing that everybody on set was like. That felt like for the longest time, for a big chunk of time,

that that kind of love of monster movies and creature features and things was like that was old hat and silly and embarrassing or whatever. And it seems like with this kind of love of 80s nostalgia coming back with like stranger things and yeah, and all that, the people know it's OK, it's OK to love that stuff again. And so it's it's perfect timing that creep show is coming. I'm glad I missed the place where it wasn't OK to love that. Yeah. And I kind of fell out of it because I was obsessed and loved it.

And it was around like the mid 90s where it just kind of started getting like. Not fun. And then when it was like in the aughts where it was like torture porn and you'd have like Eli Roth, hostile and stuff, it's like horror wasn't fun anymore. It was bleak. It was like, ooh, this is not I mean, I the horror movies that I loved are like Return of the Living Dead, Chainsaw 2, not Chainsaw 1.

What? I love Chainsaw, but I love Chainsaw 2. OK, hold on, hold on, hold on, Chainsaw 2. Chainsaw 2 is the one with the they are living underground in the subterranean tunnels. Oh, yeah, with Dennis Hopper. Oh, yeah, the fucking radio host. That shit is the best. He's scratching scratches of a fucking Code Anger.

And he's Bill Mosley, who I've met, who I adore, who played chopped up. And he was also in Tom Savini's Night of the Living Dead. And that I saw that evil did to hold on. Bill Mosley was a night of the living dead. Yeah. Wait, hold on, I'm confused here. Wait, Bill Mosley from from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He was in he was in the remake of Night of the Living Dead. OK, the remake in the 90s.

The Tom Savini Direct. OK, that's actually really fucking good. Got a little now. OK, OK, hang on. Night of the Living Dead. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which is fantastic. I love Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To me, that is the quintessential ultimate horror movie of all fucking time.

There's nothing to two or one. One. One is great. One is great. But it's bleak to me. You know, it's great. It's beautiful. It's got great. And we owe everything to it. Yes. But.

Chainsaw 2 is like strawberry cough syrup. I'm sick. Fever dream. It's like it's so 80s. It's so over the top. Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper. Chainsaws. Bring it all down down to help. You got you got Bill Mosley gone.

Music is my life. And he's and he's scratching his fucking thing and eating it. So fucking crazy. And then she says to him, OK, it's time for y'all to go. See y'all later. And he's like, good night. It's it's it's funny and sick and weird and sexy and strange. And it's got this kind of that 80s neon glow.

It's like pink and blue. And it's it's all I can say. It's like drink dayquil, drink a whole bottle of dayquil. That's what that movie is to me. When I'm yelling at my dogs because they're fucking running around right now, I'm trying to get them trained to sit while I put their food in a bowl. And I can't quite do it.

And so I end up having like, go back. I always think to the subterranean scene where the father is yelling at them. Because the place is getting cut cut spoiler guys. But that the way the father in both Texas J's the massacre one and two interacts with the kids. Or it's like, you stupid. Yeah, I love it.

So it's so strange because it's like it's it's perverted. It's weird. It's like the E.C. Comics that that. That that that Stephen King and George Romero read when they came up with Creepshow. Because you like that Nick Cage movie, the one that came out of Mandi. Yeah, fucking love fucking loved it. So good. So good. It's so fucking good.

I went to see it with like I called up called up Harman and I go, Hey, where you want to go see Mandy? It's playing at midnight at the Egyptian theater. And we're both old, like anything past 10 30. Really fuck that. I'm not going to go outside. I go. I think we should go. He never heard of it. He never saw a trailer. Never knew.

I knew a lot about it. And and let's go see it. And he was like, all right, I can't believe I got him to come out. So it was like, Harman, Cody, Kate and me went to see it at the Egyptian theater, like at midnight, Pac Theater. Coincidentally, Brian Posane and and and Pat and Oswald and Jerry Duggan are sitting in front of us. Movie starts.

I know what I'm in for, because I saw Panos's first movie under the Black Rainbow, beyond the Black Rainbow. Some beyond the Black Rainbow, beyond the Black Rainbow. So I knew I was in for some psychedelic kind of fucked up weird stuff. And I love Nicholas Cage. I like I like Nicholas Cage now. Me too. Like him over the top, crazy. So Harman has no idea what he's getting into.

Pac Theater goes black. The audience is like their chatter, chatter, chatter. Soundtrack kicks in and that soundtrack kicks ass. Just like a wave of emotion and sound and bass and just and everybody freaks out. There's no image. It's black screen. You just hear the sound and people are going, wow. And it's midnight in this Egyptian theater, beautiful theater,

packed crowds, a huge theater, big screen, stereo sound. Everybody's freaking out and the movie starts. And it's just scene after scene, line after line, just delivers, delivers. Fucking acid chemist has a tiger. So good talks telepathically. It's so good. It's it's like I felt like this is the midnight movie. This is the midnight movie I've been wanting to see since I was 18 and in college.

You know, like, I don't know if you were like this, but in in Wisconsin, I went to school, I went to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in Milwaukee and they had an OK like film place. Like they had the Oriental Theater, which they would show like Rocky Horror and they would show like, you know, like during like the Miramax Hay Day, they would show like City of Lost Children, things like that. But if you really wanted to see like like the the Phantom of Paradise, any of the trauma movies?

I've never seen Phantom of Paradise. Phantom of Paradise. Oh, yeah, check out Ferris. Keep going. Sorry. But if you want to see like midnight movies, like a true midnight movie, you would go to Madison, Wisconsin, and you would go there and you would we would drive there and be like an hour out of our out of our way. We drive there and we watch this midnight, I can't believe we did it. Drive up 45 minutes to an hour out of our way.

Watch a movie at midnight and then drive home. It's like just we would leave our comfort zone. Yeah, to go because we're so desperate to see it. Now it's just like flipping on a clicking on a name and or to see something like that. Yeah, that's that. Mandy brought me back to that midnight movie. This is forbidden fruit.

This is a special thing. Look at how many people are out here craving for that moment. To be a part of that moment and watching. And it made me go, God, watching movies in a crowd. A packed theater of people who are ready to have a good time. It's worth dying for to make something like that. Really, really is. I was like, I don't know if you were a fan of Fury Road.

The Mad Max. Mad Max Fury. Yes. That movie, when that came out of sight at the Cinerama Dome and I love Road Warrior. Road Warrior is a huge influence. Fucking kid, I gain it like a perfect movie. It's like that Robocop die hard. Yeah, turn a living dead Robocop top of the charts.

Holy shit. The structure character just firing all all cylinders. And when that trailer came out, I was like, George Miller is coming back to Mad Max. This could be fucking great. But here are all these production problems. Keeps getting delayed. Mill Gibson isn't going to be.

He's a fucking racist. We're not going to put him in there as well as being recast. I'm like, OK, OK, up until like months before like a month before the movie come out, the words coming down. It's not good. It's not good. I'm like, God damn it. God damn it. I want it to be good. Trailer comes out.

Trailer looks really fucking good. Which it to me is the kiss of death. It's like, if you see a good trailer, you go. This is all you got. I've never thought of that. That's that's my cynical side. It used to be the other way around. But it's like, I know how it works.

We're going to take the best stuff we got. We're going to put it in the trailer because that's all we got. Oh, my God. And I go, shit, I have to go see this because this is this is like creep show level. I have to see this. Went to see it. Cineramidone, like special screening midnight before it opened. Audience ready to have a good time.

Everybody's like, wow, freaking out. Wow. Yeah. Great. Movie starts. The interceptor shows up. Just like the audience is freaking out pumping. And it just like it was just like Mandy, scene for scene, line for line, everything was just like, I can't believe what I'm watching here.

He's doing it. Can I, I'm going to curse you. Can I curse you for a second? Curse me. If it's not a real curse, though, it's more, it's not a curse. I'm just joking about curse. So here's my inspirational speaker part two. Please, please. Here's a fantasy idea.

I don't believe this at all. All right. Here's a fantasy idea, though, because thought experiments are fun. Sort of stealing a little bit from the Gnostic idea. Yeah, this matrix fed off of or whatever. Demiurge has this held within some kind of soul prison within which authority and hierarchy is taken president over freedom. And that anyone who's in a hierarchical job where they have

to exert their authority of other people are secret disciples of a nameless God that is truly in control of everything and is so jealous of the true creative progenitor of all things that it simulated a synthetic universe that we're all inside of tricked us into thinking this is the primary universe and has us all held in a terror state because we don't want to get shot or arrested by authoritarian figures, right?

Meaning that true art, the thing that you're talking about in the theater that fills people's hearts with joy, is actually subversive, meaning that it's in the interest of the Demiurge to as much as possible suppress great art because it's like a crack in the dam. It's like when water comes spring through the dam, the last thing you want is for people in your dark soul prison

to experience the kind of wild joy you get when you see something truly great because it gives you hope, it inspires you, and more than likely it's gonna send you out into the world and you're gonna actually make something yourself or be a little kinder or be at the very least more excited because for a second you're reminded there's magic in the world.

There's actually magic in the fucking world. And it's weird when you're a kid, you have a more pure relationship with that and you don't even know why you're so overjoyed. You don't even know why you feel so liberated. You don't even know why. It's so weird, but there's an excitement there that fueled you, certainly has inspired me.

So here's the thing. Number, there's my favorite religious scripture, Rob, the Bhagavad Gita. It's all about a warrior who's on a battlefield and he's saying to his charioteer, I'm not gonna fight. I'm not gonna fight. And he drops his bow and it's called Arjuna's dejection,

the dejection of Arjuna and it's considered the archetype of human being a human, which is you truly do end up in a battlefield, a life or death situation, which you're describing with your age identification. I only have a little bit of time. I've got him do it. I have to act, I have to act.

If I don't act, it's not gonna happen. And Arjuna and this like, which is considered one of the greatest scriptures of all time in this situation, comes up with all these excuses for not doing it. I don't wanna kill people. I don't wanna kill my family. I don't wanna like, these are the people

in the opposing force are brothers and teachers and I'm not gonna do it. And I'm gonna go in the woods and become a renunciate beggar because wouldn't it be better to be a beggar than to live, did not gain fame, success or wealth from killing my fellow human beings? And the whole Bhagavad Gita is the charioteer, Krishna telling Arjuna, no, you have to fight and here's why.

And it's beautiful, it's a beautiful breakdown, but I love it because number one, it gives us a little bit of forgiveness for being paralyzed and also it mystic, it sanctifies the experience you're having right now. Because instead of having to feel like, fuck, this paralysis or this thing is, whatever, it's actually the experience of a true warrior

on the battlefield, which is the experience of reality, which is like, I have to either fucking shit or get off the pot. And in this situation that you're in, there's something very sacred about that and it's something very sweet about that and something very powerful about that because the reality of it is like, yeah,

you're running out of time, statistically, you're running out of time. That's number one. Number two, the reason he had to fight was not just for his own glory or reputation or whatever, it was because if he didn't, if this battle wasn't won, we're fucked, he was on the right side, he had to do it. This is Luke Skywalker, this is the story of like,

if you don't do it, we're fucked, you don't have a choice. And the reason I wanted you to talk about the Evil Dead 2 Joy is so that you could understand it's not really about you, it's about all the people who are gonna benefit from you becoming the explosion of inspiration blasting out of this dark, nostic dam that seems to be somehow forming for no good reason

in our world where people are afraid to make good shit. And think about what you were saying earlier, man, it's like, well, I'm kind of waiting for other people to give me the go-ahead. That's the demiurge, hierarchy, you're waiting for some authority figure to say, now you go do this now. It's no, and this is, no one's gonna come.

No one's gonna save you. I know, and that's the worst thing is knowing, knowing why, you know, I know I'm waiting for permission, I know nobody's gonna give me permission, I have to give myself permission, and it's like, why aren't you giving yourself permission? Cause I'm scared, scared of what? Scared of failure.

Well, you're going to fail a lot. Creativity is failing. It's like when you draw, you fail and fail and fail and fail until it's done, and then it's done. It's like, you make a mistake on a canvas and then you correct it, correct it, correct it, you erase the stuff that doesn't work. You go with the stuff that works until it's finished,

until it's pleasing. It's non-stop failure until the very last stroke. That's right, man. That's right. You're gonna fail. And that's embracing the failure. And that's, my most prolific time in my life is when I was like going, yeah, I'm a terrible writer.

I'm an awful writer. And this town is full of terrible writers and I'm just going to be another one of them. And I'm just going to crank out as many scripts as I possibly can. And I cranked out a lot of them and a lot of them are terrible, but they weren't, they had each one got better.

There's a, that's the, that's the, there's a story, a Zen story, some academic goes to talk to this like old Zen monk, cause he's doing, he's like, you know, I don't know, he's writing some dissertation or whatever on Buddhist Zen Buddhism. He goes to visit this Zen monk and a priest, maybe I'm not sure they're talking, he's sitting with him and he's talking to this priest

about Buddhism and talking and talking and talking. And they're having tea. So the priest takes his tea kettle and starts pouring tea into this academics. You've heard this, he pours tea into this fucking overflows. What are you doing? Yeah, what are you doing? You have to have room in the cup.

That's one. The other one is to me, like the curse thing is that here's the curse, because there's people who listen to this. I know for sure there's like at least a few chaos magicians and wizards out there, magicians and occult people who listen to this show. And already they're going to be visualizing you making stuff.

Like now, because of the whole, the level of strange occult people who are listening and also me included, I'm already like picturing you making this incredible horror movie and I'm doing it purely out of my own selfishness, not out of some sense of like, oh, I want Shrob to actualize. You just want to see it.

I want to watch it. That's a thing, yeah. Because I know it's going to be good. I'm doing it purely out of selfishness because I'm not good enough to do it out of selflessness. So I'm already seeing it happen. And then the momentum that's going to come from all the people listening,

blasting that intention into you, it's going to like, there's nothing you could do. Now that's one part of it. The other part of it is a little more sinister and I hesitate to tell you this. No, no, no, tell me. Man, you know, once I was at one of these Ram Dass retreats and there's this Buddhist Lama,

who is like, Lama Surya Das is his name. And he was like initiated by the Dalai Lama, but he was like wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He doesn't look like the way you would expect it to look at all. And he'd been watching me because I interview people at this thing. They let me interview people.

I love it. But I was doing, at the time I was doing this, like really fashionable cynicism. It's very embarrassing when I think about it. Trying to be more skeptical than I felt about it because I wanted to seem cool. But I remember it was the last day of this retreat and he's like, do you mind if I have a couple of words

if they're just going to talk to you for a second? And I'm like, sure, this is a dude wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He does not look like- Yeah, yeah. And so the thing that the president told you, is this the kind of stuff you want to be making? In Buddhism, this is called wrathfulness. And wrathfulness is not the way we think of wrathfulness.

It's like, hey, motherfucker, get ready to die. Quite often wrathfulness is whispered or it's like very, it's just like someone just telling the truth in a sweet way with the intention of healing or helping or loving you. So he's like, he looks at me and goes, you know that cynical thing you're doing? He's like, you know, in like five years,

that's going to look like bell bottoms. Like, it's just, you know what I'm saying? Oh! That's cynical thing you're doing. Oh, man. And it was beautiful. Oh, I totally know. And then the other thing he said,

and this is the sinister part, was if you hold it inside you, it'll kill you. Yeah. You can't hold it in. You have to let it out. And like, it's almost like it, like, if you don't put the thing out there that you know you're supposed to make,

it blows you up from the inside. That's the scary part. Right. And I totally believe that because it does feel like it's eating me away. It does feel like, it's like, and it's that, it's that, what are you, what are you waiting for? What are you afraid of?

And I go, I don't, I don't know. It's that, it's this parallel, being paralyzed, you know. So you can't, you can't. So the reality of the situation is, you have to go into a war mode. You can no longer listen to your mind because your mind is going to just give reasons to not do it. Right.

And then you just make something. Well, the thing is, is like, it's your lizard brain. As I'm getting older, my lizard brain is like going, hey, you can't run as fast as you used to. You can't jump as high as you can. You know, like you can't do all the stuff that you used to when you were younger. So you better hide in your cave away from predators.

You better keep your belly full. Because if you starve, you start, it's like all this kind of cave men mentality that's just like, that's like on overdrive where it's just like, don't take any chances, stay away from the unknown, which are two things a creative has to run into, go into the unknown,

take chances or you're just never going to do anything. No, and you have to. Yeah. Because if you don't, the world is not going to be as good as it could be. No. And if there's some, any part of a person that's altruistic or desires the world to be better,

you have to follow that instinct. And you have to make horror for us. Because honestly, man, the type of horror you're describing is exactly the type of horror that I love. And it's, and it is, and it is in short supply these days. And it is rarely. I think, you know, right now, more than ever,

it's my, all of my genre of work, because I'll do like sci-fi, horror, I keep coming back to horror because it's, the production of it all is like, there's more problem solving that has to be done with, as far as like, how are we going to convincingly make this thing? And also because I have a heightened sensitivity,

I like feeling that, shit, what's around the corner? What's around the corner? I know it's a guy in a rubber costume, but it's whatever the combination of editing, music, camera angle, lighting, and the rubber costume is making me feel something right now. It's like horror.

And that's why I think I do well in comedy and in horror, because it's both, it comes from the same place. I think, I really do think. Sure. Stephen King said, you want to know, there's two genres that you can know if you're, if there's two types of movies that if you sit outside the theater, you know if they're good,

are horror and comedies. Because if you listen, if they're screaming, it's a good horror. They're laughing, it's a good comedy. If it's a drama, you're not going to hear anything. Wow. So it's really, it's really, it's the same, it's knock knock who's there.

It's stimulus response. It's all about timing. And that's why I think people keep on trying to do horror comedy. And that is considered like such a risky genre because people either go, they don't respect one side or the other. They don't, they'll go like,

well, it's not funny enough. So it's not a comedy. It's not scary enough. So it's not a horror. So it's usually somebody leaning on one side or the other. You got to really like do what Edgar Wright does, Shaun of the Dead, and just play it right down the middle.

And say, the comedy is comedy and the horror is horror and never the twain shall meet. It's the- Tightrope walk, man, because when it falls on either side, it is fucked. When it does not work, it's a hard thing because you're making fun of death. And it's something that we all are

of thinking about 24 hours a day. It's thinking about, I'm gonna die someday. I'm gonna die someday. It could be today. What if there's something around the corner? Because we're programmed to think that. We're just a bunch of rabbits in the forest going, what if today is the day I get my stomach ripped open?

What if the day, and there's actually this thing that the psychologists talk about called terror management, which is something that I believe is the beginning of evolution as, and biblically, I think when you talk about the tree of knowledge, I think when you,

it's like when the mythical story of biting into the apple and saying, oh, what is the tree of knowledge? Well, what am I really knowing? You know you're gonna die someday. Whoa. Animals fear death. Humans are the only animals that know that they're gonna die.

And once you bite that apple, once you lose that innocence, like I'm gonna die someday. You can't unbite that apple. And so your brain is constantly going, I'm gonna die someday. I'm gonna die someday. And there's actually this thing called terror management

in your brain that if we didn't have that psychological device, we would go insane with depression and sadness and go, why bother? Why fucking do anything? And terror management is distraction. It's like, if we start talking about death long enough, somebody's gonna make a joke.

Somebody's gonna go, oh, did you see this movie? Or I gotta play you a song. It's gonna be distracting you. So I think people who like horror, people who are very creative people because it's on their mind and they're trying to distract themselves. They're trying to understand horror.

They're trying to, I think horror movies are are very beneficial to children, I think. Because it's something like, here's something scary that is an exaggeration because it's like monsters and stuff, things in the dark, that you're going to have to deal with sometime in your life.

You're gonna have to walk into the forest and look for something without a flashlight. You're somebody gets hurt in the dark. You're gonna have to deal with this sometimes. And the thing about horror movies is it lets you experience these terrifying things and you have control over it. I can press stop on the VCR or the DVR or whatever.

I can wait when the credits roll is over with. If it's a haunted house, there's an exit door and I can leave. It's under my control. But when it's preparing you and making you experience something that your brain is 24 hours a day, trying to not think about. And it lets you go, okay, you can think about it.

But if it gets too intense, we're turning it off. Or we'll think about it for an hour and a half. But when those credits roll, we're going to not rewind it and watch it again. And that's what it's all about is- That's beautiful, man. And I think it's a very healthy thing. I think we want to, I think video games, horror movies,

sci-fi, whatever, we want to experience these things in a place of safety to prepare ourselves for the inevitable. We're going to die someday. We're going to see our friends die someday. And if we avoid that, if we avoid even like this mythic storytelling exaggerated cartoon, which is like Evil Dead or Creepshow or something like that

and make it in a, I mean, I'm sure you've had this conversation with people who aren't fans. How could you like that? It's just like- Sure. Why is that fun? And I'm like, I don't know. And your answer is, I don't know.

I just like it. I just like it. There's something fun about that. And it's like, I'm experiencing, it's like in comedy. Why do you like it when somebody slips on a banana peel? Somebody got hurt. They could have broke their neck. Somebody stubbed their toe and you'd laugh.

Why are you laughing at your friend just stubbed their toe? Because it's not me. I get to experience that pain, that stimulus response from a place of safety. And there's that, like Harman explained this to me is like laughter is a form of crying. It- Yeah, right, sure.

I don't know if you've had this conversation with them, but I think it's applicable to horror. We learn to laugh as babies. Like we laugh as babies. It's really- And you don't understand jokes. You don't understand comedy, but you do understand this peek-a-boo.

You cover your face. You do it with your baby. You're probably like- Yes. You cover your face and you go, ha! And the kid goes, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know, like the kid doesn't see your face and doesn't understand that you're still there

behind your hands or behind like a blanket or ducking behind like the bed or something like that. And the kid is like going, where's daddy? Where's daddy? Where's daddy? He was here a second ago. Where's- Oh, he's there, you know?

And just the second when they start going, oh no, daddy's gone forever. No, he's here, he's here, he's- And then they, that's how they learn to laugh is this form of crying. And so there's, and I think, you know, we do that. Some of my favorite comedies, there are moments of like, I'm Groundhog Day,

I'm crying, you know, this is so great or whatever, this is so special or whatever. There's like comedy, horror. Comedy drama. Comedy drama. When you pull it off, it's incredible. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, also what you're saying, two things came to mind. One, the great thing that happens when you wake up from a dream, and you realize, oh fuck, that was just a dream. Yeah. The dream is terrifying. You wake up and you're like, oh, I'm okay.

Yeah. That sense of relief is narcotic. Yeah. It's a bit- Relief, relief, yeah. So the, similarly in life, some monster emerges. Right. But there's always the thing after it.

Yeah. And the thing after it is always really great. It's really sweet. It's not as bad as you thought it would be. Right. No matter how bad it is, whether it's your parents dying, whatever it may be, suddenly in the midst of this thing

that the whole world is terrified of, and the whole world has been telling you, this is one of the worst things that can happen to you, you're in it. You're like, this isn't that big a deal. That brings me back to Creepshow. Okay. Cool.

So seeing this trailer, and they would play it over and over again. You know, they would play it over again. And I would be like, oh my God, there's that face. Look at the floor, wait it out. You know when it's over, he's going to say, rate it R.

And then it'll go back to GI Joe and Transformers and you'll pretend like you never saw it. It's terrifying. It's terrifying. Same with Return of the Living Dead. Same with Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Oh my God, so scary. So scary.

The trailer is scary. That voice is telling me, this is the most scary movie ever. Yeah. See, you're going to be fucking scared. And then my friends would say, I just saw Return of the Living Dead. It's so scary.

It's so crazy. Oh, it's like, and they're telling me about the movie and I'm imagining how scary it is. Then finally I go to see Return of the Living Dead. I get this. I go, I rent a creep show.

I go see Dawn of the Dead. All these movies that I was just like, the movie starts and my heart is racing. Like, this is going to be the scariest thing I've ever seen. I'm not ready for this. I think I should leave or whatever. But I'm like, no, no, no, no.

My friends will think I'm a pussy. I'm going to just sit and watch this. I watch it and I go, this isn't that bad. This isn't as good. My thought, what the movie was, in my head that I was putting together, it was way scarier than this. And that was kind of like the beginning of me

becoming a writer. You know, as I started writing down this stuff, started drawing this stuff. Yeah. But all the movies that I was terrified of as a kid, horrified nightmares, like I can't sleep at night. My mom was like, oh, you can't watch these movies anymore.

You're too scared. I would buy them. I would watch them. I would watch them and watch them and watch them and watch them and watch them over. I became obsessed with them. And I would watch them to the point that I understood like, oh, the camera's down here.

Go over here. And that's why it works. Boom, here's the thing. Oh, that's how they're doing this special effect and reading up on it and go, oh, that's a latex thing. That stopped motion animation. What's that?

Okay, okay. And so, oh, they did that in front of the camera. That's forced perspective. It was my film school because I became obsessed with it. I just, I couldn't get enough of it. And I think it was like growing up in a small town,

growing up in a town of like 3,000 people where, and I had like, I had the first VCR in town, I think. And then starting to rent these movies and being able to rent movies that I couldn't go see in the theater and then getting Fangoria and learning how they made it too. And then getting my grandfather's like,

super eight camera, making stop motion anime, dinosaur movies and making latex masks out of cotton. You did that? Oh yeah, I did all that. Out of cotton? Yeah, latex and cotton. You know, that's a Dick Smith's like makeup book in Tom Savini's grand day illusion.

That's the Bort Barrier I never got past. I was always teetering on the edge of making the masks. I did that, but I never got to foam rubber. I, you know, I would see it. I just couldn't figure it out. I mean, I toyed, I went to art school and I was sculpting stuff and I was like, hmm, I could learn how to do this.

I could figure this out, but I got chicken shit. And I went into comic books instead, which worked out fine for me too. I wanted to do a bunch of, I wanted to do comic books. I wanted to be Tom Savini. I wanted to be Sam Raimi. I got the kind of- Sam Raimi, man.

That's that to me, that is the- That's the goal. The pinnacle and it's still, and it's going to, you're gonna do it though. I don't know how you're gonna do it or what it's gonna be, but you are gonna do it. It's just that, like, you're putting it out there.

It's part of your process probably. You start blowing it out there like this and then the boomerang comes back and then it's gonna be a thing. You're like, oh, I will make that. I'm gonna make that. It does feel like I'm at the starting line and there's like a stadium full of people going,

fucking run, go! You have to. Go! What are you waiting for? And you're just like, ah, I don't know. Rise to the fight. Yeah. Yeah, that's the verse in the Bhagavad Gita.

Rise to the fight, O great warrior. Yeah, it's better to- It's a good story. Better to fight. And because the thing is like, the thing I've always loved about all those like war movies or the like, what's it called? Gladiator, like the ethic of the warrior.

The war now is just, I'm not talking about archetypical war, not corporate wars, archetypical, beautiful, or you're like, I am going to give up my life to help people and I don't care if I die. Yeah. And I love that shit, which is like in Norse mythology. If you die in the field of battle,

you get in, you go to Valhalla or you go to like Midgar, whatever, you get to drink with the gods. You know, you're like, you, so this is why to me, failure in the pursuit of your heart's desire is not failure at all. It's dying on the battlefield in a sacred war that even if no one, anyone who dies in a sacred war is a hero, anyone who gets an arrow in their chest

fighting the dark one is the hero who like, didn't get to be the ring bearer or whatever, but fuck you gave it up for some greater thing. So you can't fail in that sense. There's no real humiliation there. There's no way to like, no matter how catastrophic the result of an endeavor that's your heart's desire, you can always say to that person, yeah,

but I fucking tried and you haven't yet. So I win, I win. Even if it's a fucking piece of shit I made, I tried. That's good enough. That's all that matters. Cause it's that paralysis, it's the, that's why the Bhagavad Gita starts there.

That's why the whole thing starts with the path. That's why the garden, that's why I love the Bhagavad Gita story and that's also why I love Christianity cause both in both cases, the sort of, I guess you wouldn't call Arjuna and the Bhagavad Gita a side figure, but a savior figure in both of these mythologies has a great moment of existential hesitation. Garden of Gassathami, Jesus is like,

take the cup away, I don't want to do it. It's the refusal of the call, it's cambo. It's that. Refusal of the call. Yeah, and I always get, and I do have that excitement of, it's like standing on the high jump in a pool. You know, like the highest, yeah, I don't know if you ever did that as a kid

where you're like standing on the edge and you're just like, oh my God, I can't do it. And I remember thinking like, I just want somebody to push me. If somebody would just push me, I would do it, but I'm standing here. And I remember like, I don't know if I did jump eventually, but I mean, I remember there was probably more than once

where I went, I can't do it and turn around and walk back and had to climb down and how humiliating that was. Cause everybody in my swim classes, like going, yes, that's me, I did that. And I'm just like going, I can deal with, I can deal with being called a wuss. And then eventually I was, but I was always like going, I wish there was somebody that would just shove me forward.

And I bring that into my adulthood. It's just having somebody going, you have no choice, you have to do this. This is like the, when I was at this funny, you bring that up cause like in one of these interviews I did with Ramdas, just ignore my sweet pup. I asked him, I use this exact example, the diving board. And I was like, you, you have,

you dived off this fucking diving board. You went to India with a bunch of acid, met a guru, wrote B or now hung out with Tim Leary. You are, you know, the progenitor of like a whole, I guess you could call it a hippie philosophy or whatever. You jumped. What about those of us who have not just are sitting at the edge of the diving board,

but who built a house at the edge of the diving board and you know, are living at the edge of the diving board. And he goes, there's no diving board. There's no diving board. That's just in your mind. You think there's, you know, there's, there's, it's a trick you're playing on yourself to imagine that there's a here and a there

when everybody's falling. And you know what I mean? That's the reality of the situation is if there is a diving board, we jumped off at a long time ago. And now here we are in this material universe plummeting towards apparent oblivion, which by the way, to me, one of the great spoilers, Buddhism has given me in relation to death

is a spoiler alert if you're getting off on the fact you're going to die. Buddhism doesn't say you're not going to die, but Buddhism is more along the lines of you die every time you breathe out because everything you were before this is gone. And there is no future. There's just this right now.

And then there's some accumulation in your mind of memories and a sense of here's who I must be. This is what I like to do. This is a preference. But the reality is that's just the thing you're holding onto to give yourself a sense of some kind of centipede existence that stretches into the past when there's no past at all.

It's like the head of a centipede pretending it's got a body when it doesn't at all. So there's a, that's the situation that we're in with. We're dead, you know, gone. It's gone, gone, gone beyond the going. There's no, we're fucked essentially. Which is why I love the beat. I used to think the beat poets meant like beat.

You know what it really means? You know that? No. It means we're beat, we're defeated. We're not going to win. We lost already. We lost it. It didn't work.

We're defeated. That's the beat poets. I would Ginsburg, all those people. We lost. It's the beat generation. We got beat. We're done. And starting from that point and making stuff.

Ugh. Ugh. So, yeah, that's, that, there's nothing more exciting about like, I don't know what I can't do. That moment, the moment where you're like starting off. Like, cause I remember like moving here and deciding like, okay, I can't hide behind Dan. Forever.

I'm going to have to learn how to write on my own. We're going to have to do it. I don't know what I can't do yet. Let's just figure it out. And then learning how to do it and, and being excited and then opening up your computer and going, I wonder what I'm going to do today. Or, well, this is fun and watching it and being like,

oh, I can't wait to wake up in the morning and write. You know, I miss those times. But now that I've had like 10, 15 years of experience of writing where I go, I know what I'm not good at. I know what I am good at. I'm bored at what I'm good at. And I don't, and I don't know how to get better at what I'm bad at or whatever.

That excitement is, is kind of gone. So that's, that's why that's part of the parallel. Parallel, per, per, per, being parallel. The paralysis. Paralysis, yeah. Yeah, well, the, you know, it's, I don't know what the mechanism is going to be, but it'll be like, you'll, you'll just,

you'll just have to do it. I know what the, I know what it is. I know what the on and off switch is. It's like, do something dumb. Do something, who cares? Do something that makes my friends think I lost my mind. Do something that makes people, that's really it. Is like, make the most you thing you can.

Make it like a hundred thousand percent you. No one else can do it other than you. Yeah. And that, that's, that's the key. That's it. Is going, I'm going to write something that is, I'm going to make something that people are going, what the fuck were you thinking?

What are you, what is wrong with you? Yeah. Just me. I don't know if you're like that with, but I get such a thrill and you've, it's probably experiences on Harmontown or whatever. I love it when the audience, mostly Dan goes, looks at me and it just goes, what is wrong with you?

What has happened to bring you into this thing? I get such a glee out of that. Well, my, there's, when I see posts where people are like, has Duncan lost his mind? I'm like, oh God, I'm on the right track. You broke through. I broke through. You broke through.

I'm off the map. I got off the fucking map for a second. And then I go right back on the goddamn map because I get scared because I start thinking, did I lose my mind? Yeah. But I think, you know, you look at, I look at the stuff that I like the most.

You know, when Evil Dead 2 came out, people were like, oh, what is wrong with this? Like they were like going, Sam Raimi's tying like cameras to two by fours and smashing them through windows and throwing his friend Bruce Campbell down into a pit and throwing shit at him. Like these guys are nuts. These guys are crazy.

Same with Toby Hooper with the first chainsaw massacre. You know, John Landis says, you know, when you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you're going, oh, I'm in the hands of a master filmmaker. When I'm watching a Toby Hooper movie, I'm in the hands of a fucking maniac. I might get hurt. People might have actually died doing,

this is documentary style. That woman seems like she's losing her mind when she's tied to the chair. That is an insane performance. How he got her to scream like that is chilling. I heard people were puking and stuff on set. Like they're really sick from that. The vibe was really dark on that set.

Yeah. And I heard he was like, you know, the investors were like going, you have to have a shot list. You can't just make it up as you go along. You know, and he was like, okay, I'll do a shot list. And he was going to do like this one shot. It's the shot when you see like the Sawyer house

and they're zooming, they're not, they're dallying in underneath the swing. Yeah, sure. Following her. It's the iconic, he was setting up that shot. And like the, the, the AD was like going, this isn't on the shot list. You can't, you're not doing this.

And, and Toby Hooper is like going, well, I'm the director. And that's the director of the photography. And we're doing the shot, get the fuck out of here. And it's like, in cinematic history, one of the best shots in the film. In film history, it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous.

You look at the rest of that movie and it's so like, oh, but that shot in particular, the one that he said, no, we're doing this. Those are the stories that, that get me so excited where, because especially working in TV, directing TV, you're directing the schedule. You're not directing the script. And you're being, you're a hired hand.

You're the substitute teacher. You're there Monday morning. Everybody knows everybody except you, you have, you have the writers are making you feel stupid. You're trying to figure it out. It's like, I describe it as like, it's like moving furniture, you know, you're like, when you're a guest director on a TV show,

you're the guy with a truck and the show is the friend that you never hear from, unless they're moving. And they're like, look, we just want to get the couch from A to B. We don't care where you think it will look best in the living room or what room it should be in or what pillows you got. Just get us the footage and we'll try to make it work.

And that's like the, you make a lot of money. You meet a lot of really good people. But at the end of the day, if you have something you want to say or some art that you want to try to do, it's not the place to do it. Well, here's the deal. You're going to do it.

I don't know what it's going to be, but I know you're going to do it. And fuck, if you don't fucking do it, man. I'm a piece of shit. No. I inherited a little bit of money, Rob. And... You're going to kill me.

I won't kill you. Mr. You're going to get a phone call tomorrow, Rob. Someone you love. Someone I love. No, no, no, no, so fucked up. I did have an idea what it's about. I'm sitting there with the Academy Award.

I just want to thank Duncan, who hired somebody who killed up my grandmother. It's really... I did have an idea what it's about. Like having a hit man kill your enemies fucked up. But having a hit man kill everyone your enemy loves is way more fucked up. Anyway, that's what I'm going to do.

And I look forward to seeing what you make. I don't know if this helped at all with your paralysis. No, no. Actually, we're done. I want to keep talking to you about some other stuff about it. But because I got an idea of Bruin that I think just based off of our conversation. I'm so inspired from our chat, man.

I just want to go and watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre now and review the shots. So good. How can people find you, Rob? We got to wrap it up. Halloween is coming up. We should have a movie. Justin's got that screening room.

I've been wanting to send... Give me 24 hours I'll put together a playlist and we'll just sit and watch it. Please. I would love that. Wouldn't it be great? I don't think I have anything to offer. Well, let me plug real quick Creep Show.

Creep Show, the series is premiering on Shutter, which is an awesome streaming app. If you love horror, if you love like just horror or action, revenge movies, like stuff from all over the world, really, really great stuff. And they do what no other streaming platform does is they don't just dump everything in front of you

and go figure it out like Netflix or Amazon. They actually go, here, if you're into this, like this, if you want to know like the beginnings of horror, check out these. They have so much direction and they really have great... When's it airing? September 26th is the first episode.

Each episode is going to have two installments. I'm not sure which one mine is, but mine is called Bad Wolf Down. And the series is going to start on September 26th and it's going to lead up until Halloween. Also at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal, one of the installments or whatever. I've never been there.

Have you been to the horror mazes or whatever? But anyway, they have a Creep Show slot or whatever. There's a place, Maze. Creep Show Maze, where it's going to be like all of the original Creep Shows, a Creep Show. I'll be there.

Yeah, it's going to be great. It's like something that's tied you over Father's Day. The crate is going to be there. And then two of the new ones are going to be Gray Matter, which was written based off of the Stephen King story. And the other one is Bad Wolf Down. Oh, shit, they did Gray Matter. Gray Matter is fucked up, man.

That was that from, that was from which book of short stories. It's not Skeleton Crew, is it? I think it was Skeleton Crew. Is it Skeleton Crew? I think it was, yeah. And that is a fucked up story. Well, here's the thing that goes full circle,

that I'm going to just have a bit of pride here. And it sounds like I'm bragging, but it's like Creep Show written all by Stephen King, Gray Matter written by Stephen King. The only one not written by Stephen King. Bad Wolf Down. What? And I can't believe it.

That's... Yeah, if I talk about, I'll start crying because I'm just like, oh my God. You should cry and be half. It's really, really like, I'm so, so... I really hope people like it. I really wanted it to be a part of it. They're going to love it, man.

Listen, your heart is so in the right place for this stuff. I can't wait to see it. And I'm really, really happy we had this conversation. I'm so glad to be on the show finally. We've been talking about forever, man. Thank you for coming on, Rob. And let's keep talking. How to curse it.

Thanks so much for listening, everybody. That was Rob Schraub, all the links you need to find Dr. Schraub will be located at dougartrussell.com. A huge thank you to our wonderful sponsors. And if you truly love the DTFH and would like to help us out, it would mean a lot if you would fly to Egypt

and climb up one of the great pyramids of Giza, making the sigil of Asmodius towards the Sirius Star cluster. We'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, J.C. Penney.

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