Happy Sad Confused - Matt Reeves

Episode Date: June 22, 2014

Filmmaker Matt Reeves takes a break from putting the finishing touches on “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” to talk to Josh about his biggest undertaking yet, why Apes was too tempting to pass up, and how he wound up writing a film for Steven Seagal way back when. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is the technology such that it's going to go up? Is it going to come down? Do you think it's going to be just sort of an extrapolation of where it is right now? Well, I think there's a lot of smart people wrestling with that right now. Today I'm speaking with Michelle Herodence. She's the executive vice president of Embridge, Inc, and president of Embridge Gas. She's a leader helping us reshape how millions of us experience energy at home. Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy Podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design

that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 XE90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Hey, guys. Welcome to another edition of Happy Say Confused. I'm Josh Horowitz. Welcome to my very own podcast. Thanks to all of you who have already subscribed and left your kind comments and your reviews. And if you haven't done either of that, then what the hell is your glitch? Guys, come on, just do it. Hit the subscribe button, leave a comment, rate the show, spread the good word. Hopefully you've been enjoying what we've been doing thus far and lots more amazing guests to come.

This week's guest happened very serendipitously. I'm really thrilled that we were able to make this happen. This is a conversation with a filmmaker by the name of Matt Reeves. If you don't know his name, you really should because Matt is, for my money, truly one of the most talented filmmakers working in Hollywood today. And is somebody that's just going to continue to turn out amazing work. His credits include Cloverfield, the film Let Me In. He co-created Felicity with J.J. Abrams, who was a childhood friend of his. They've remained very close ever since.

And he is also the director of the new Planet of the Apes movie, which looks amazing. It's called Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I'm sure you guys have seen the trailers and the posters by now. So what happened was basically, I know Matt through professional acquaintances, et cetera, over the years. I was a huge supporter of Let Me In, which was a remake of another amazing film. called Let the Right One In, but that was truly, let me in was my favorite film of, what, probably 2010 or 2011, whenever it came out. Got a chance to talk to Matt a lot in that time. And so when I heard he had signed up for the new Apes film, I was so stoked.

This is him working on a much bigger level, at least in terms of budget. This is his first kind of full-on Hollywood movie. Cloverfield was very much kind of an anomaly, not what I would consider a typical blockbuster, as he talks about in this podcast. Anyway, I was in L.A. I wanted to tape a podcast because I was going to be out of the loop for a week or so, thanks to some trips coming up. And I knew Matt was there, presumably, putting the finishing touches on Donna the Planet of the Apes. Hit him up, and we were able to arrange this really quickly, swung by his offices over on the Fox lot. The man was and is dead tired because he has literally been working without a break for months,

was still putting the finishing touches on his film, which I have not. yet seen. I have seen about 20 minutes of it, which look amazing. So, you know, just a big thanks to Matt for making the time. The guy's putting the finishing touches on the biggest film of his career, and he made the time to chat with me. So he's a really smart, thoughtful guy. If you've seen his work, he's meticulous, he's serious-minded, he knows his stuff, and he loves genre, so he checks all the boxes. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this conversation. As always, Hit me up on Twitter, Joshua Horowitz. As I said before, rate, review the show, spread the good word,

and in the meantime, enjoy this conversation with the supremely talented Matt Reeves. I think that you were a bowtie to work, even though you're obviously putting the finishing touches. You should be, like, in pajamas and... Yeah, you're crazy hours. I work. I literally can't tell you the last day I've had off,

and we work from... About 9 in the morning till probably 12, 30, or 1 every day. It's crazy. It's amazing. It's been that way almost the whole time. So, FYI, if it's cool, we're recording right now, it's pretty casual. There's no official introduction. Okay, cool.

So, obviously, usually I get a chance to actually see the film before talking to the guys. I know you're here working, so. Yeah, we're mixing right now. It's funny. When I walked, we're in the Fox building, I walked in, and I had deja vu. I think this is where Jim Cameron, like, took over for, like, Avatar. Like, I think he was doing all his shenanigans here at some point. I actually don't know.

I know. We shot a bunch of stuff in the volume down at his volume at Lightstorm in Long Beach. I'm sure it probably was here. Yeah. I know that they mixed here because our mixer actually mixed the film. He was telling me about it. And actually, I think they did take up. I think you're exactly right.

I think they were upstairs in this room and they were doing the 3D. I think he took over the whole building. You're exactly right. Yes. So he, I would imagine this is clearly a different scale of filmmaking than, you've done before. Yes. Is it, I mean,

when you, when you approached this one, you've obviously got some friends that have worked on the scale and you know the business by now, but there's one thing to know what it's like and some of those actually experience it. Does it, does the experience of being, directing a studio film of this type,

of this magnitude, of this weight, match what you hoped or thought it would be, or is it? Yeah, I mean, I would say, it's weird, because I would say that, And first of all, I knew it was going to be hard because one of the things that happened when I first got involved was they approached me. They told me what, first of all, I've been a lifelong apes fan, just like fanatical. And when I was a kid, I was obsessed with the dolls and I watched the TV show.

I had records. I had like a little eight millimeter of thing. You know what? I don't remember. To me, it was the coolest thing ever. I love it. I have no idea what the show was like because I haven't seen it since I was a kid. But when I saw it as a kid, it was the greatest thing ever.

And I loved Beneath. the Planet of the Apes, especially, which was terrifying. And I loved Planet of the Apes, of course. And of course I'd seen them all, and I had all these comic books, all this crazy stuff. So, you know, I'd always had a real affinity for it, and then when they talked to me about

doing it, the thing is, they approached me with the story that they were doing. Right. And I didn't respond to the story they were doing. And so I said, oh, I don't think I'm the guy for you. And they said, well, no, no, no. well, we're not, just tell us what you would do. And I say, well, the thing that I think you did that was so amazing in RISE was that

you created an emotional identification with Caesar that was beyond anything, I think, that had ever been done with the CG creation. Like I just think that what Andy and Weta did and Rupert and everybody in that film did is they created, they turned you into an ape, which is all I ever wanted to do as a kid was become an ape. But they did it emotionally. And so I was like, you know, I would do that story. because it wasn't really totally Caesar-centric.

And when I sort of said, well, what I would do is I'm less interested in the post-apocalyptic aspect of it, because that you've seen in a lot of movies. And of course, that's a feature of Planet of the Apes, so it will be part of the film, no question. I said, but what's really amazing is this idea that they went off, and somehow that Caesar created the beginning of civilization for the Apes. And so I wanted to see that movie, and I pitched that to them. I said, I don't want to, you know, the original story started with the Apes coming into the city, they were pushing up power lines and crazy stuff was happening.

I was like, wait a minute, the apes don't need any of that. Why are they here? Because what was interesting to me about Rise was that you're left in this place where with the viral apocalypse seemingly breaking out, you realize, oh, this is how there's going to be parity in numbers, and then it's going to be just about who is going to be the dominant species, who's going to be the one to take over? And so I thought, well, if you have a story in which there is parity in numbers because of the virus, then the advantage that the apes would have would be.

that they're apes and that they don't need any of the things that we need. And so we should start in their world and we should see their world. And I knew when I did that, first of all, they said yes, which was crazy. Literally I went in and I sort of pitched it out and I'd been meeting with Dylan Clark and we'd been talking

about it and Peter Cherin. And then I came in and sort of talked to the studio with them and I went through this whole thing. I said, look, here's what I would do. And my assumption was that that would be the end of it because they would basically say yeah, okay, good. Well, that sounds great and we're not doing that. And then they said, okay, fine, that sounds great. And I was like, you're kidding. And they were

like, no. And I said, okay, well, what's the catch? And they said, the catch is that we have a release date and you've got to do your best to make it. And I was like, all right, let's do this. Yeah, exactly. And to me it was like, because I was looking for, I was looking for so many reasons not to do it. Because the one thing about doing these big movies is that they're so hard that if you're going to devote, you know, this was, even though this was an accelerated schedule, this was two years of my life. And if you're going to invest that level of emotional, physical, and mental commitment, then it better be something you believe in.

You don't want to start it with compromise. Yeah. So if you start that way, then it's like going, okay, well, you know, okay, well, it's the opportunity to do this film. It's like, well, but if I can't do it the way I think it would be cool, then I'm not the right guy for it is really just the truth. And what was cool was that they just said yes. And I knew that the big problem with that was that my idea for what I thought would be cool to do was going to be the hardest shoot

that I'd ever been through and because my idea was that we would the other thing that I thought the thing that I loved in Rise was all of the sort of the way in which Andy's performance was then translated

into Caesar's face in a way that was so vivid that you connected with him emotionally in a way that was seamless you just felt you felt for him you were him and the one thing I did feel was I thought gosh

wouldn't it be cool to push the photo reality further so that that illusion which happens at an emotional level but every now I mean look it's amazing the movie when you look at it for that time there's no question it was mind blowing but still there were shots where I was like

there's a certain sort of you have to take a sort of level of just putting aside your lack of belief in the reality you just accept it and I was like well what if we could take that further how far could we take that and so I wanted to the first movie was shot a lot on the stage because when you're using mocap, which is an incredibly exacting

kind of technical experience, there's so many, not only that the cameras you're shooting on, but there's all of the mocap cameras all around. And they need to get good reliable information so that that motion can then be taken into the computers and then the animators can use it and work from it. And I was like, well, what if instead of doing it on the stage, what if we wanted to be in an apseilization, we actually went to a place like that? What if we went to the woods? What if we shot in the rain? What if we shot in the mud? And when I said this to Weta, I said, you know, the other people's heads exploded. Yeah, the cool thing was here's the crazy. But they were challenged by it. I'm sure they were excited. Well, not only that, here's the thing. Weta was

excited about it. And that to me was the most, I'd never worked with them before. And they are incredible. It's a crazy thing because most companies you work with, the shots come in. And when they start coming in, they start making a pitch to you as to why this should be. You do a thing along the way where you do finals, and that's basically like, now I'm accepting it, because you see all kinds of iterations, you see blocking passes, animation pass, and all that kind of stuff. With Weta, they're the only

people I've ever worked with to this extent, because they're doing everything in this movie. I mean, everything, and it's crazy. Like, almost every shot in the movie in some way, even just in human scenes, is an effect shot. And they're the kind of people who, if you say, God, you know what, I just don't think that's looking real

enough. You're not really getting the emotion of that moment, and on top of that, somehow, He's moving, it doesn't seem quite right. And they never say, well, you know what? We're running out of time. Sorry, see you later. They say, okay, okay. And then they go off, and then it comes back and you're like going, oh, my God.

So they're amazing. So they were really up for the challenge. And the other part of the challenge was that I wanted just the lighting and production design to be as real as possible so that we would have much more. I had this thought because there was one moment that really grabbed me and rise visually. On top of, I mean, there's plenty of really visual stuff, but it's going to sound like a non-visual moment. But there's a moment where COBA is lying on the.

table in fluorescent light and they're putting this um they're basically putting like an oxygen mask over him right and the lighting obviously whatever lesnie did in that scene it looks like they lit it with fluorescent light and it looked very it was very topy it was exactly what it was like the lighting in this room right and i thought that in that shot in particular cobal looked so real that it was one of those moments where i thought and that's not a real ape in this movie and i just thought what if we did the whole movie not in fluorescent light but with that concept use light that feels so utterly real. And Weta said, that's very exciting to us

because we've always felt that way. We've always felt that if you take, because a lot of what Weta's done is sort of more fantastical. Yeah, in a stylized world. Yeah, and that's the fun of what they've done. To put it in the mundane world we live in. And I was like, yeah, how natural can it be?

How real can the world look so that the only fantasy just becomes the idea of intelligent apes? And they were like, that will work. And it meant it was going to be the hardest thing that I'd ever done. and even knowing that, it was so much harder. I had no idea it would be this hard

because the thing about it is that my last film, we shot in the snow. And I have to say physically, that was one of the most, my toes are still not quite, I can't feel the tips of my toes in certain days and this kind of stuff, you know. So the physical experience of that

was as hard as this. The other thing that was really hard on this also was that the studio said, you know, we'd really like you to do it in 3D. and when I was talking to WADA, I said, first of all, I want the aesthetic to be a 2D aesthetic. And what that means is that one of the things that I wanted to do in terms of this reality was shoot stuff with less depth of field,

more naturalistically, more the way that you would shoot if you were really going to go up and do an epic story, like in the woods and there would be these grand scope vistas, but then when you were in the intimate moments, you would shoot them in the way that you would shoot drama. And that meant that, and the reason that that is very unusual, as an idea is that normally if you've got a company like Weta

creating like this is an ape civilization movie right so if I'm shooting you and behind you are like a hundred apes the idea is you want to see all 100 of those apes and I was like I don't want to see them I want them to be soft I want them still be moving I want it to be all that thing because if I was shooting you on a 75 millimeter

lands and we were a little bit open the movement would be back there but it would be soft and it was like basically like somebody would see that as throwing the money away I saw it as increasingly the uncanny reality of the thing. You look at going, wait, this isn't real? And they were very excited about that too.

But I wanted to make sure that the 3D would not interfere with that aesthetic. Because those are the two things I said in my pitch. In my pitch, I said I want the story to be Caesar's story and I want it to be an ape civilization sort of beginning story. And then we discovered the humans are still alive. So I literally wanted

to start the movie with the apes and be with them for 15 minutes before you ever saw any humans. And they said, okay, to that. And then the other thing that I say I wanted to do is I just said visually, I wanted this to be kind of a darker, more naturalistic, more realistic thing. And so when they brought up the 3D thing, I was worried. And then I saw Life of Pie, which at the time they had just done.

And then I got so excited because that's exactly the aesthetic that Eng did in so many of those scenes. He did, like I love shooting overs and soft focus overs and all the stuff that I associate with intimacy and reality. And there's a lot, there was a conventional thinking before then that overs are something. something you never do in 3D. You don't want to see an out of focus blurthing on the edge or that kind of stuff. Well, he did it in the movie, and I thought it was stunning. I thought, not only did I not think it was distracting, I thought it was beautiful. So I got very excited about the 3D. And then, of course, what that meant was that the shoot would be even harder because then, not only were we taking mocap capture cameras all around performance capture cameras and setting up in the woods in the rain,

on the hillside, in the mud, but we were using native 3D cameras because when I talked to Weta, they said the only way to do what you want to do and do it in 3D if you want to do this ape civilization story in the woods is you've got to shoot in a native 3D you can't post-convert because if you post-convert you'll never get the detail of everything we're seeing around us so that meant those cameras are so heavy every camera is two cameras and the cameras are mounted on a rig that keep it in constant popper convergence and all this crazy stuff so that meant we had to shoot on cranes on top of that

Because there is one steady cam shot in the movie. We did 10 takes, and the 10th take, and we had a very strong steady cam operator. There was no chance he could have done another. He said, yeah, I hope that's good because it's it's all I got in me. Yeah, that's what I got. So I knew that then we were going to be shooting on a hillside in the rain, fiber optic cable, two cameras for every one camera all on these crazy cranes, and that was insane. And that wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was that the mocap, the idea of, holding mocap in your head and what that is, nothing can prepare you for the strange mind games that that plays on you. Because on the one hand, the big relief very early on is that mocap is exactly the same in this way in terms of the performances. The first thing that I did when we started was, because I was so affected by Caesar, I wanted to see what Andy had done, and I wanted to understand how Weta had translated that. And so I asked them to show me the footage from the set that was of Andy in his mocap suit with his camera

and the dots all over him and then show me each of those shots with him as Caesar and the big relief came right away when I asked to see that scene where he's banging against the window when he's being left behind and he's pressing his face against the glass

and I remember I mean I teared up in that scene and I was like so powerful and then I saw what Andy did and I was blown away I was like oh this is such a relief the reason that Caesar is great in that scene is because Andy's amazing And in fact, he was, I felt, in certain ways, even better than Caesar.

And that just shows how amazing his performance is because what Weta is able to translate through was so powerful that it affected you even though Andy was doing even more. I thought there was even more sadness in the like rims of his eyes. You'd see a little bit of the red vulnerability and this kind of stuff. And I was like, oh, so that part is not a mystery. The reason Caesar's great is because Andy's great. And because Weta are geniuses, they know how to translate what he's doing into an anatomy of an ape. So that part of it was a relief and very exciting, and then working with Andy was incredible. But the other part of it that was really challenging, though, was that you have to do multiple passes of everything.

So when you're shooting a scene, you shoot a scene with the actors, and you bring Andy in, and you bring Jason Clark or Gary Oldman or Carrie Russell and Cody. You just bring them all in, and you start staging the scene. It's like any other scene. And that's where it gets weird, because you stage the scene. and then after you finally get the scene where you want it you have to ask the ape actors to leave and then you've got to go and you've got to get what they used to call the clean pass

but a clean pass in any other effects movie means you shoot a plate that essentially can be used for cleanup in this movie what a clean pass means it's what the people who are playing humans that's their performance for the film so some people were telling me in the last film that they would say okay so now we do a clean pass and that certain actors would never quite get

that the performance they'd just given with Andy was not going to be in the movie. And so that's a crazy mind-bender. So I basically like to say, okay, so Jason, now you're going to do this thing and now those, like Andy's not going to be there. And neither are, you know, you're going to be surrounded by, you know,

100 apes, which for us was probably 10 guys, but you're not going to have any of those guys. And they had to reproduce all those performances. How are they getting the cues and the... Well, sometimes Andy would actually... talk through his performance. We'd play back the chosen take and he would say it was pretty funny

because he's got this wonderful voice and accent and he would say, and see he's like woke up. It was this great thing and you would see and then basically the actors would react to their memory of the experience. It was crazy. And that was so that was hard but then

it was also hard to edit because no shot is actually the shot of the movie. I mean here's the crazy thing. We are near the end. Everything is composed. You have And I am not seeing, there are some shots that are still just coming in. And in fact, in the last month, I'd say I've seen more shots of this movie than I've seen during the whole course. And there's probably, you know, my shooting style is not the same as some. Some people have like really every cuts like, you know, two seconds long.

And so you've got like, you know, 3,000 effect shots. I don't have that many shots in the movie. But for this movie, like I said, virtually everyone is in effect. And I think we have probably, you know, around 1,200 shots of apes. the rush of them have been coming in in the last six weeks so that means

you've been working on editing a movie for a year and you haven't really seen quote your dailies until the last six weeks it's crazy and so you sit there looking at

okay so this shot what you're always trying to do what I try to do as a director is I try to respond to what's in front of me so when I'm watching an actor I just try to be open to whether or not they're moving me

or whether or not I feel what they're expressing oh he's afraid or whatever that is the crazy thing about editing mocap is you try to see that but you also then have to block out like 85% of what's in the frame so you try to respond to Andy

but ignore the fact that he's not an ape ignore the fact that we're against blue screen in this part and ignore the fact that these apes behind him there's going to be 500 of them and not two or it's crazy so everything that kind of you need to react to you don't see till very late so that

part of it made it more challenging on so many levels than anything I've ever done beyond the fact that it's also So a studio tent pole and just the pressures of that and the craziness of that. How much of the lore also of doing something like this was, you know, coming off of Let Me In, which, as you know, I was a huge fan of it. And it was very well received, but it's still like, you know, by the scale of something like this, small and a smaller audience.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure you got a huge rush off of the Cloverfield phenomenon. And it was that. And coming off of Let Me In where I'm sure you probably hope that more people just nitty-gritty, more people saw it. Sure. Is to play in this sandbox where you know you're going to get the popcorn audiences going. These are kind of films that you were raised on, I'm sure.

Well, you know, the thing about it is that for me, what was exciting, because I actually, there were a number of, one of the things about Cloverville that was great was that it did create a kind of splash in a way where I was approached with a lot of kind of some of these tent poles, right? And then actually, the great thing about doing Let Me in, which I did for personal reasons, because I was so connected to that story is that that actually created even more of those opportunities. That's the only reason that people asked me to do this.

But before they asked me to do this, because the interesting thing was, after Cloverfield, they knew that I could create a kind of feeling of dread and a bit of spectacle and actually do it in a restrained budget and do, you know,

there's a kind of cinematic trick that they knew I could pull off. But they didn't know necessarily because it wasn't the focus of the character maybe how I could do the, quieter moments or how I could do character moments or how I could, all of that kind of stuff. And then, of course, the one thing that was the same was that both films with Phil would dread. So I got approached with a lot of things that would have dread in them.

Including dread? I wasn't. I wasn't. I wasn't. Ironically, I wasn't. But the thing about it is that I had been offered a lot of movies that were these kind of tent pole movies. And I knew it would be, you know, obviously, because Cloverfield was made in a very specific way we knew we had a certain budget and in a way the studio was just they were so stunned that we were doing what we were doing on the budget that we were doing it for that their reaction was great and it wasn't like oh well wait a minute you've got to do this for that it was more like i can't believe you guys are doing this for that price right and so when they saw it were doing

they were great and really supportive but they weren't it wasn't like this or it was like okay so you're going to jump in the big sandbox and you're going to it just ended up being a big sort of connection and sort of out there where people sort of saw it and said it became a moment for that but it wasn't like doing this and I knew that when I finally did

a movie like that it had to be a movie where I felt I could connect emotionally to what it was and a lot of these tent pole movies I don't necessarily connect to because a lot of them

are about spectacle over character and the ones that I really love have characters somehow really at the forefront and then I also really like naturalism. I like realism. And so to me, this was really, when this opportunity came up, in fact, there was another project I was working on and my agent was like, I don't want to confuse you. And I was like, well, why? What will give you? Because I know you're trying to decide about

this other project. He goes, but I just was approached about this one. I don't know if you're a planet of the apes fan. I was like, what? Talk to me. What? And he said, well, they want to know if you would be interested in doing it. And I was like, oh my God. I was like, I will take that meeting. Yeah, and the funny thing about it is is that when I saw, so then I watched the movie again, and the interim from when I'd seen it originally, and when I watched it in preparation to come in to meet with them, I had had a son. And there was something in watching the movie the second time and watching Andy's performance that it's going to sound weird, but it totally reminded me in my son. And the reason, there were a couple reasons. One is that there are certain

moments, and I am a first-time father. So there were certain moments in being a father where, you look at your child and you look in his eyes especially this is around the time I was watching the movie my son was just starting to learn how to speak and I mean just like a word or this kind of thing and there's a

crazy thing that I saw which I'm sure you know which all parents know but was my first real experience of it you look at your son and you realize that behind his eyes is comprehension of almost everything in a certain way and because there's a kind of thing that I think that maybe I didn't quite

understand which I thought well there's a period of accumulation of knowledge or this and that and it was like no actually he sees around him and understands so much of what's going on he just doesn't have the tools yet to articulate and i could see his frustration my son became so much happier once he could speak sure because he was struggling and needs and wants and whatever and when i saw andy doing that role in the movie leading up to that moment where he says no and it's breathtaking that's what i felt going on and so and it was really heightened for me having had this experience with my son and there were also a certain moments where my son where I could see this incredible intelligence and this desire to express

himself, I would also then see him suddenly react very impulsively and animalistically, which was this thing. I was like, oh my God, this is such a reminder that I think that I often forget that we often forget that we are animals. We have these base impulses at the core. Yeah, exactly. And I looked at my son and I was like, God, you're a little animal. And I was so great. But it wasn't even that. I was like, I loved him for it. I thought, wow, that's right. That's what we are. And so somehow in seeing all of that, in addition to just the sheer sort of fanboy thing of being since a kid obsessed with that world and wanting to be an ape and having all those dolls and somehow in a mind-blowing way to think that as an adult after having been obsessed with it as a kid that now I would enter that world, it also had a real deep personal meaning for me because of that. And I thought, you know, when am I going to get the chance to explore those kinds of feelings, those kinds of instincts on this scale? and what I thought was so cool about this franchise

and why I was so shocked when they said, yeah, you could do that story, was because really what it is, is aside from the fact that they're intelligent apes, these are stories about who we are. These are stories about our nature. And so in a way, the movie, it's got plenty of spectacle. It's got all the popcorn thrills and scares

and all of the fun sort of stuff. But at its heart, it's actually a drama. And so to do a drama on this kind of scale, for one of these tent pole movies, that's got to be one of the rarest things in the world. I mean, that's what Chris Nolan is doing with Batman and Dark Night and all that. And I just thought, wow, that's what this is.

And so that was totally irresistible. That's the longest answer ever. You asked me about this whole thing. It's all fascinating. You're also operating on like two hours of sleep, so you're forgiven for long answers. It also must be just so cool. I mean, obviously your relationship with JJ is well known.

The fact that you guys, I assume, remain as sounding boards for each other, I would think, to a degree. I mean, he has the key. to the Star Wars Kingdom. He's literally right now shooting Star Wars. I know, so bizarre. We were just talking about it in the other room

because we were mixing, and there's a John Williams concert coming up, and they talked about how, like, at the Hollywood Bowl, when the Star Wars stuff comes out, that all the lightsabers come out and this thing. And it just suddenly hit me because that was such an important film for me as a kid, and I just thought, God, what must he be thinking to just be in that world?

What a weird thing, to be in that world of those films? Has he clued you into what story-wise or anything? I mean, only in the Vegas. ways. I will say this. I haven't seen him this excited and this nervous in a very long time, which I think is a great sign because it means that I just know when he gets that level of fear, it means that he's about to do something great. So it's really exciting. There are a few people I would trust more for that film than JJ. Is TwilightZone still something that you hope to get back

to? Was that the thing that you were wrestling with at the time? Yeah, that actually, that was the thing that we were wrestling with at the time. And that project, we weren't really in that place where I felt like it was fulfilling sort of what it should be. And so that's when it was like, okay, well, you've got to decide, you know, are you going to go all the way through with this? And that's when my agent said, well, is it a bad idea to distract you? And I said, please distract me.

I'm confused. And then I was like, that's not a distraction. That's what I want to do. So I'm actually not involved with the Twilight Zone anymore. Well, I find also fascinating. And, you know, we've talked a number of times. But in going back, and I remember this about your career, you almost have like a second Lise on Life as a director.

You directed The Pol Barre, which I remember seeing years and years ago, not a genre film, a much different kind of a sort of a thing that I think it sounds like you wrote out of college or right after school. Yeah, I did, yeah. So does it feel like this is all the last six, seven years since Cloverfield is like what you were hoping to get to way back when? Does it feel like a totally different life than you were trying to pursue way back then? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting path, you know, how you do.

I always find that for me, the way. weird thing in being a filmmaker is you have certain passions, certain things you want to do, and the idea of getting to make a movie is the greatest gift in the world. It's an incredible thing. And you want to be able to continue to do that, but you also want to be able to continue

to do that in a way where it connects to what excites you about it, or then why are you doing it? And I think I've always felt like I was in, and I still feel this way, that I'm always in the process of figuring out how it is you can have a career as a director. Because when you do that first

movie you know it's your first movie out of film school you've been saving up for for years in your mind you know it's like what they say with like certain albums where it's like well it took you know if somebody's 25 years old and they do an album it's like well it took 25 years really to do that album and what do you know in the next one you got a year usually sucks yeah exactly and so you know the thing about it is is that i i guess you know with each project i'm always trying to figure out okay so how do i continue to go in a direction that is exciting to me and keep the career going And one of the things that happened after the pallbearer, which was my first film, and it was a difficult experience in many ways, was that I ended up completely as a, I wouldn't say a fluke. I didn't understand what TV was.

I mean, I knew I loved TV. I'd been a huge TV fan, and I, you know, I loved, like, I was obsessed with, like, my so-called life and all of these shows. And when JJ and I, you know, we talked about doing Felicity as kind of casually sort of as a movie, and we realized it wasn't. in a movie. And then, in the weirdest way, it was like, well, you know, our agent had just left and joined another agency. And that agency was very big in TV. And he goes, well, you know, TV actually is, our agency is really good in TV. We could do this as a TV show. And I literally thought, I didn't know what that meant. I thought, well, so what does that mean? We'll go off. We'll do a pilot. It'll never get on the air. And then we'll try and figure out what the next

movie is. Right. And that's not what happened. The crazy thing was that that thing which we went off and did, and I directed the pilot and we did the show together, the crazy thing was, first of all, what a great experience it was. And it was like, it was no different from making a low budget film. And, you know, it was Carrie Russell was like this great cast. It was so much fun. It was like college all over again. It was really great. And I thought it was going to be one little stop along the way to figuring out what my next movie would be. And then the network loved it. The curse of success.

Yeah, it was a weird thing. But the weird thing was I literally, this is how little I understood about the TV. I said, so what does that mean? And I said, it means you're going to do a show now. And I said, well, when you say do a show, like, we're going to go and do a show. And the answer was yes. But you did manage to squeeze in under siege to dark territory. But that's not really true.

I didn't squeeze it in. Here's what happened with that. That's the greatest credit on your resume. Yeah, thanks. that project was actually I wrote a movie in college with my friend Richard Haddam and we were

I had this fantasy it's all about trying to become a filmmaker right so there was a huge I was a huge diehard fan like we were obsessed with I thought it was just the coolest movie and there was a period there when I was in film school

where there were a lot of what were called big spec sales and actually JJ was like you know doing a lot of spec sales and I remember I was in film school and JJ had already you know, he didn't go to film school. Like, Hardy Henry when he was like 22 or something. Yeah, and I was like going, wait, maybe I'm doing the wrong thing.

What are we doing? We should just be trying to write something, you know, and sell it and get in. And I really wanted to make a student film. And at USC, it's not guaranteed. A lot of film schools, you get to make a student film and other ones you have to kind of pitch. And it's like, USC is like the studio system. You have to pitch to the administration. You had to get it.

And I must have held the record for the guy who made it to the finals but never actually got the film for the longest time. And I was like, what am I going to do. do. So then I was like, you know what? I'm going to finance my film. And I had this crazy thought that if we could write one of these action movies in the spirit of like diehard or something, that it would be able to help me finance my film. And we wrote this movie and the spec market crashed and none of that happened. But the weird thing that happened was that these independent producers really loved it. And they optioned it. And we did some rewrites. I was still in film school. I ended up finding the finances for my film in another way.

And then right as I graduated film school, those producers went to Warner Brothers, and the spec market was picking up again, and they sold that movie to Warner Brothers. By the way, not as under siege. Again, this is this other project. And they bought it for an enormous amount of money. And everyone was like, going, congratulations,

but we had a deal because they had an optioned it. They got the money. We got very little. And so everyone was like, wow, that's amazing. And they're very odd credit on your IMD, thanks to it. This didn't really work the way I thought it was going to work. And then the weird thing was, then we did a couple, my first job, right out of film school, surely out of luck, because I'd made a student film, it got me an agent.

But the thing that was my first job was this. And I was writing with Warner Brothers, and, you know, Rich and I were writing and we're doing this thing. And we wrote a draft that was supposed to be, oh, this could be like Mel Gibson, or maybe we could get Harrison Ford. And then one day they came to us and they said, so, listen, we're making your movie. And I was like, you're making our movie. This is crazy. This is your dream.

It's the fantasy. And they say, yeah, we had a script coming in for Underseech 2, and it's not quite what we wanted. And actually, your script is, and we have to make this film faster. We lose Mr. Seagall. And I was like, oh, I said, but our movie isn't like that. And they said, it's going to be. And that's going to have that.

And the rest is history. Last thing for you, because I know you have a movie to finish. I mean, you are killing yourself for this one, yet you are, your next one is presumably going to be another ape's film. Yeah, we're figuring out the next one, yeah. So are you trying to balance in your head sort of like how you kill yourself a little less the next time? Because I'm sure it's going to be just as ambitious, if not more. No, totally.

I mean, you know, the thing about it is is that, you know, part of the idea of wanting to do another one came from just the richness of this world and the characters. And to me, the idea was that with, you know, because people have said to me, well, how can this be interesting when you already know the ending? like you know it becomes Planet of the Apes and I said but that's the most interesting part because in film school I had this teacher this guy Frank Danielle who is he was an amazing he's passed away but he was the dean of the school

and he was such an inspiring teacher talking about story and he would talk about two kinds of stories and that there were stories in which the big question was about what happens and you watch the movie and as it unfolds you discover what happens and then there are other stories in which you know the ending

you know and he was talking about like Casablan or something where there's like flashbacks or this kind of stuff. But if you know the ending he said then those stories are not about what happened. They're about why did it happen and how did it happen. And to me that's the most exciting. The why is the most important thing. And the why and the how is always

about character. And so the world is so rich because somehow this character that Andy and the writers and everyone, you know, Weta created that character leads to a path in which the apes are not only the dominant species but they essentially have humans as slaves

like all of these things that are very different from where we are in rise and actually where we are in dawn how do we get there how does that happen what is it tell us about our nature that this becomes that right and so that's such a rich vein that all those ideas started coming up and that's what got me excited about the idea of continuing down that vein not to mention certain characters that just start popping up you know we got we have a lot of great ape performers who we got involved like Toby kebill has her gives an incredible incredible performance and it's so exciting so you realize wow this is just so rich but the actual the hard part is okay so then the the just the physical and mental reality of going through

those hoops again it just comes down to um trying to have enough time to do it and and so i think that's that's the only thing i hope that will change is that somehow we'll be able to squeeze a little bit more time before it comes out but we'll see how that goes um well i can't thank you enough for squeezing me into what sounds like an exhausting crazy schedule but um it's good to see Hey, Michael. Hey, Tom. You want to tell him? Or you want me to tell him?

No, no, no. I got this. People out there. People. Lean in. Get close. Get close. Listen.

Here's the deal. We have big news. We got monumental news. We got snack. Actular news. Yeah. hiatus, my good friend, Michael Ian Black, and I are coming back. My good friend, Tom Kavanaugh, and I are coming back to do what we do best.

What we were put on this earth to do. To pick a snack. To eat a snack. And to rate a snack. Nentifically? Emotionally. Spiritually. Mates is back.

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