Happy Sad Confused - 3 BODY PROBLEM (David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, & Alexander Woo)

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

The creators of 3 BODY PROBLEM know something about scrutinized book to screen adaptations. David Benioff & D.B. Weiss (GAME OF THRONES) and Alexander Woo (TRUE BLOOD) join Josh to talk about their complex audacious new series, their sci-fi influences, their favorite character deaths and that GAME OF THRONES ending. SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! ZocDoc -- Go to ⁠⁠Zocdoc.com/HappySad⁠⁠ and download the Zocdoc app for FREE BetterHelp -- Visit ⁠BetterHelp.com/HSC ⁠today to get 10% off your first month UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS ⁠Merrily We Roll Along (Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez) March 28th in NYC -- ⁠Get tickets here⁠ Tom Hiddleston April 11th in Los Angeles -- Get tickets here Cabaret (Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin) May 20th in NYC -- ⁠Get tickets here⁠ Check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Happy Sad Confused patreon here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! We've got discount codes to live events, merch, early access, exclusive episodes of, video versions of the podcast, and more! To watch episodes of Happy Sad Confused, subscribe to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Josh's youtube channel here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. Do any of you have a favorite character death you've written in your illustrious careers? At the end of Battle of Bastards, when Sophie sticks the half, you know, on the bastard, she doesn't walk away. You don't really actually see the death. You see some of it in the background. But you don't really see the death. But what you do see is Sophie's smile, our sonza's smile. And it was all in one shot.

And we did it, you know, seven times or something. And I just remember standing there with Dan. And when she finally got, like, she nailed it on the seventh or eighth time. And it was just that feeling of like that's such, that's so epic. I mean, Sophie was so good. And when she, when she got that shot, I just felt like that's, I can now die happy. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now.

I'm Josh Horowitz. And today on Happy, Sad, Confused, what happens when you combine the brains behind Game of Thrones and True Blood with a beloved modern sci-fi bestseller. You'll have to check out the massive giant swing that is Three-Body Problem on Netflix to find out. I am thrilled. This show is bringing these three very talented men to the podcast for the very first time

is its executive producers and showrunners for Three Body Problem. It's David Benioff. It's Stevie Weiss. It's Mr. Alexander Wu. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you for having us, Jeff. Great to be here.

Congratulations on the show. I'm sorry. I missed you guys in South By. I know you, I hopefully, you fit some barbecue, some tacos into promoting your beloved show? Not enough. Never enough. Yeah.

Never enough. Talk to me a little bit about, look, we're taping this like about, I guess, what, 48 hours, 72 hours before the show drops. Who's the chill one in this trio? Who has the most anxiety to balance each other out? Is there a chill one? There's a whole table full of pills next to me that I'm not showing you. I think we need a chill one.

That's why we needed a lorke. So there could be like, you know, the Beatles. That's what we're missing. We lost. We need a Ringo. We forgot the Ringo. We always bring a Ringo. Alex, that wasn't your job to come in to help this duo out and show them out?

That wasn't part of the deal? No, if you've seen my medicine cabinet, that's not my job. I guess you are the chill. I remember the fact that you have even more pills than I have on the table that I'm not showing. Compare this to me, for me, look, you've been. through some very, um, lauded, um, uh, you know, dissected shows in your careers before the days before true blood and Game of Thrones came out. Did you have similar good butterflies, bad butterflies? Can you compare and contrast from me at all? Yeah, I was terrified personally. I mean,

um, when the first episode came out of Game of Thrones, Dan and I were, so that was back in the time of actual TV ratings, you know? And Dan and I were on a scout. We didn't know if there's going to be a second season, but we had to prep one just in case. And we were scouting in Croatia, right, Dan? Yeah, we were with Strauss and Croatia. We were scouting with Carolyn Strauss, who had been the president of HBO, and she was the woman who we pitched the show to, her and Gina Ballion. And then she became our producing partner. And when the first episode came out, we didn't know how to read the ratings because we hadn't worked TV before, but Carolyn, the Harvard-educated, you know, former president of HBO, she obviously

knew ratings. And so she looked at the numbers and she said, oh, wow, that's incredible. You guys, we got, we got, was it 8 million people for the first, for the first night? Just as, like, Boardwalk Empire was like the biggest show that they had in the air. And their pilot, I think it was Scorsese directed pilot, had gotten 7 million viewers according to this whatever metric she was reading off of. so yeah so for about nine minutes we were the happiest guys in croatia and then caroline said oh wait a second i got that wrong two million two million people what so it was a quarter the number was a quarter of

what we thought we had and uh and i was like i was like how did you how did you make the mistake but how did you multiply this exaggerated by 400 percent and she just said i never know how to read these things. I'm like, you ran the network through its golden age. Like, you were in charge of the soprados and the wire and Deadwood. She's like, yeah, but I never knew what these numbers meant. Luckily, there was no anxiety in the years to come. You had no anxiety in the rest of your run on Game of Thrones. It was just the chill experience. So all good. After that lax sale. What is your, all your relationships with fandoms at this point? I mean, Alex Trueblood had very passionate fans. Were you?

you, were you guys always talking about how the fans were receiving it and kind of like, did fan, the fan reaction ever influence what you guys were doing on that one? Yeah, it grew over time. So, I mean, True Blood ran from 2008 to 2013 and even the power of fandom increased over, you know, over that period. And then, you know, David and Dan can speak to, you know, Game of Thrones. I mean, it's just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The first show I worked on, which Brian Fuller just posted something that it was like, it's the 20th anniversary of Wonderfalls, which was my first job, and which is incredible to think that it was 20 years ago.

But that's a show that if there were fandom that could go on the internet and, like, evangelized to other people, that was one of those shows. And it didn't. And then he created Dead Like Me, which is sort of, in many ways, spiritually very similar to Wonderfals. But I always thought, like, if there were a fandom, there that could that could speak to the outside world it would have yeah it could have had a better life than it did uh true blood i think it was very very positive at the time you know uh from the very beginning and i think it was a kinder gentler time at least you know in the first few years

um and uh you know now like everyone has a voice everyone has an opinion and often you know the louder you're opinion is, the more tension, uh, you get. Uh, so, you know, I, I think we're the beneficiaries of a time when, when people were, uh, were, uh, uh, I think a little bit, a little bit gentler on us, uh, with maybe the exception of like television without pity, which I love, by the way, I really did, uh, love television without pity, uh, you know, introduced, you know, some snark to it and some, uh, you know, and, and, and, and, and, some fair or unfair sort of critical, you know, critical viewing, which, you know, there are benefits to it, but also adds to the stress level for those of us who make the shows. Sure.

And for you, gentlemen, what is your relationship with fandom and critics at this point, having been at the very extreme unusual circumstance? I mean, I will say that, like, to this day, I really enjoy, like, meeting people in person. and like having an actual human interaction with somebody, it's almost always positive, even if it's somebody who is critical. It's a different kind of a vibe when you're talking to a person face to face

and I've always enjoyed it, even the critical stuff in person. I don't, we don't do, for reasons of like design and intention, like we kind of stay off not on any social media and don't really engage online. The main reason being that just once that was kind of starting to ramp up, I think, I don't know the exact dates, but I kind of, the subjective feeling was that as Thrones

was starting to take off, so was engaging on social media. And we were very much the beneficiaries of that, like in a big way. So it's, you know, it's kind of hypocritical, I think, to complain about the negative side of it when you benefited so much from the positive side of it. But I just bet in positive or negative, it was really just more about the amount of time it took to engage with that. It was very obvious to both of us from the outset a tremendous amount of time that we just didn't have. I mean, making a show, Thrones was, it sounds like an exaggeration, but it was, we were, it was slightly different. It was a more or less day and date release schedule, April 17th to 25th, somewhere in there every year, you would come out with the first episode of the season. And to do the job in that timeframe was, it was like it was 364 and a half days a year, which sounds like bullshit, but it really wasn't.

It never stopped. And it felt like the time we had to like spend with family and friends was already like a very narrow life's margin. And as soon as you added on to the top of that jenga tower, well, if we dip our toe into this, then the whole thing would have fallen over. And so we never got into it. And I don't, I don't think I never really will. It just feels like I always wondered as a younger person. I was like, what will someday make me feel like an old person? And this is, this is it.

This is like the old, this is where I, like, crossed over the old person line where I'm just not going to do this thing that I know even like my parents are probably thinking about doing at this point. I'm not going to engage with it. I think for your long term mental health, it's probably the wise decision. As much as you want to engage, look, I, LUV, DeNaris, 300 million has a lot of important things to say on Instagram, but you've got a life to live. I love it. I would love to meet him, her, they in person and like talk about what they have to say. That's great. But it's just the online version of it. It just kind of feels like maybe it's a giant, like experiment involving several billion people that I kind of want to see how the experiment plays out before I engage. Yeah, good luck to all of you. Well, speaking of psych experiments and segueing into a little bit more directly, three body problem science. realm. Can we talk a little bit about our sci-fi influences growing up? I mean, did all of

all of us, did any of you grow up? Were you Asimov readers? Were you Arthur C. Clark? Were you, you know, debating the meaning of 2001 in your college dorm room? Give me a sense. David. If I were in a different room, I could, I could point my, my camera at all the like old paperbacks in the plastic cases, but this is the wrong room for that. And who was the author of most of those paperbacks? Who is your favorite? I love the most. As a kid, I loved Robert Heinlein. Yeah, I was going to say Heinlein over Asimov and Clark for me.

Yeah, Philip Dick was also probably. That was my single biggest was probably Philip Dick. And Bonaget, I know, like, I'm not sure. I think he counts. I always counted Vonnegut. David, were you going to know something? Yeah, Vonnegut. No, no, I was going to say Heinleyn.

For whatever reason, I never got into Asimov. Like, I tried. And, you know, if somebody you could tell, was incredibly smart. I probably had, like, 190 IQ, and I just never, never care about any of his characters. And so I was probably more of a, I don't, soft science fiction sounds really lame, like, like soft rock. But, you know, whatever, but not. But both of them are awesome. Less pejorative description of sci-fi that's not considered hard sci-fi.

It was probably more of my thing. Yeah. Science fiction. What's it? What is it else? Science fiction. It's not. It's not.

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I grew up in the 80s. And there was some good sci-fi films then. You know, that's obviously around when, like, James Cameron kind of came into his own. And we're getting alien in the late 70s and then aliens, of course. But on the TV side, it's kind of slim pickings. I mean, ironically, I think, and I don't know if you'll take this as a compliment or not, like a miniseries that had a big influence on me was V. Which I could-

Us too. We're talking about me all the time. Oh, God, yeah. I was obsessed with me. I read the novelization of V when I was a kid. I believe I did too. I think Kenneth Johnson wrote it. I think he did it also.

So, yeah, V was this crazy 80s miniseries that had some similar touchstones to this. Did it come up in the writer's room when you were putting this together at all? Oh, yeah. It definitely came up. And, you know, I think it's, we were talking earlier today about,

you know, you don't necessarily see the aliens in our show, but there was that great moment in V I think where her skin gets torn if I'm remembering and then you see like the lizard skin beneath it and uh we'd make jokes about like Jess Jess, Jess tears her skin Jen the character on the show

and there's like lizard skin but there was also if I remember correctly they were like the Capos back you know in V who the humans who sided with the um and they made a pretty obvious like comparison to the actual capos but but uh you know that came up when we're talking about the

the various humans who decide to align themselves with the uh with the santi invaders um and yeah i mean he was he i was obsessed with that show when i was a kid back when you actually had to be there at the moment it came on and you know um because yeah there were a lot of great movies and you know et was was getting to show my kids et finally when they were old enough with a great moment as a dad i mean it was kind of cool about science fiction oh sorry no go ahead No, go ahead, Dan. It was kind of cool about some science fiction on television back of the day was that what was being written about was so completely unachievable visually.

There was just absolutely no way to put Isaac, most of Isaac Asimov on the screen back then. There's no way to do Robert Heinlein on the screen back then, none of it. So a show like The Outer Limits, which was, I mean, such a huge influence on Cameron and so many other people as well, like really needed it needed to find a different more thoughtful conceptual way in to telling science fiction stories which it was it was such serious limitations put on what they could and couldn't like manage on TV but i think those limits sometimes like confinement makes for higher water pressure you know like i think it really did kind of make force them into a smart place because they couldn't they couldn't do anything big expensive cheap you know, blowing stuff up sort of gag. And Twilight, I mean, we talk about Twilight Zone. A lot of those episodes are, a lot of them are, you know, overtly sci-fi and some of them are kind of, you know, on the border between sci-fi and horror.

But, but again, yeah, like taking advantage of the limitations and using that to create a sense of atmosphere and paranoia. And what's the episode that you were talking about last week? Yeah, we just watched, just the other night watched the mom. are due on Maple Street with Claude Raines and a guy who's named Jack Weston, which is, I mean, it has to be, I think, maybe the best one. Well, there are all these, like, confined almost bottle episode things, right? Like, obviously, the William Shatner episode on the plane. Yeah, that's a nerd.

Like, I mean, they're all very actually contained stories that just have very clever, brilliant writing. I mean, on the flip side, I mean, against I going to what you guys have done here, this is, look, you have limitations. You can't, you can't not have limitations. What are the limitations for something like three body problem, which obviously has sizable budgets and a lot of advantages that those folks way back when didn't have? Like, what are you budding up against that's spotting new ideas? Well, I think we're taking advantage of the same. You mentioned V and then we talked about the Twilight Zone. You know, those were both shows that took advantage of something that television can provide.

that is different from film in that it's an intimate experience. It gets under your skin. And then that's what made V so scary to me as a kid was that I was kind of alone in the living room in the dark watching this thing that was that with the screen was like maybe a couple of feet for me. And, you know, there was, that's a very different experience than say Star Wars, for example.

And V, took advantage of that. It seems so simple to us now, but like back in the 80s, this was not like, this was not of a an immediate realization. And Twilight Zone, a lot of the really sort of truly horrifying, frightening moments are because it's so like, it's so intimate. And so when we're making this show or when, you know,

Dan and David made Game of Thrones and even to an extent when we made True Blood, these were shows that have a lot of spectacle to it. There's a lot of bells and whistles, but at the heart of it, it's something very intimate that happens to characters. And that's still what we hold closest to us. That's at the center of everything we do, because all the bells and whistles and all the craziness

is not going to matter unless you care about who it's happening to. And that's one of the great strengths of television is that you really care and engage with these people for maybe up to a decade of your life. And if you don't care about it, all the big explosions, you know, aren't going to matter that much. That being said, States Hill Episode 5, just for the big stuff. And that big stuff, I think, matters more because by that point, you care about the people who are responsible for it. No, but it's a million percent true, obviously.

Look, from Game of Thrones getting, you know, all the attention for the effects and the battles and the dragons and all of it. you guys know way better than I do it's the characters that everybody became obsessed with the same on true blood vampires are always going to be cool but it's the characters that you're going to be that are going to stick with you and I think about like

you know quote unquote first contact stories which this essentially is whether it's ET or contact or close encounters those are very human grounded stories that's the commonality I guess right yeah no doubt

I mean, those, like close encounters to me, that's one of those ones that I saw like when it came out in the theater and I kind of remember how old I was. I must have been like eight years old. Yeah. And yeah, that was a, that was a first contact story. And I didn't realize at the time that it stood out from other first contact stories as not being about how we're going to, what kind of a weapon we're going to use

to destroy them or blow them out of the sky. but like a much more nuanced like involved even sort of quasi religious engagement with the idea of what happens when something bigger than us comes from up there you know um but it made the huge impression on me i mean it was it was that those jaws and that were the in star wars were really the most formative movies for me from the time and you think about with with with close encounters I mean, Alex, I think it was you who made this point last night when we were talking. One of you two guys made the point about patience, you know, the beginning with beginning is like not rushing it. And there's something when you watch Close Encounters again and just kind of remembering how long it takes to get into the story, like how Patience Spielberg was with how he developed the characters, how he, you know, showed you like the goodies with, you know, whatever alien stuff was going on.

It's all very patiently done. And because of that, like it's, it doesn't feel nearly as dated as some science fiction movies that came out 30 years later that that just feel like they were really exciting and fun when you saw them in the theaters in, you know, 1996. And now you look at it and it's just like, oh, lots of just kind of crappy effects and kind of a boring story. So something, you know, for me, like Richard Dreyf is just just losing his mind with the mashed potatoes is way more excited than, you know, a flying soft is zooming by. I will also say when I was watching this, the show begins. I mean, I always think about the opening of close encounters and like the juxtaposition of like, what film am I watching? Where am I?

And you're seeing like what those like World War II bombers and like I feel like the desert or something in the opening scene. And similarly in a different way in your show, I'm watching the opening scene and I'm like, where am I? 1966 China? Like what did I click on the right button? And there's something really special about that. There was actually kind of a, it's a pretty, it's funny because I didn't.

it's so burned into my brain and like who I am that I didn't even the fact of like the close encounter starting in that piecemeal way where you're taking all these disparate strands and you're wondering like how do these things all weave together I kind of get what it's about but I don't know how they all put together into a coherent whole like that actually is pretty similar to the way that this show starts out especially in the first like two or three episodes. Did, look, the last few years have proven perhaps that any of us that were Pollyanna-ish and thought like, well, you know, when a global existential threat comes around, we're all

going to unite and we're going to sing kumbaya, we're going to figure it out. And sadly, apparently, pandemics, climate crises, you name it, we're kind of fucked. I don't know. Maybe those things just aren't big. Yeah. That's your conversation you're having, David? We were just talking about something similar. Sorry, I know sometimes I'm looking like my mom when I'm

FaceTiming with her. I know it's kind of just like just my schnaves, right and float up. But yeah, literally like an hour and a half ago, we were talking about this, how the three of us started planning the show and talking about story and everything on Zooms while we were locked up in our separate houses for 18, months or whatever it was during the pandemic and watching the world not come together in any meaningful way to combat this threat to the entire species. And certainly we've seen over the years the failure to come together in a meaningful way

over global warming and over, you know, international conflict, whatever, as you say, it's very hard to be polyanish about it. And I think it did inform, you know, not only just the skepticism about that, but also skepticism about people's faith in science and how, you know, there, there is a large part of the populace, maybe even the majority of the populace that just doesn't really have much faith in science and doesn't really believe it when scientists in mass say, this is happening, this is real, you know, this temperature, the fact that temperatures are X degrees warmer now than they were 50 years ago, that's a real thing. A lot of people just don't buy it.

And so that informed a lot of the decisions in terms of the writing. You know, there's a giant eye in this guy. We all see it. It's up there, but a lot of people aren't going to buy it or they're going to think it's some kind of conspiracy. Yeah. You're talking to a guy whose wife has worked for the NRDC the last 17 years. So it's been a challenging, to say the least.

Really impressive promo by Netflix mounting these congressional hearings into aliens, et cetera, the last couple of years. Well, well done, whoever is making that happen. Where are you guys at on aliens? I'm kind of a disbeliever, but do we have any believers here? Well, I think they're definitely out there somewhere, but like it's just a question of how are they going to get here not in the show? Because I think we're Sassian and Liu did a very good job of explaining exactly how they're going to get here and how long it's going to take them. But I'm not sure in reality that works.

I'm not a science, science professional, so I can't really speak to that. I think it's a very solid science fiction. It seems like even four light years away is a hell of a long way to go. So are they out there? I think almost certainly there are many ways out there all over. And there have trillions of planets in the universe. But are they going to actually make it here that I'm a little bit more skeptical about? Look, this show, I think I said in the beginning, like I always love big swings, and this is a giant swing.

It's a giant ensemble. It spans different time periods. It's, it's, you know, it's heady stuff. It's challenges in audience. What felt like to you guys, the biggest swing? Like, we're like, we're really going to, we're testing the audience. We're going to push up against it, and this may or may not work. What felt like you were out on a limb?

Just wanted to go full Dave Kingman. He missed a lot more It's a low batting average for Kingman A lot of dingers though A lot of home runs Who's the biggest point? That's a good question I mean I think anything that is

that is conceptually just like hard to even get your head around no matter how much time you have is going to be a huge challenge to put on screen where hopefully it all flows in front of you and and you know you don't have to press pause or look up a concept so uh you know we we do a huge explanation about higher dimensions in in this show which you know was iterated many many times but that is a really hard thing

to bring across in a way that you can digest as it's being explained to you uh luckily we were the beneficiaries of two great science advisors and also utilizing, utilizing not just the information they gave us, but the way they explained it to us in a way that we could all understand. And there's also other people who are on YouTube, for example, and explain science to people who aren't scientists that I found really, really useful because Because that is how, you know, we have to convey a concept like, you know, 10-dimensional objects, you know, in the three-dimensional world. Those are hard things to try to tackle. I don't know if that answers to whether it's a big swing, but it was a big thing to tackle.

Sure, sure. Well, yeah, I mean, the other, one of the other things that I feel like you all have commonality in. in your work is, look, you love writing great characters. You also love killing off great characters. Spoiler alert, everybody does not survive to the end of this first season. Do any of you have a favorite character death you've written in your illustrious careers? Favorite death. It was fun.

It with Thrones me. It was so much killing of good guys that when we finally got to really kill. Both Joffrey in season four and Ramsey Bolton in season six, it was fun to go back to the old-fashioned kind of joys of just killing off a really bad guy. One's actually had a coming as opposed to. Yeah, we didn't get. It felt like it was maybe balancing the scales a little bit.

So that was always enjoyable to. It was really satisfying to watch too, you know, as a viewer. Yeah. You know, because you also spent time, on the flip side of going to love characters over time, You grow to really hate people over a period of time, too. So when you finally get the thing that you've been wanting all along, it's also deeply, deeply satisfying.

I got to do a monologue once where the character who was killed was not a significant character on True Blood, but I got to have Dennis O'Hare kill a newscaster on live television and then deliver a speech, which I just cribbed, essentially, from network. I didn't copy the lines from network. It was the delivery and the style of that, of Ned Beatty's monologue. And I also knew Dennis O'Hare would just kill it. I mean, he would be, you know, and it was fun and campy. But that was one of those things that I was looking forward to, you know,

the day we're going to shoot it because, you know, you were in the hands of an amazing actor. It was going to do something incredible. I think for me on the end of Battle of Bastards when Sophie six the six to half

you know on the bastard she doesn't walk away you don't really actually see the death you see some of it in the background but you don't really see the death but what you do see is Sophie's smile or Sansa's smile

and it was all in one shot and we did it you know seven times or something I just remember standing there with Dan And when she finally got like she nailed it on the seventh or eighth time and it was just that feeling of like that's such that's so epic. I mean, Sophie was so good. And when she when she got that shot, I just felt like that's, I can now die happy. Maybe I should have died happy right then. I peaked.

That's it. And this is obviously, look, it's Netflix. So of course, 99% of Netflix is the binge model. Was there ever discussion of any kind of different delivery system? Because some have done it in batches, strangeer things have done, you know, you know, kind of split up seasons were you, did you always want to do it this way or was there something? When we went, when we went into it, we went into it at the time that we, we signed up and started working with those guys. It was still very much all on the binge model. And so that,

you know, that was fine. That was what we knew it going in and we planned accordingly. Somewhere in the midst of the years it took to actually get the show made, they started opening up to the idea of different ways of dropping seasons, whether you're breaking them at half or breaking them into three parts or even, you know, even a week-by-week thing. I'm not sure they've done that yet. But by that time with this show, we'd already kind of built it to be watched, you know, watch at your own pace and not not broken up with time spent in between. And I think that with this one, it actually does.

I'm at least speaking for myself I'm pretty happy to have it all at once I think it works well for this show going going forward if we end up doing more of it who knows whether or not we'll stick with this or go to something that's maybe more like what stranger things did

but for this season it was always thought of as a as an all at once show so we wrote it that way I like calling a delivery system though I like the idea of it like a hypodermic needle like, gives you one episode. Take your medicine and you'll like it.

Keep you alive. Yeah, exactly. An amazing ensemble in this. You're sadly missing one president of the United States, I know. I just heard President Obama was approached. He's a noted fan of three-body problem. Do I take it he was going to be playing President Barack Obama in the stretch of a lifetime? Yeah.

What was the idea? Was there a seat? He rejected us flat out. No negotiation. He was very nice about it. It was my favorite rejection letter I'll ever get. Do you have a favorite? Many.

By the end of Thrones, where people must have been throwing themselves at you to do cameos. Did you reject a lot of people by the last season? I don't know. Usually when usually when people, if someone was willing to come all the way out there and like put on our armor and roll around in the mud, we were like, sure, why not? Okay, okay. Hey, Michael. Hey, Tom.

Well, big news to share it, right? Yes, huge, monumental, earth-shaking. Heartbeat sound effect, big. Rink is back. That's right. After a brief snack, nap. We're coming back. We're picking snacks.

We're eating snacks. We're raiding snacks. Like the same. Snackologist we were born to be. Mates is back. Mike and Tom, eat snacks. Wherever you get your podcasts. Unless you get them from a snack machine, in which case, call us.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Shear, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from the league, VEP, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk. about good movies, critical hits. Fan favorites, must-season, and in case you missed them. We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Greece to the Dark Night.

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcast. And don't forget to hit the follow button. Okay, it's official. We are very much in the final sprint to election day. And face it, between debates, polling releases, even court appearances. It can feel exhausting, even impossible to keep up with. I'm Brad Milkey.

I'm the host of Start Here, the daily podcast from ABC News, and every morning my team and I get you caught up on the day's news in a quick, straightforward way that's easy to understand with just enough context so you can listen, get it, and go on with your day. So, kickstart your morning, start smart with Start Here and ABC News, because staying informed shouldn't feel overwhelming. I'm going to go on record here. Maybe I'll alienate my own audience, but I'm going to say, I love the ending of Lost,

and I love the ending of Game of Thrones. Okay, I'm not saying it just because you guys are here. I've lost all my fans, but it's true. It was totally worth losing all of your fans to say. Yes, yeah, just to make you guys happy for 30 seconds. Totally. Were you taken aback by the discourse? Did you see it coming?

I think we knew it would be controversial. I think we hoped that it would be a little more 50-50. You know, I think you hope for like a better proportion of definitely didn't want it to be quite so much hate. We're prepared for some of it. But, you know. I guess I hadn't really taken into account the network effects, you know, which is the network effects that can help a show when they're working in your favor is a positive. feedback loop the kind of the exponential just like feeding on each other yeah yeah and I think I think

that's what that's what I was maybe referring to before when I was like it's it's hypocritical to to love it when it's blowing in your direction and to and to decide it's the end of the world when it's going the other way but it's it's like yeah I think that maybe that was the part of it that we hadn't really accounted for in knowing that some people were going to like it and some people weren't. David, is this why you're on the move right now that Game of Thrones fans are chasing you? Yes.

It's like hard day's night, except they have blades and hammers. But to your point, but I will say the only positive moment I've ever had with Homeland Security was going through LAX a few months ago. And the guy saw my driver's license and he said, he's like, are you, are you Dave and Dan? I was like, what? I'm one of, yes, I'm one of David. I love the final season. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

There was a really sweet moment in a situation where you're not expecting sweetness. So there are people out there who like the last season, not the only one. They're like 11 of you. Yeah, I was going to say to quote, rest of development. There are dozens of us. We exist.

I would imagine it, I know this is a project that you probably can't say much of because it's never going to happen. or maybe not, but like, I know you guys were going to do Star Wars for a bit. That must have been a thrill just to, I don't know, dip your toe into that world for a while. I'm just curious, like, how far down the road did you get? Did you have a script?

Did you have the trilogy mapped out? We had, we had, we, I think we got relatively far story-wise with the first one and, like, had kind of a basic roadmap for the other two. And, yeah, it was, it was a shame. I mean, it's just the truth is that our Hollywood's ratio or batting average on things conceived to things actually finished has never been tremendously high. And they're always going to be ones that get away for various reasons, you know, the ones that just aren't meant to be. So, yeah, it was sad that that was one of them for us. But it's just, you kind of, as time goes on, you just kind of need to let go of those things.

Because if you don't, you'll drive yourself completely crazy. Is there some awkwardness at all that James Mangold is tackling a story that sounds somewhat similar to what you guys were tackling? Sorry, is there some, is there some what, Josh? Well, the fact that, I mean, has there been conversation? because that was roughly the pitch, no, like the beginnings of the Jedi, the Dawn of the Jedi. I love Jim. He's a great dude. So I go all best of luck to him, you know.

Fair enough. So where are you guys at right now? Look, we're approaching the dropping of these first eight episodes of the first season. You have two more books to adapt. This is not something you can just like jump into and be like, oh, let's start. just dash off eight more scripts. So how far long are you in terms of figuring out what the next two seasons are? We have a pretty good idea of what a next season, hopefully we have a next season,

we don't want to count any chickens of any kind. You shouldn't count chickens at all. Generally, people out there. No, like let other people do. that. We're not chicken farmers. But we have an idea of a good idea and a framework of what season two would be how that kind of maps to where the books are. Beyond that, it gets a little bit hazier, you know. I mean, there are concepts even, you know, going forward that we're like, I don't know how we're going to do that. Like, we will. We'll have to. Hopefully it'll be a good

problem to have if we get to the point where we have to figure out some of these things then you know we'll know we've gotten that far and get to get to maybe the end of the story which would be fantastic um it's a it's you know certainly the the the the season right in front of us would be is is is i think uh something that we have a strong idea about past that you know hopefully we get there and we'll have a chance to figure the next one that. Definitely. Definitely. Here's hoping. I'm going to end with a little bit of a rapid file. We end the happy, say, confused

conversations with our profoundly random questions. Any of you can jump into any of these. Are you guys Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings guys? Either way you want to go. Lord of the Rings is more for me. Just because that's like one of the things that built me as a kid.

Foundational material. As a child, Lord of the Rings, but you know, as a parent, watching the Harry Potter movies with my kids was a lot of fun. So I would say Tolkien shaped me and I'm now misshapen, but it was great fun watching Harry Potter with my three kids. I read six of the seven books to my oldest son out loud, which was actually very nice. A lot of five fond memories of that.

Feel the same way with Harry Potter. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I take it Star Wars over Star Trek or is there love for both? For me, Star Wars all the way. I was more of a Star Wars person, although I did the original Star Trek, I was very into as a kid. Star Wars, though, I, you know, I'm friends with George Decay, so I can't hold that against him. You gotta represent.

Oh, my. Oh, my. Is there a movie, any of you are embarrassed to admit you've never seen? Birth of a Nation. Well, I think you're okay. I feel like, you know what? I don't think I've ever seen all sound of music. There's a movie that my daughter watches musicals on loop.

I feel like there's a French movie that was voted the number one movie ever by someone. I sell them like cinema magazine. Oh. It's the name of a story. Jean Delmar. I'm losing it. It's like Jean-Demage and then her address. Right.

She's a Chantile Ackerman movie. Yeah. Look at us posers. I won't spoil the end for you. It's a slow burn, but it gets there eventually. Actor who makes you happy in the spirit of happy second fuse, an actor that always makes you happy. William Cunningham.

Liam, Cunningham for David. M.M. M. M. Walsh. Nice. Dan. I do always love seeing and try not to name our own actors because I've been that I start to divide and divide loyalties

who's an actor always makes me happy Steve Mishamie Nice A movie that makes you sad I mean on the waterfront Yeah You guys can tell me breaking the waves really crushed me at the end.

Sorry, I'm probably not allowed to have two answers. That's okay. I'll take one of your answers. Fair enough. This is Bruderfilm. Yeah. Wow. I've seen it.

I've seen it so many times and it gets me every time. Finally, a food that makes you confused, gentlemen. You just don't get it. What's the deal with that? A food that makes you confused? Yep. Pineapple on pizza. I never really got.

I know people like it, never made sense to me. Yeah. We'll accept it. Alts. Flame it hot, everything. Like, just like, not everything has to be blaming on. Oh, it needs to have a coating, a chemical red coating to make it delicious, Alex. You don't get it.

David, finish strong. Food, that makes you confused. Oh, I'm not going to finish dry. I feel like I had two sad movies, so can I, uh, I've got nothing pineapple and pizza to get in? answer. That's bizarre. People really do that. It feels like something that people do just to be like...

Culture culture. I've seen it ordered and eaten. It's not by me. I'm just relieved. I'm sure we're... Like Chiraco in a sushi bar, and you were not confused by that. What happened? Chiraco.

Cod milk. Oh, my son's arm sack of a cod. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had that. Yeah. Kurt? Wait, we're talking about Kurds? Well, that... No, the Codd Spur.

I didn't know, but I actually liked that. I had that recently in Japan. Yeah, no, that's good. I agree. It sounds disgusting, but it was good. Let's just end on a happy note. David has found safe haven. The cops did not find him.

He's okay. We're all safe in our respective safe places. I did just think about if I had been murdered on the street of L.A. during your podcast, like that's how, that's the only way I have you remembered really is. Oh, yeah, that's the guy who got a shot. I didn't want to go there, but it would have been great for the show. Great content.

Great content. For three body palm and happy, say, I confused. It would have been a big win for all of us. We can't buy that kind of publicity. You want to run back out into the street and take one for the team, buddy. Do you have a few seconds left this time yet? I would do it, but there's just, it's not going to happen. Come on.

There's still two of you to show run the show. That's why you have three. So you have an extra. That's true. There should be a good three body pawn right here. I just feel like it's just waiting for somebody. The re-body problem is the show. I don't know if we convinced anybody to see it,

but we did our best guys. Congratulations. Epic in every possible way. I hope you guys got to do more of this. And thanks so much for the time, everybody. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Josh. Thank you, Josh.

Appreciate it. And so ends another edition of happy, sad, confused. Remember to review, rate, and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a big podcast. podcast person. I'm Daisy Ridley and I definitely wasn't pressured to do this by Josh. Are you looking for a movie review show where the critic is at the top of his or her game, meticulously breaking down and explaining exactly why a film does or does not work? Well, good luck

with the search because we're having fun here on Adam does movies. I talked to you like we just got done seeing a movie together, giving you the pros and cons, and I'm digging in the trench in the mud and muck on streaming services telling you which films are worth your time. Each and every week, I hit the big blockbusters, I cover the streamers, and I even toss in some movie news for fun. Because this show is Adam does movies. I'm obviously Adam. I probably should have led with that. But perhaps I have led you to check out the show on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube.

And hopefully, we can do movies together. Hooh-ho-ho-ho-ho. Hot. Thank you.