The Big Picture - A 'Joker' Deep Dive (SPOILERS) | The Big Picture

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Todd Phillips's 'Joker,' a gritty homage to '70s films like 'Taxi Driver,' has become one of the year's most anticipated and controversial movies. Sean and Jason Concepcion explore the long history of the Batman supervillain, in comic books and on screen (1:30). Then, they take a close look at the new Joaquin Phoenix–starring movie, its societal ramifications, and what it means for the superhero movie genre at large (41:20). Finally, Sean is joined by writer-director Noah Hawley to discuss his feature film debut, 'Lucy in the Sky' (75:18). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Jason Concepcion and Noah Hawley Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys? It's Liz Kelley, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I want to tell you guys about a brand new podcast coming to our luminary slate called Sonic Boom. For more than four decades, the Seattle Supersonics were among the NBA's most iconic franchises. But in 2008, they packed their bags for Oklahoma. Hosted by the Ringers' Jordan Ritter Kahn, Sonic Boom tells the story of basketball and politics, wealth and power, and reveals new truths about the NBA's greatest heist. You can find the eight-episode documentary podcast exclusively on Luminary starting October 3rd. Me here at last on the ground, you in me, dear. Send in the clowns.

I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about, that's right, Joker. Joker is here, but first, later in the show, I have an interview with Noah Hawley, who is best known as the creator and showrunner of shows like Fargo and Legion. His feature directorial debut starring Natalie Portman is Lucy in the Sky. It's a loose riff on that infamous story of Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who suffered a breakdown, who we've all read about many times. That movie is out this weekend, so check out that conversation after this talk. But now I'm joined by Ringer Senior Creative, host of the Emmy-winning NBA desktop,

and the co-host of Binge Mode, Jason Concepcion. What's up, man? I'm ready to talk about the Joker. You're here to talk about the Joker with me. There's only a handful of people that I really trust to come into this very special environment we've created on The Big Picture and talk about comic book movie content. This is a different kind of comic book movie content. And in order to talk about this movie, I think there's a lot we need to unpack about the history of this character later in the show.

But before the Noah Hawley interview, we're going to talk about Todd Phillips's Joker, the movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. And we'll talk about it in great detail. We'll talk about what works, what doesn't work, how we felt about it, what this maybe means for the future of comic book movies, maybe what it means for the Oscars, a whole bunch of things. But before we get there, help me, a regular man living in the universe,

understand why the Joker is such a persistent figure and where he came from. The Joker, Batman's archn nemesis made his first appearance in uh batman number 119 so this is 1940 um the country is still wracked by the depression which created a crime wave all throughout the 30s comics at that point were kind of an extension of of pulp fiction so hyper violent lots of crime stories, malls, gangsters, that kind of thing. To that point, Batman, who's previously existed in detective comics, had been fighting, you know, like gangsters, petty thieves, the odd mad scientist. But he had not found, you know,

as the world's greatest detective, had not found his moriarty until batman number one with the appearance of the joker and you know it's really striking i was rereading it and it's almost all right there right away you know the green hair the purple suit purple trench coat use of mass media to broadcast terroristic threats, mass killings, the use of chemicals, the use of poisons, his elusiveness. I mean, this guy just escapes very easily. So a voice comes over the radio and interrupts Gotham's repose and says, tonight at precisely 12 o'clock midnight i will kill henry claridge and steal the claridge diamond do not try to stop me the joker is spoken of course henry claridge

does eventually pass away despite the fact that he is surrounded by a cordon of police officers it turns out the joker had snuck in and injected him with a chemical agent that's deadly effect would only strike after 24 hours. This is in the very first appearance of the Joker. This is the very, very first appearance of the Joker. Now, like a lot of stuff in comics, who created the Joker is pretty disputed, but this is what we know, that the character is, according to Bill Finger, co-creator, and Bob Kane, they agree on this, that he was based on the character from the 1928 silent film, The Man Who Laughs. Conrad Veet. Conrad Veet is the actor. The character is Gwynplaine,

who is disfigured with a permanent grin by the villain of the story. And you can look at the still from this movie, and yeah, that is the Joker. According to various stories, Bill Finger showed Bob Kane a postcard with Conrad Veidt's picture on it or vice versa. Whatever the case, almost certainly this is the template for the person who would become the Joker. Right. So the man who laughs is he's got a pale face.

Pale face. A big, massive, oversized grin. Right. He's got rimmed lips. He's got slicked back hair. Right. And blackened eyes. And he looks a bit like a clown.

He's not a clown. He's not a clown, but his face is frozen in a mask of delight, which, when contrasted with the character's obvious suffering and the kind of tragic things that go on around him creates this really kind of eerie frisson of evil and revulsion in people. And certainly that is the effect that the Joker has on people. The first Joker's first few appearances, like he appears in, I believe, nine of the first 12 batman stories

and he is a remorseless killer absolute murderer he uh some of the notable stories from this period are detective comics number 62 laugh town laugh Town Laugh from 1942. A famous comedian leaves an enormous sum in his will to the person who can tell the best joke. So the Joker goes out and kills the top comedians in Gotham so that he can then tell the best joke and get the money. Detective Comics 64, The Joker walks the last mile. Here we see the Joker as this kind of like troll figure who delights in using the mechanisms of government against itself. Joker turns himself in, confesses to all his crimes and is promptly electrocuted in the electric chair. But using another chemical, his henchmen bring him back to life. And he's trotting around town.

Batman sees him, says, hey, wait a second, brings him back in. He's brought before a judge. The judge says, well, guess what? Because of the double jeopardy laws, we cannot convict the Joker of his crimes again. And he is free to go. And the Joker is then free to gallivant around town while his henchmen commit crimes in his name. He pretends to know nothing of this. And, you know, he goes to the circus and sits in the same box as Batman, taunting him. Really interesting stuff. And here's where we get that first hint of the Joker delighting in taunting Batman.

Why does the Joker do all the things he does? He doesn't seem to need money. He doesn't seem to spend it on anything. He just kind of likes causing chaos. He kills scores of people over the course of his first few appearances, but gradually softens over time, becomes more of a heist master, robbing banks, stealing jewels, using clever gimmicks for each kind of crime. And then a really landmark thing happens across the industry, which is the creation of the

Comics Code Authority, which a similar thing happened in movies where – The creation of the MPAA. Right. Responding to kind of public outcry about the content of their books and fearing government oversight, the comic publishers kind of created this self-regulatory industry which promised to make make sure that uh contents of a sexual and violent nature was kind of toned down and from then on uh the joker kind of became like a more buffoonish clown character very campy uh i'm thinking of uh you know and and his gradually kind of like winnowed away his appearances and then came 1966 and the batman tv series um which kind of really codified the joker as this you know very clown like colorful criminal but ultimately one who wasn't really going to hurt anybody.

So let's talk about those first two phases because those are important to me. The first phase, it always struck me, and I don't pretend to be a Batman expert. Batman is not in my personal canon of superhero comics. But Joker always struck me as a kind of pure evil, not a very psychological character, even though he played very psychological games on Batman. And he was a little bit of that agent of chaos that we see later in some of the Nolan films. But it just seemed to be a very cut and dried

kind of derivation of villainy, of evil. And then in the 60s, he becomes a little bit more of a goof. And he's not, perhaps not as life and death threatening. Maybe the stakes are lower because of the comics code and we start to understand him as the quote-unquote clown prince of crime and the air comes out of the balloon a little bit more and even though he becomes a more popular and well-known character in caesar romero being on tv once a week as the joker probably

makes him a more influential figure. Probably just not as meaningful intellectually as he would go on to become. At some point, things change. Yeah. So what happens that the Joker somehow becomes this portal? There's a course correction in the 1970s when the comics kind of writ large returns. This is like silver age of comics, so to speak, and it bronze age, excuse me. And they all kind of returned to their darker, pulpier roots.

For one, the Comics Code Authority kind of loosened its reins. And then a new generation of comics creators came in who were kind of weaned on these, who kind of wanted to return comics to their roots. With Batman, you're talking about writer Dennis O'Neill and artist Neil Adams, who really this iconic creative duo. Batman 251, Joker's five-way revenge from 1973 is really a landmark issue. Return of the Joker.

He breaks out of a unnamed state mental hospital. And also this is also kind of the first state mental hospitals as places where Gotham's criminally insane were housed had been mentioned before, kind of the golden age. Silver age, so you're talking like 50s, been mentioned before, kind of the golden age, silver age. So you're talking like 50s, 60s. It kind of went away. And this is the issue that really brought that back.

And it was not too long after this, I think only like seven issues or so, where that state mental hospital for the criminally insane was titled Arkham Asylum, which is obviously iconic. So the Joker returns, breaks out of prison. He's angry that he has been put on ice for so long, and he blames one of his old gang for betraying him. And he sets about to, you know, kill them all. So he starts just killing off his old gang members. Batman is, of course, contacting these people, trying to stop them. A lot of them are like, I don't want to work with you, Batman, regardless of the danger.

Several of them are killed. And this is a really interesting issue because we get like this kind of, um, first of all, the Joker's back and he's killing people again after all these years. And then we get this kind of hint of the weird psychological almost psychosexual relationship between him and batman where batman because batman doesn't want to kill of course that's one of his like core tenets because batman cares about the lives of others and also doesn't want to kill he's willing to let the joker cause a lot of damage before he really stops him. So the Joker has one of his final living henchmen. He has him hostage.

He has him suspended in a wheelchair over a tank with a shark in it. Very James Bond. Very James Bond. And Batman, rather than allow the Joker to let this man be eaten by a shark, submits to the Joker's whims, which is the Joker ties Batman's wrists behind his back with chains and then places Batman in the tank with the man, with the shark. And, you know, of course, Batman prevails. But it's one of the first a real dark turns and it's uh and it represents a real

return to roots for the for the character who then is is kind of like placed on this path of not just murder a psychopath but one that's willing to torture to get what he wants from the very beginning the joker has a device that Batman creators have used is the Joker captures Robin and that is something that compels Batman forward. From here on, we see that the Joker is not just willing to capture Robin, capture other people, but torture them in order to compel the Batman to do what he wants. And this would culminate in Death in the Family, an arc in the 80s in which the Joker, after being involved in a very shady business deal with Robin's long-lost mother, actually beats Robin to death.

So the 70s with Dennis O'Neill and and and neil adams is really the the return to not just the joker as a more murdering figure but batman the detective batman the the darker figure throughout the kind of um 40s 50s and 60s batman was like shockingly quippy you know he'd be socking people in the face and saying yeah take that you i bet you never thought i could do this like he does barrel jumps on ice skates like in one issue but in the 70s he becomes completely internal that stuff it's all thought bubbles with him thinking through the clues and wondering what's going to happen next and he he becomes very taciturn so it's a dark turn overall in the 70s.

And that's really where it begins, culminating in Death in the Family, Dark Knight Returns, these kind of super gritty, for lack of a better word, Batman stories that feature gruesome crimes committed by the Joker. And I feel like that takes us to essentially 1989,

which is when we meet Jack Nicholson's Joker. And it's a fascinating conversion because you've got almost 50 full years of a character arc. And he's gone through various iterations. Some of them are meaningful. Some of them are just happenstance of being a reflection of a TV character or something that is a little bit goofier

or the vagaries of the way that the medium is changing over time. I guess my question to you before we get into Jack and we get into the movies, which I think we should look at pretty closely because there have been three big examples up until now and a fourth is upon us. Is this a character that you like?

Would you get excited when you would open an issue and say, oh, it's a Joker issue? Um, oh, that's a great question. You know, yes and no. Yeah,

I would say so, especially since, uh, post the kind of like death in the family, dark night returns issues, which really set up the Joker as, as something, um,

even more ominous than he had been. But it's also frustrating because over time, you begin to wonder, why doesn't Batman just kill this guy? Just murk this dude. Stop putting him in Arkham. He's going to get out. I promise you you he's been doing it for years um and that really uh that exploration of their dynamic together is uh really the lens through which i process this character it's less about the joker on his own which is a conversation we're going to get into talking about this movie um and a really fascinating aspect of this movie. And it's more about this really bizarre relationship between a hero and a villain who are essentially two sides of the same coin. Order and chaos. Yeah.

And I think that I personally, one of the reasons I never truly caught into Batman is because I found Batman a little dull. Not just because when you're 11, if you're not a Sherlock Holmes person, you might be more drawn to the X-Men than you would be to the detective who has a cave. And full disclosure, X-Men was my favorite comic. Yes, mine as well. I think we're of that generation. And I think the stakes, I think,

always felt somehow more global in X-Men, but never as sort of personal and murderous as I think a lot of Joker stories did, which I found to be like a little bit difficult as an 11 or 12 year old. It was a fairly intense series of books. Yeah, there's an intimacy in with regards to the Joker's crimes, you know, like the X-Men and you're talking about global politics and ideology and philosophy and all these big ideas. The Joker just wants to hurt specifically Batman. Like, yes, he robs banks, and yes, he's stealing priceless jewels

from various heiresses and rare baseball cards, but he really just wants, and also, like, in one of the most hilarious arcs, attempting to trademark all the fish in the sea uh but he really just wants to fuck with batman like in a major way he wants to hurt him um and that is a a really an intimate and dark thing so in the movie version that we get tim burton decides to make Batman in 1989. And he makes a hard left turn by casting Michael Keaton as his Batman, who is a very unlikely choice, who is perhaps not the overwhelming, physically imposing presence that you might expect of a Batman, who is basically has a comedy background, who actually later goes on to be really praised for his role. And there are a lot of people who I think who still believe he was the best batman actually what is your take on that um you know he's good

i think that a lot of the kind of blowback you know we had just come from the 80s where it was like if you didn't have 50 pounds of muscle on your frame then you were not an action star period it took until it took really die hard to change that paradigm um but i think he was good there's a weirdness and a steeliness to him and and and a kind of you know something really off-putting about his depiction of of bruce wayne that i find compelling i think bail is better because he manages to capture a certain blankness about br Wayne that I think is kind of really important to the character. You don't know what the hell's going on in Bruce Wayne's head. What is going on inside of his heart and his soul and his mind that drives him?

I have no idea. And I think Bale's depiction really got at that. Yeah, I always thought Bale did a really nice job too of this sort of debonair smarminess that Bruce Wayne needs that Keaton was weirdly a little too empathetic in his oddballness as Bruce.

Nevertheless, the choice for Joker was Jack Nicholson and it's an inspired choice and he is a kind of an obvious, you need someone who is willing to

play to the rafters to do the Joker well. The Joker is a quote unquoteunquote hysterical character. Yes. Oh, I got a live one here. Oh, there'll be a hot time in the old town tonight. He's laughing all the time. He is a bit ridiculous.

It's kind of bon mots galore, double entendres galore. He's also talking, Nicholson's character in particular, is talking in a kind of illogical riddle language where a lot of the things that you hear him say, and most famously, if you've ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, which is the most quotable line probably that he utters in the movie tell me something my friend you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight what i always ask that of

all my prey i just like the sound of it just it doesn't mean anything in fact he gets called on it in the movie and he's like it doesn't matter that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, he gets called on it in the movie and he's like, it doesn't matter that it doesn't mean anything. It's just a cool thing I like to say. And it underlines a little bit of the illogical nature of the character where we can't really get to the bottom of what are his motivations.

I think that's a core trait of this character, which is why the hell is he doing this? Why is he robbing banks the hell is he doing this? Why is he robbing banks? Why is he killing people? You can't really get to the bottom of it all. He kind of espouses at times and through different incarnations kind of the fragments of political ideas,

but it's clear that he doesn't really care about it. He's just kind of like putting that stuff forward to get a reaction. And in a certain sense, he's like, we'd call him a troll today. That's right. You know, an edgelord. It's basically what he is. He does stuff to get a reaction from people. When you have him portrayed by Jack Nicholson, though, you get something that feels almost hyper real Jack Nicholson owns such a big

part of the actor real estate in the consciousness of the movie going public in the 80s you know he's he's already been he's already an icon at this point and so it really does feel at all times like not Jack inhabiting the Joker but the Jack is the Joker right the Jack just decided to be the Joker for a month. And he's got Jack voice and that devilish grin on his face, that outsized grin, which is, you know, I don't even fully know how they did that in the film, the way they stretch his face in that way. But it's both enormously effective, but also the whole time as I was rewatching the movie, I was like, that must've been really annoying for Jack Nicholson to have those prosthetics on all day.

That looks really uncomfortable. And it's kind of distracting and it's kind of wonderful. I think he has a level of commitment in the portrayal that is fascinating to me and they do fuck a little bit with his origin and who the character is. They try to give him a little bit more of I think

a kind of noir crime movie background where he's kind of a upper level henchman lieutenant for a big-time mob boss played by Jack Palance in an interesting bit of casting. And eventually, as he is trying to, I believe, murder a cop and rob some documents from a factory before burning it to the ground.

He falls into a vat of chemicals. He encounters Batman and he falls into a vat of chemicals. Now, the vat of chemicals thing is something that's been repeated over and over again. But where does, does that have any legacy in the comic book?

Why is that? Because we saw the same thing in Suicide Squad. Right, right. When Jared Leto portrays him and he creates Harley Quinn by putting her into a vat of chemicals. Is that,

where does that, does that come from the Batman movie? No, that's been canon for a while the first appearance of the chemicals was from 1951 detective comics number 168 mystery of the red hood um basically before the joker was the joker in this story um he was a criminal known as the red hood who has a confrontation with batman in the midst of a heist and trying to escape he dives into a vat of chemicals and emerges as the joker you got to understand that for decades we had no idea where the joker came from zero idea now there's a there is a story going sane from like 1988, which kind of like very similar to the Joker movie where you get like this kind of like these snapshots of the Joker is like this of the struggling comedian. his background with the chemicals and also with him being the guy that shot Bruce Wayne's parents

in front of him uh that you get those elements that that struck me as one of the first times I became aware of a kind of fanboy culture complaining about messing with canon because when the Jack Nicholson Joker character before he becomes the joker kills bruce wayne's parents there was a little bit of an outcry of people saying like you've taken too many liberties you don't truly understand batman in making this movie the tim burton batman and batman returns are fascinating cultural documents because on the one hand they obviously presage exactly where popular culture is going but they're so immensely strange and so so sort of like goofy yeah they don't really they don't look or feel or sound at all like aquaman or like iron man

they they are unto themselves and it's a fascinating rewatch i think nicholson does is doing something really funny it's notable to me that he was not nominated for an Oscar. I feel like if he gave this performance... A lot of Oscars was at the time. There was. And he was also... He got nominated for Falling Out of Bed in the 80s. He could have done anything and gotten nominated. And I think at the time there was a little bit of an intellectual

resistance to comic book movies that maybe there wouldn't be now in the aftermath of Black Panther being nominated. But I do like the Nicholson performance. Sure. I like that movie. I don't know if I love it. The Joker that comes next is not Heath Ledger.

I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else. All it takes is one bad day. I think it's Mark Hamill. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day. Were you a Batman the Animated Series watcher? I was not. This happened underneath me, although I retroactively watched them.

Once Harley Quinn started really becoming a thing, one of the more interesting origins of a character created for a cartoon, then becoming so popular that she entered regular comics lore. And so I watched them in reverse. I watched them that way. Yeah, Mark Hamill also voices the Joker in the Batman video games, the Arkham video games, is almost like satanic in the gleefulness that he depicts the Joker with.

A really interesting performance. And I think people are perhaps, there's probably a lot of people who are unaware of the influence of Mark Hamill on the Batman universe, like completely independent of his Star Wars fame. Yeah, I mean, there was a good piece by Alan Siegel on the ringer uh earlier this year about the the array of voices that he has done over the years in animated series and elsewhere but I think his Joker is probably the most iconic and it is it is kind of back to that evil those evil roots I wouldn't say it's necessarily the most psychologically drawn character it's a cartoon meant for children, but it's

been said many times it's one of the best animated series probably ever made. It's a really good iteration of a comic book, and his portrayal is fun. It's effective. It works really well. Those mob fools want you gone so they can get back to the way things were. You know, I was reflecting a bit on Heath Ledger and what he did in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. A couple things to talk to you about. Sure. No, no, no. No, you, you complete me. A couple things to talk to you about.

Sure. You and I did a rewatchables of this movie with Chris Ryan a couple of years ago. Very fun rewatchables. And I think we might've nitpicked a little too hard, but in general, I think we have huge admiration for that movie. Yes. The thing I remember originally

and what feels very quaint right now is do you remember the teaser trailer for the dark night i do not so obviously batman begins was a big hit and i can't recall what film it ran in front of is probably early 08 and all it was was a sort of a shadow image and light bursting through the shadow and slowly but surely light formed around the batman symbol and all you could hear was stray bits of dialogue from the film. This is before we had seen even a frame of the film. I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight. And at first what you hear is Bruce Wayne's voice

and then you hear Alfred's voice. You crossed the line first, sir. You hammered him. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand. And Alfred says, he's essentially talking about a man who is in search of chaos, a man who wants to watch the world burn. And then we hear Heath Ledger's voice slowly but surely in that burst of cackle.

Starting tonight, people will die. I'm a man of my word. And I remember being in a movie theater and people started yelling because it was the first sign that we were getting a Joker Batman movie. And I don't know how we got to that point where the anticipation for that character felt so titanic. But and Ledger had that perfect his his version of the laugh is the version to me. And I remember a kind of, I could tell right at that moment that this was going to be the biggest, maybe the biggest movie of all time. It may not be the biggest, the box office champion, but in the minds of like our poisoned minds in the 21st century, I feel like this movie carries the most weight of anything you know it's interesting because that the jack nicholson uh joker didn't really have that much influence on the depiction of the character in the comics but the heath

ledger joker absolutely changed everything how so um he just became a lot it became very de rigueur to uh to make the joker absolutely revolting he does this one thing where he allows his face to be cut off, cut off, and then he wears it a Hannibal Lecter style, like with using like bands to like kind of tie it onto his like raw skull and carries out his various evil adventures just with this rotting skin on his face, you know, like post Heath Led ledger it's like let's make him scarred let's make him even more depraved let's like make his flesh rotting let's

make it you know like even the the darker turn in the 70s he's got he's kind of natty in the pinstripe purple suit he looks you know the hair is well done kind of a handsome clown right the makeup is is is put on well post heath ledger the makeup's all messed up the lipstick is smeared his skin is rotting he's just a much more revolting figure after that yeah and i think the thing that people have glommed on to is the idea of a person that is a little bit closer to what you were describing that started to happen in the 70s, which is a man with one purpose, and it is merely to sort of torture his counterpart. And otherwise, what he wants to see is chaos.

He wants to see things exploding. He wants to see people panicking. He wants to see what happens if you can upend the system. And it's a pretty, it's a riveting performance. He obviously won posthumously the Oscar for his performance. And he resets the template, I think, for what you can do in a movie like this. And there is a very clear connection to me

between this performance and what Joaquin is doing in the Todd Phillips movie. I wouldn't say that he's emulating him by any means, but it's an updating on this this concept of um no holds barred i agree and there's you know there are it's when creators you know it's the it's really the first time that um in a non-comics format where you saw a depiction of the Joker as someone who has been traumatized in some way, where you got an idea of the internal landscape of this character. And it's not good. You know, the constant lying about his background, the explanations for the scar, which change over time, the kind of joy he takes in watching people suffer, the willingness to put himself through pain, and the joy he takes from being beat to a pulp by Batman at times. is a is a real darkness there that was absolutely influential to the way the character is depicted

now you know just like a kind of self-mutilation that takes place um in the creation of this character some somewhere in his past that has has really imprinted itself on the way the character is is depicted going forward and one thing that's interesting relative to the nicholson character the impression you get from watching that character, who I think is called Jack, it seems like he wants to run Gotham. The thing he's most interested in is sort of taking over and being in charge of Gotham, whatever that means. He's obviously crazy, but, and been driven mad by this chemical experience that he's had, but he has sort of like an end game. He's like, I want to kill Batman. I want to kill all game he's like i want to kill batman right

i want to kill all the police officers i want to kill all these people and make them realize that their vanity and their greed is their worst enemy and that they should die for it but i do want to be in charge and you don't get that impression from the ledger character at all you you you mentioned the sort of like the unreliable narrator quality of the character, which makes him so much scarier. And we never know. He's always constantly retelling his origin story in a new way. And that's really some of the best acting that Ledger is doing is when he has got someone locked in and he starts saying, you know, I got these scars, like all that stuff.

My father was a drinker. And he's completely riveting. But you know that he's a drinker. And he's completely riveting, but you know that he's a cipher. He's a metaphorical figure for an uneasy feeling we have about terror. Yeah. Which makes him really, really powerful. I don't want to get too far ahead,

but that is one thing that the movie Joker does the opposite of that it is quite literally an origin story in which even though some things are not as they seem in the film it's trying to explain who and what this person is now it whether the movie is a part of dc canon going forward we don't know we may never know but I have always loved and appreciated the fact that Nolan knew not to give us where this guy came from it. Cause it, in many ways,

I think it does not matter. And I think it's more effective if we never learned. I think it's way more effective. Yeah. But I, not again, not to get too far ahead of ourselves. I was,

I found, I found Todd Phillips Joker very compelling. It is. It is very compelling. I think it's going to be so funny to watch us try to adjudicate our own feelings about a movie that I think we both really liked. Before we go there, though, anything else you want to say about Heath? Just one of the most titanic performances this character that had existed for 60 years before that. It's truly amazing.

If you haven't seen the movie The Dark Knight, I would recommend that film. Very quickly, Jared Leto. So what are we doing? Bring the car out. We're going for a drive. So Suicide Squad is really just one of the more bungled movies of the last 10 years. And it's interesting how much, how little of the Joker is in this movie. Yeah.

And it seems like there was quite a bit left on the cutting room floor and they kind of refashioned the film halfway through. It seemed like David Ayer, the director, was trying to make something deeply dark

and gritty because that is his style. And people said, whoa, why is this not funny? Right. This movie has Will Smith and Margot Robbie

and should be a little bit more of a romp. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you get a Bohemian Rhapsody tuned trailer and you see that the movie has taken a slightly left turn into a kind of a hijinks. Yeah. Near do wells movie.

I think DC and Warner Brothers at the time was like in the throes. You might still say they are still in the throes of an identity crisis brought on by the fact that marvel was kicking their ass up and down the street with their movies and had seemingly figured it out and you know this is a company obviously with with a decades-long rivalry with marvel and so what do you do do you copy the formula and then get called out for copy the formula or do you try to establish a brand that's antithetical to Marvel's and have a different? It was just like you could feel that all throughout this movie. actually the villain why are we not seeing more of Jared Leto I think Jared Leto's choices are all wrong and it's not it's a different kind of a character but it has too many trace elements of the Heath Ledger performance to make it any good it does feel like a pure vision of evil and

not madness he's there's just a lot more anger and glee at violence and not enough of the psychological damage that i think we come to associate the character with so it's a weird kind of reversion there's a there's an off putting vanity to to this depiction of the joker like he's strangely muscular the tattoos speak to something uh something other than an internal derangement and just seemed like, I guess you'd look back and be like, why are you trying to be Tekashi69? It just looks weird. And using image in a way that we don't think of the Joker using image. We're going to talk about Todd Phillips' Joker now, but first let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor.

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And people are starting to notice. You think this is funny? Is this a joke to you? We're back here on the big picture talking Joker. Jason Concepcion, you and I, last night we had a date. We went to a movie theater. It's delightful. We saw the feature film Joker, which is,

I think this is a three-pronged conversation. And I'm going to outline for our listeners where we're going to go with this. One, we're going to talk about the movie. Do we like the movie? Does the movie work? How does it fit into the storytelling that we've been discussing for the last 45 minutes? How are the performances, et cetera, et cetera. Then we're going to talk about the controversy of the movie and the complicated ideas that have surrounded this movie.

Now, personally, I find them a bit exasperating. But having seen the movie, I actually do understand why there is this fraught conversation around it. Thirdly, we're going to talk a little bit about comic book movies in general because you are as passionate and thoughtful a fan as anyone I know. And I do think that this movie will create some ripple effects in the way that we experience these movies. So we'll start with the movie. The movie ended last night, and you turned to me, and you said, wow, Todd Phillips made a great movie.

Yeah. He made a good movie. I like Joker. It was pretty good. Yeah. I think that it feels strange to say it was pretty good, because we absorbed a lot of commentary from the makers and the people who have seen it in Venice, it won the Golden Lion and the Toronto Film Festival

where everyone said whoa this is a nihilistic piece of garbage and it's a you know thinly veiled taxi driver wonk I think it I think it's kind of everything I think it's kind of a masterpiece and kind of a taxi driver wonk it is certainly kind of a taxi driver wonk and seemingly very purposefully so. In its setting, in the time frame, in the certain shots that Phillips uses, it is quite clearly, what if the Joker was De Niro's character from Taxi Driver? It was Travis Bickle as a mad comic book supervillain.

And the movie, we can say, I think without spoiling anything, that it's about a man named Arthur Fleck. Yeah. Who is mentally ill and who is attempting to move through his life as a professional clown and an aspiring comedian. Right. And take care of his mother. Mm-hmm. And he lives in 1970s New York. Yeah.

He lives in late 70s New York. The city is dingy. It is violent. This is the New York of Son of Sam. Welcome to New York from the gutters overflowing with refuse and crawling

with rats. That kind of New York where there are porn movies still on the marquee in Times Square. The movie goes to great pains to show us on television that there is a super rat problem. Right. You know, there is a violent encounter, a Bernard Goetz-esque encounter on a subway.

There is a series of conversations between people in which it's evident that the people talking to Arthur realize there's something really, really wrong with him. Yeah. And frankly, he knows

there's something wrong with himself. He's aware of it. And that struck me as a kind of an, I don't know about an innovation, but an interesting note on the Joker character because self-awareness and empathy

are not things that I think the character has been imbued with in the past. And I found that the design of the movie was really interesting because he does a lot

of heinous things in the movie. Obviously, he's the Joker or he's going to be the Joker at some point. But he also does a lot of thingsous things in the movie obviously he's the joker or he's going to be the joker at some point but he also does a lot of things that make you think god this guy was he got a raw deal yeah he was he was abused he was overlooked he was frustrated and what did you think about the way that philips kind of positioned a greater sadness around a character who had previously either been a chaos agent or an out-and-out villain. Yeah, I think that I was struck by how this is really the truest depiction of the Joker as someone suffering from mental illness as there has ever been.

This is not the, you know, Heath Ledger's Joker certainly had problems, certainly was traumatized, but had an ability to plan and carry out extremely complex schemes. He was a mastermind. He was a mastermind. This is not that person. Arthur Fleck, the Joker, would struggle to go to the corner store and buy some milk. This is not a person capable of planning beyond the next five minutes because he is truly ill. He's truly sick. And I thought in that way, the movie really captures something truly tragic in that sense.

Because this is a person who just like can't, I don't want to say not responsible for their actions. Because again, he does some of the truly heinous things in this movie, but is obviously ill in a way that impacts everything he does. Is unable to have anything that would resemble a normal life at all. Let me ask you this. I think one of the things that we feel when we're watching the movie is because there are these overt homages to complicated portrayals of people struggling for mental illness. I mean, particularly those two big De Niro parts from Scorsese, The King of Comedy, which is overtly referenced by casting Robert De Niro and Travis Bickle is not a hero. In fact, one of the brilliant aspects of the story is the way that the film kind of ends with a vision of Travis Bickle being deemed a hero because of the things that he does

in the shootout at the whorehouse. But we do have a sensitivity towards him. And because it's wearing sort of like a taxi driver costume throughout, I think we bring a similar level of empathy and sort of artistic openness to the character. And I'm still personally trying to evaluate whether I feel tricked by that. And the character is kind of the arch trickster.

And I feel like there's a case to be made that we were seduced into a vulnerability that maybe the movie hasn't earned. And I've seen some critics say that. And at the same time, I was riveted by the movie, particularly the final act in the movie. Yeah, I think that there is a case to be made for that. I was talking with this movie with some people today, and I would love to see it again. I'm sensitive to that kind of idea that we were tricked into empathizing with this character at the same time it really is again a very plain depiction of a person suffering from uh from severe mental illness and it never shrinks from that there's never a moment where you're like oh maybe he's kind of got it together anytime there's even a hint that that might be the case that maybe arthur can kind of get his life that is snatched away

from you in a way that that leaves you no doubt that this guy just cannot walk through the world without causing damage to himself and like everyone around him because he is severely mentally ill do you think that how do i phrase this it's really complicated because i think that we've just spent an hour talking about comic books, comic book movies. And the first hour of this movie is not a comic book movie. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Not even a little bit. It's just a gritty 70s New York drama.

Yeah. And it's about a very damaged person trying to make his way in the world. It's as much like Joe, the Peter Boyle movie from the 70s as it is. It has way more in common with that than The Dark Knight. And so we get this sense that we're watching something that is a kind of a quote unquote movie movie. Right. And not what a lot of people would dismiss as movies now, which is Endgame. You know, before the movie started last night, you and I were like, it was pretty good. It was Endgame. That was actually really great. And, you know, I tend to think that you and I are always

in the middle on this where we're trying to make a sincere case for the quality of a kind of artistry that has also been poisoned, not just by its popularity, but by fanboy culture and all this other stuff. But there is a really good way to make an authentically entertaining and thoughtful and useful, in a way, comic book movie. But as I say, this movie is not trying to do that, at least not until we get to the second half of the film. Right. And it's successful in that in varying, at least not until we get to the second half of the film. Right. And it's successful in that in varying degrees. Yes. Which we'll get into.

We'll unpack that a little bit. Do you think that if this movie were just called Arthur or Fleck, would it be as effective? Would you think, man, this is a good film?

Actually, yes. You know, like, we'll get into this later, but when the Batman, quoteunquote elements are introduced, it's a little bit jarring and feels kind of unnecessary. There'd be a, you know, it's a fantastic thought exercise, and I'm sure that someone will do this, but if you go through that movie once it comes out on DVD or whatever,

cut out all the overt Batman stuff and see what kind of movie you have. You really have like a very 70s style character study of a damaged human being who goes on a killing spree. comic book movie craze as a Trojan horse to make the kinds of things that he wants to make now that he has conquered comedy and then is still coming to grips with what comedy is now, which I don't, we don't have to explore that too much, but all that is better left unsaid, I think. But, you know, Todd Phillips has directed The Hangover and Old School and The Hangover 2 and 3, and he's a huge Hollywood success story. He's from Huntington, Long Island, by the way. I don't know if you know that. And now he wants to make a that. Yeah, I do know that. And now he wants to make a 70s crime movie about a damaged person.

Sure. And he knows, I think, pretty savvily that the easiest way to do it is to slide it in with some face paint. What do you make of that, the fact that filmmakers are now readjusting their chemistry, their creative chemistry to do this, to this genre i mean i

think it's part and parcel to things that have happened throughout the history of stories the history of genre genre is constantly evolving and you know once uh once a kind of storytelling a style of storytelling reached a certain maturity then you have a wave that comes in that says okay let's reevaluate the tenets of this genre and find out which of them we still care about you know like the wild bunch i think is is a great example of in the 1969 western about these aging uh outlaws coming to grips with a changing world. I think that's a great example of a story that, that in which a storyteller uses a genre to tell a kind of story that maybe doesn't fit in that genre or we, or you would previously not think of as being part of that

genre. And you saw it, I think again with, with Logan which is this kind of of re-examination of a character that you think you understand. In that sense, what Todd Phillips has done here is not any different than all the various kind of retellings of genre stories that have happened in various mediums over the years. This is how storytelling works, essentially. I want to come back to that point because I think it's really important and maybe we'll close the show on that specific idea, which is important.

What did you think of Joaquin Phoenix? I thought he was really magnetic and completely disturbingly without guile in a way that was both hard to watch and hard to look away from he does this thing with his body i wouldn't say he's contorting his body but he kind of like bows his back and shapes his shoulders and kind of like and then and then philips shoots it from a certain angle that makes him look almost like reptilian and bowed in a certain way and literally misshapen. And that theme of this person who's just bent out of shape is in every part of his performance.

And it's a really compelling performance. You know, he struck me as a little bit of that physical work that you're talking about is almost like a 15th century Renaissance fair marionette or a Punch and Judy doll. You know, something that is being controlled from on high but doesn't know why its body is moving the way it is. And there are these sequences. There's one in particular after he commits his first kind of serious, awful crime where he goes to a bathroom and he just begins to dance and it's the most possessed yeah kind of beautiful but ugly thing that i've seen in a while and it's one of those things where if seen from one perspective you could be like this is immensely pretentious thing to be putting in a movie right but seen from a little bit of a more sympathetic angle you can say like this is a vision of a person

who has only just figured out how to be themself after doing something terrible. And as the character grows and goes on, you see that kind of a violence is a release for him and it shows him like what his place in the world is and why he would dance after something like this. And it is not the Cesar Romero, teeny cackling dancing.

It's something more tragic and more artful, for lack of a better word. And it is entirely on the back of Phoenix. If you don't have someone like that who is so gestural and powerful as a performer, you don't get that. There is, jumping off that, there's a moment in this movie where Arthur Fleck is watching his – Robert De Niro's character's show and they have like a famous actor in this world come out. for appearing on this show, kind of starts mimicking this actor's gestures and the way they come out, the way he puffs out his chest and kind of like the strong handshake he gives. And I thought about that

when thinking about that dance segment. There's a thing all throughout Phoenix's performance, which is he's just trying, he's looking at other people and trying to figure out, is that how you be normal? Is this how you dance? This is how people act when they're happy, right? They do this kind of like balletic dance. And this is how you act when you're confident and you're sure of yourself, you come out and you, you know, and you smile big and you wave

in a really confident way with one arm up to the audience. And this is how you do it. This is how you're a normal person. And I thought that was really eerie and absolutely intriguing. He does another interesting thing, too, in the performance, which is his character has an affliction in which he cannot control when he laughs. Right. is has an affliction in which he cannot control when he laughs he uncontrollably bursts into laughing fits and which is

I think a nice callback to the man who laughs the Conrad Beat movie that we were talking about which is the inspiration for the Joker and this movie is larded

with all kinds of homage to all kinds of psychos there's an homage here there's all kinds of movies on Marquise that you're seeing blow out

Zorro the gay blade I saw there's a little bit of a Heath Ledger callback too at the end of the movie. The window shot. The window shot. And so he bursts

into these laughing fits and he can't control himself and it informs the character and how society views the character as an outcast. But he does another thing, which is when people are laughing at something,

he has to fake laugh. He doesn't actually know what's funny, but he has to performatively try to fit into, he has to fake laugh. He doesn't actually know what's funny, but he has to performatively try to fit into society. And his fake laugh is enormously unnerving and loud and strange. And he has to have the look on his face as if he's the kind of person

who knows how to laugh at the right moment, but you know that there's something just somewhat off about him. And the whole performance is kind of dotted with all of these little and sometimes big physical and intellectual gestures that he's put into the character that, you know,

like I said before, with a lesser actor, you just get a less interesting movie. But because the camera's on him 95% of the time and he's absorbing it all, you just get something that is really lived in.

I was reading about Phoenix's early interviews about the movie, and when people started confronting him about what the ramifications of this movie would be, early on in an interview with The Telegraph, he seemed shocked that someone would emulate violence based on seeing this movie, and in fact walked out of the interview

because he was so flustered and confused by it and then eventually came back to the interview and continued. But I think one of the natural ramifications of this movie, and we have been surrounded by take lords sharing their opinion about what this movie means for America, is what happens when a movie like this comes along and this will be an opportunity i think for us to kind of talk about the back half of the movie and how it crescendos in a great deal of violence that feels i think for the character quite cathartic and maybe for some audience members cathartic in its way are you the kind of person that describes any responsibility to a piece of art when something like this is happening i think art you know art is on the one hand incredibly influential and also, generally speaking, I would not ascribe any kind of direct responsibility for people to mirror things that they see in books, video games, movies. I usually reject that premise and i reject it now i don't think that that is a thing that people should ascribe to this movie although i under i completely understand why after seeing it and certainly the times we live in um if you're talking about a

movie uh that is a depiction of a certain kind of white male rage born of helplessness that explodes into violence. I think it's certainly something that people should think about. I think that if you're going to start listing down what are the things that we should worry about that might push someone over the edge into committing a violent act, I would say the Joker and movies and books and stuff is so far down the list as to be absurd. I completely agree with you. I think one of the trying aspects of this conversation,

and let's just say if you don't want the movie spoiled for you any more than it's been spoiled, please turn this off or fast forward. But eventually the Joker sort of realizes who he is. Sure. And he begins to don the purple suit and the face paint in full. And he recognizes his character. He dyes his hair green. And he's been booked on an appearance

on Robert De Niro's show. And a lot of things start to happen in the film that are completely fascinating to me and interesting to unpack. One, we have this appearance on this talk show in which Joaquin Phoenix is openly not just gesturing at the kick of comedy and the things that happen in that film, but also at movies like Network and other 70s dramas,

and also at his own appearances on David Letterman when he was promoting I'm Still Here, his fake documentary. And it becomes this sort of metatextual experience where the movie, it seems to be winking directly at the audience. And from that moment, though he's already committed

a few murders, the movie takes a hard turn into this intensely confrontational scene between Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro. And there are a lot of things that Joaquin Phoenix's character says

when he's sort of monologuing and answering De Niro's inquiries that I think people are going to identify with about being alone, about being overlooked, about being stepped over. I don't think that they're going to identify specifically with wanting to wear clown makeup or even necessarily with having narcissistic personality disorder or delusions of grandeur or the other things that this character were meant to understand has inherited from his family. But we go from that moment where he sort of triumphantly declares his purpose and then kills Robert De Niro's character on television,

on live television, and then goes out into the streets or he's arrested and then eventually finds himself out in the streets and finds a society that is consonant with his way of thinking that is on the brink of anarchy that is recognizing that we're in a kind of an eat the rich society moment and is flipping over

cop cars and lighting things on fire and looting in the street and this is so complicated to me because on the one hand i think you've made a good point which is a movie like this should not be is not i think directly influential on heinous crime. I think that's completely unfair to all art. And I do think the movie could theoretically seem through one prism be presumed to be not sympathetic with people who commit violent crimes, but trying to psychologically unpack that and reflect something about personal experience on through those experiences. On the other hand, I saw somebody this morning say, is Joker Antifa? And in a way, it's kind of representing those kinds of politics at the same time. So this is a really nuanced conversation.

I agree. It's not cancel Joker and it's not Joker solves all of our problems. It is a lot of different feelings colliding at the same time. And that's why I find this to be such an interesting document of popular culture right now. Yeah, I think it,

I've tried to really unpack like what is the message of this film? Does it have one? Does, is it, is it this kind of anti-capitalist eat the rich? Let's get the guillotines out movie. Or is it this kind of anti-capitalist eat the rich, let's get the guillotines out movie. Or is it this kind of like expression of white male rage that is really toxic in the popular culture?

Is it trying to give – to get us to empathize with that? what I've kind of landed on is it's a movie about how anger that's just kind of like in the in the air needs a focus needs something to focus it and what happens with the Joker is he becomes the focus the symbol for that anger even though he himself does not have any kind of political leanings doesn't have any kind of ideology he He's just a person who's acting, who's acting in a way that is seemingly in line with kind of ideologies that exist. And this wave kind of rises underneath him to carry him to a higher level. But he himself doesn't like stand for anything he's just like an opportunist who is there um the movie actually expertly identifies that yeah he literally says right i don't have politics right i'm not a person of politics i'm not a person who believes in

movements which is on the one hand i think kind of a nice echo of a lot of the chaos conversation that the character has been a part of but also it kind of seeds seeds blame it seeds purpose i agree yeah which you know i don't think a movie has to have a purpose like that i don't think it has to definitively say it's antifa or it or it's a you know an ode to the misunderstood intentions of dylan roof like it's neither of those things but it is inevitable that it will be judged against those concepts because that's that's the world we live in you know we're gonna we're gonna take society and we're trying to find our way through the take right now you know what's what's disconcerting about the joker is that this kind of uh character possibly well obviously mentally ill but um but kind of imprisoned by

forces beyond his control no agency in his life who lashes out violently is a figure who absolutely dogs our real world right now like thanos uh carries out a very elaborate plan to commit universal genocide and kill half of the people in the in the universe right half of the living things in the universe and because he's a purple alien with a magic glove uh who obviously you would never see walking down the street or possibly encounter in a movie theater or in a bar or anywhere else or in a chat room. There's no threat from him.

We are not threatened. We do not feel the need to unpack Thanos as a figure who could possibly influence our culture and impact our lives. But we feel that with Joker because this seems like a person that you might meet or encounter possibly or you might ignore if you saw him on the street and and and that is a complicated aspect of this you know i don't we don't we don't have the answers

to these things no and i think it's i think it's good that we don't have the answers yeah we're working through some stuff it's interesting to me that the movie has been, I wouldn't say rejected by critics, but it has been hotly debated, not just about its sort of artistic merits, but about its purpose.

And it makes it a real flashpoint. And the other reason that I think it's a flashpoint, and we can kind of begin to wrap up our conversation here. Sure.

I was on a podcast with Chris Ryan probably about a month ago. We were talking about the Amazon Prime show, The Boys. Have you seen The Boys? kind of begin to wrap up our conversation here sure i was on a podcast with chris ryan probably about a month ago we were talking about the amazon prime show the boys have you seen the boys i've seen the boys so i liked the boys i i liked the boys uh despite myself almost i wanted to not like the boys i had read the first few pages of the comic book that The Boys is based on and found it honestly pretty repulsive. And I was just like, yeah, it's not for me. The Boys is good. Softens some of those repulsive details,

but is generally good and a really interesting x-ray of the superhero phenomenon. Exactly. And so in some ways, I think that film shows the corporatization around the superhero ethic. And it's kind of a satire and kind of not a satire. Anyhow, I find that the boys and Logan, which you mentioned earlier, and Deadpool, and now definitely Joker, operate in this kind of third wave of superhero content. And it is the wild bunching of content yes and we're at a place where the

violence is intensely real unnerving the movies are r-rated they are morally fraught they're not particularly pleasant no even the boys which is theoretically a charming TV show, is like gritty to a fault. Yeah, laden with violent dismemberment. And Deadpool is the quippy version of it, but it was the first time when I saw a superhero movie and thought, whoa, these movies could actually be a lot more violent and they're going to make them more violent. Like active comic dismemberment is something that's going to be happening in these movies going forward logan obviously is kind of in the samurai tradition and is incredibly um raw and um upsetting in its way and also but but hues to the kind of hero's journey tale joker to me kind of confirms the theory that i was pitching when i was talking to chris about

the boys and i've mentioned it in the past year, the last few weeks, which is, I'm not sure if the genre can really ever go back from a movie like Joker. Because here's what we get at the end of Joker. We get a comic book movie. We get the defined origin story of how we get Batman, which is that in the streets during this anarchic, chaotic, looting period. Someone tracks the Waynes down and shoots them and pulls the pearls from Mrs. Wayne's neck, and Bruce watches it. And while that's happening, Joker is being celebrated in the streets as an icon of anarchy. And we'd previously seen Thomas Wayne running for mayor of Gotham. We'd previously seen Bruce at Wayne Manor. There was an interaction between Arthur and Bruce Wayne. There's the implication that maybe Arthur is the son of Bruce Wayne who had an affair with

his mother Penny while she worked for the Waynes, though that is debunked in the film. And then a movie becomes much more comic book-y. And that is kind of why my brain is on, is this what comic book movies are now is are they are we in the wild bunch period where we can never go back to john wayne as the white knight i don't think so but it is a fascinating time considering that there's not a major marvel movie offering in the works for the next six months six months yeah so it is really interesting you know it's whenever genre goes under goes goes under an evolution like this really what a movie like the wild bunch what logan what joker asks us is like how much of this stuff still matters how much

of this how much of this previous genre do you still care about um and i think the jury's out you know do we how much how much of what kind of marvel has in large part created that kind of glossy uplifting quippy these are the good guys thing do we really care about still after a movie like this? Is that still something that is valuable to us as a culture? I would guess that yes. That like I couldn't go see six more movies like the Joker in a row. You know, could I think how many Marvel movies? 22, 23 up to this point? Could you watch 23 Joker-like movies on a trot?

No, but I think what I'm more specifically trying to say is not that, because I don't think that every Western is like the Wild Bunch now. I think what happens is that Westerns moved away from being the central storytelling conceit of young masculine entertainment. And it became, movies become a sort of gritty crime movie in the 70s, and they become a kind of action epic in the 80s, and they become a kind of like cheeseball beginning to iterate on superhero movies in the 90s. That's kind of the arc of here's movies for men aged 10 to 37. And I wonder if we're now crossing the Rubicon here on these kinds of movies.

I lean no, but I think the jury is certainly out. Logan, Deadpool, and Joker, I think, are the first wave of a real kind of recontextualizing of this kind of storytelling, and it remains to be seen how valuable that will be going forward. Let me ask you one final question before we go. Would you recommend Joker to just a regular person? Just someone you grew up with?

Who sees three movies a year? Would you say this is one of the movies that you have to see? That's a great question. I would say the first question I'd ask is, do you like comic book movies? Are you a comic book person? Do you like the Batman tales? If you're a Batman person, yeah, go see it um is it better if you're not that's the thing i'm

trying to wrap my head around i don't it's i think it's completely different if you're not and i think it it's a weird you know it's like much like this uh this movie there's a lot to unpack there because strangely for me, the overt Wayne tie-ins and kind of canonical nuggets that are in. That's literally like, I don't know how many times we've seen that in like 20 times in the last like 15 years now. Did I need it? No. How much of that is based on the fact that I've seen it the previous 15 times? Probably a lot. But I do think that if you're a comic book person, I would recommend it. If you were not a comic book person, I would say, you know, wait for it to come out on video. Where would you put the odds at Joker 2? Because there is a distinct shot in the movie that is unmistakable. There's a lot of cool shots in this movie, I should say. This is a pretty sophisticated movie for Todd Phillips. There's a lot of match cuts. There's a lot of Dutch angles.

There's a lot of rear projection. There's a lot of Dutch angles. There's a lot of rear projection. He's got some moves here. But there's one unmistakable shot, which is Arthur reflecting on everything that's happening and then a flash to young Bruce Wayne in the alley after his parents have just been murdered. They did not have to put that shot at the end of the film. We could have just moved on.

But it's almost an indication of that psychosexual connection that you were talking about between these two characters and the fact that they are bound to one another. The same way that they were bound to one another when they were Christian Bale and Heath Ledger, the same way they were bound to one another when they were Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. And that would beg the question, maybe just because we've been brainwashed to think that everything is serialization and needs a sequel but it does feel like they kind of left a door open i i agree although i would say back to the to the point of this joker not being like the mastermind joker that we've seen in the past i do this joker this depiction of the joker did did one thing that i thought is an improvement on previous depictions of the joker that i've seen which is you understand why people would follow him because they don't know anything about him. They consider him a symbol and they consider him as this catch-all

for their own personal ideologies and anger. But he doesn't actually stand for anything. That said, again, this guy could rob a bodega, but he'd get caught within five minutes so i'm not sure while i do think we probably will see a sequel i'm not sure how that plays out because this is not he's not arch villain material this is like just a knock around guy with a mental illness where does he get bullets from, for one? It's a logical question,

but we've seen movies take stories like this, something that is meant to be pure and contained, and find ways to update it and tell it in a new way. Any final thoughts on Joker? Just a fascinating movie and a fascinating snapshot of where we are in the culture in 2019. Thanks for examining that snapshot with me, Jason. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Please stay tuned and listen to my conversation with the writer-director Noah Hawley. And thanks for listening. Delighted to be joined by Noah Hawley. Noah, thanks for being here. My pleasure. Noah, why is Lucy in the Sky your first film? Because it's the first film that I made. It's highly logical, but I suspect that you had the opportunity to make a feature before this movie. Well, I've certainly had discussions, and even in moving toward making a movie last year, there were some options that I had.

But this film combined a lot of interesting things for me. I mean, one was I get to tell a lot of stories for the small screen. And so if I was going to make something for a movie theater, which is what you make a movie for, then what was going to be important enough or what was going to make full use of the theater enough to justify it? Because that's how I think about it is the way you watch it has a lot to do with how I should tell you the story. And this is a story that starts in space, you know, so obviously it's very cinematic, but really it's a way to kind of crack this character and understand what she was going through so that that then my brain starts to think about all right so

we're creating a subjective experience for an audience in a movie theater what are the things that we take for granted about a movie theater it has has a giant rectangle in it, right? True. And it has about 30 speakers in it. And everyone always thinks you got to use the whole rectangle and you got to use all the speakers, but the theater is just a tool like any other tool that you have to create an experience for the audience. And I started to think, you know, someone goes up into space and they see the vast celestial everything and it's enormous and the full rectangle is being used. But then when they come back to Earth and life looks so small, suddenly the image shrinks. And that became a way in for me to think about sculpting a cinematic experience for the audience

that actually enhanced the story I was telling. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the movie is you kind of tangling with the aspect ratio throughout the movie. And it almost feels also like not just an impression of what you see when you're in space versus when you're in your intimate life, but how your psyche can expand and retract at times too. begins with Jon Hamm and they're kissing for the first time where literally the edges of the box start to waver almost like heat lines. It's starting to get close to that feeling of being in space again. It's trying to, but it doesn't get there. But you feel the energy of it literally on the edges of the frame. And my hope is that maybe you notice the gag the first time or second time, but then you stop noticing what the box is doing. You just feel the feeling of expansion and contraction. And, you know, obviously if you resist it, then your experience of the movie is not going to be as good because you're going to notice, you're going to spend a lot of time going, okay, the box is bigger now.

Okay, the box is smaller now. So the best thing to do is just give yourself over to it. Yeah, maybe people shouldn't be listening to this before they see it so they don't even know what to expect. The sound too, I feel like you did something very similar. There's some moments where we get a lot of isolation. We get a low hum in someone's ear. Was all of that stuff preconceived when you read the script and said, I have a few structural or visually dynamic things that I want to do here to tell this story effectively?

Yes, a lot of it was. And then what's exciting, the director's hat versus the writer's hat is really about everything is about trying to get into her head to put you into her head because it's harder to judge her if you're inside her shoes. So a lot of the visual elements that are in the film were added in prep, my desire to, you know, that Dan Stevens working on the house that that he's peeling back this wallpaper and it's this very kind of rigid striped wallpaper and underneath it is this floral more romantic paper as if to say the movie is peeling back her layers and what's underneath that for her and and

sort of shades of the yellow wallpaper too and the woman sort of slowly losing a grip on what she sees right life you know yeah and and you know all those visual metaphors and what was you know what interesting in the editorial process is you know we shot these sort of magic realism pieces that that were all meant to really show you how she's feeling on the inside but then of course Natalie is such a tremendous actor that there were a lot of times where I was like well I, I can see how she's feeling on the inside. I don't need this additional piece. So really it became about calibrating the film so that you only got those more fantastical elements when you absolutely needed them.

I think when people first heard about this movie, they expected something that was very fact-based. And I don't know what the script was that you originally read, but at what point did the decision to go a little bit away from that story that we read about the female astronaut and everything that she did driving across the country, when did that change? Well, the first thing that I interacted with was a script that was already fictionalized. And, you know, what drives me as a writer is a desire to understand the world I live in and the

people who are in it so often a book will come out of me trying to understand like why is this person like that and so what you do is you try to recreate that person and and try to figure it out for me this story was how does a woman go from being on top of the world to being a mugshot? What is that journey? And obviously there is a real story about a woman who made that journey. That's not this story. The story, the more that I tried to get into that person's head and also sculpt an experience for the audience that, that in which they wouldn't judge her, they would go with her. You know, so I started to make some creative choices that steered, steered me in other directions. And ultimately the end of the day, I look at it and I go, okay,

now I think I understand how a person could do this. You know, obviously that's not, doesn't resemble the real event, but, but, but, but, you know, what was critical to me was that I was taking a story that had been a tabloid story, a tabloid story defined by me as a story about human beings with dignity who have made mistakes and ruined everything and been reduced to a punchline. In other words, a tragedy. And my goal was, can we restore their dignity? Can we remind the audience that their punishment was the fact that her punishment was the fact that she lost everything that she cared about. We don't have to humiliate her on top of that. Is it hard to get a movie like that made? Because I feel like we don't see, to define a movie as a tragedy in that way is increasingly uncommon I feel like in movie theaters yeah I mean I think there was an evolution to it on on some level I think that the script that I read originally was more of a

dark comedy um and Reese Witherspoon was attached to it and it was set up at Fox Searchlight and I think they saw very clearly what that movie was more in the I, Tonya spirit. Yeah. Election in outer space. Right. And then their mistake was to offer the movie to me. And I was like, well, they made I, Tonya. I don't really want to make a mockery out of this character. What I really think is exciting is the fact that we have very few films about women having an existential crisis. That's what's exciting is a really cinematic attempt to understand this woman's psychology and the journey that she goes on. And then obviously Natalie Portman came on board and Jon Hamm. on Ham. And, and, you know, so I think there's probably, you know, you're probably about break even on commerciality of the, of the film, but certainly, you know, I, Tonya might have been a

more commercial film, but that wasn't really the film I was interested in making. Did those things cross your mind when you're working on Fargo or Legion or writing a novel or making this film? Is it, I want a lot of people to see this. Is that the, where does that exist in your, especially since you're incredibly productive and you're putting out a lot of things into the world? Yeah, I mean, for me, it's just all an experiment. And, you know, we did testing on this film

and the studio said, we need to get the numbers up. And I thought, well, I don't know how to do that. I don't know what that means. I can work on the film creatively and make choices that I think will make the movie better. I don't know if that will make the numbers go up or down. So some of that is just beyond my anticipate or, or to control. Um, but, you know, I do think about relatability and accessibility and, and, and empathy, but, you know, John Landgraf once said

when talking about how he programs FX, you know, I'd rather make something great for somebody than something good for everybody. And, and I think that's a really great organizing principle, you know, which is this movie will find its audience. Um, the more specific you make it, um, you know,

the, the, the, I feel like the more specific you make a movie, um, the more people can relate to it and the more generic your characters, you know, he's a cop with a drinking problem, the less people can really connect. And, you know, I was amazed when I wrote a novel that, you know, had a loosely based version of my mother in it, how many people came up to me and said, that's my mom. Like, you know, and you think that's your mom.

I feel so sorry for you. But it's something that I think about, and certainly conversations that you have with a network or a studio, they want to make sure there's an audience for it. But you never know. I mean, I think we all thought Legion would be a more popular show. But of course, I mean, it's a very complicated show. And certainly by the third season, unless you'd invested in the whole journey, you're not going to add an audience in the second or third year.

Unless, like Breaking Bad, you're kind of a hidden gem that people, you know, that's easy to follow and has those stakes to it. But Legion was such an experiment that, you know, I think the value of that show will continue to prove out over time. It's interesting to hear you describe why you wanted to make this film too

and the visual aspects of it that you were thinking of because I've definitely always thought of you, especially the last two series that you've made, as really unusually visually dynamic, especially relative to television in general. So had you always been aspiring to make films or is this just sort of the thing that came along at this time because of what you'd done before? You know, for me, I was a fiction writer and, you know, I happened to, my first novel got optioned by Paramount and I ended up writing a script for it and a spec script and a couple of other things, but I kind of stumbled into screenwriting and then my motto is, what else can I get away with? And so I started doing some TV development and, you know, I ended up with The Unusuals first and then My Generation. You know, My Generation was interesting because it was a fake documentary, you know, not a mockumentary, but an actual fake. Very cool show.

Very little lost of time, that show now. Yeah. And, you know, what's really fascinating about a documentary is that, you know, it's an after the fact film. So, you know, even when you send camera crews out, they don't know what's going to happen. Right. So if a couple has a fight and she storms off and he goes after her, the camera is following to catch up, you know, versus the way that fiction tends to be filmed. So, you know, we had a motto, which was imperfect is perfect. But the great challenge as a writer and a filmmaker is, okay, well, let's tie the other arm behind our back and say that all we have to tell the story is two found photographs and audio recording, you know, all these things that people have in documentaries. And how exciting is that as a storyteller, you know, when you can't have the scene itself, you can only have, you know, we didn't get into it, but I thought, well, maybe we'll have dramatic reenactments, you know, the kinds of things that Errol Morris would do. And, um, so that started me thinking

about filmmaking a little more seriously, but, but then obviously it was Fargo and the fact that, that, um, you know, the Coen brothers aren't just two of the greatest screenwriters of our time. They write a lot of movies that they don't direct, and those movies are never Coen brothers movies, right? So there has to be something in the filmmaking that defines them, and you can't ask them, how do you make a Coen brothers movie? So it was incumbent on me to figure it out. And so much of it

i think has to do with sensibility when i was prepping the first season the network kept telling me because i would send them my casting choices and they'd say you know this isn't a comedy right now it's and i so i literally went in to them and i brought, I like to make like bar graphs and bend diagrams because I think it's a funny way to talk about stories. So I had a bar graph that I made that was like comedy and drama and Coen Brothers movies. And on one end, there's like Miller's Crossing on the dramatic side. And then there's, you know, Lady Killers on the other side. And I was like, we're here. But what I said is, you know, Fargo is the tension between tragedy and comedy right and and

it's like if i if we cast javier bardem in the show and you're all high-fiving in the halls and then i gave him that haircut right that stupid prince valiant haircut which i know they laughed at his face for like 30 minutes but there's nothing funny about it in the movie, right? It's just this weirdly specific and unsettling detail. And that's what I mean by sensibility. There's a lot of stuff in Fargo that I think is hysterical, but it's not meant to be comedy. It's not played as comedy. It's like when Billy Bob showed up with that haircut, I was like, oh, we're making the same movie, you know? So it's just a way of looking at the world in a process where even gruesome things, there's enough of an element of comedy

in them that they become more unsettling than anything. Yeah. I feel like they're either, and this is true for a lot of your work, it's either uncomfortably on or comfortably off. You know what I mean? I don't, but I like that description. So about this film, why did Natalie want to do this? I feel like she's in an interesting phase of the characters that she's choosing

where a lot of them are maybe not transgressive, but you can't quite put your finger on what's going on with them, that there's something unraveling about them. What is it that she responded to? Well, I think she really responded to the fact that this was a movie about a woman having an existential crisis and that we were giving her her due.

And we, you know, she was speaking at the press conference yesterday about, you know, usually when you send a female astronaut to space, you give them a child waiting for them at home. Like that's the only thing that a woman can have that ties her to the earth. And I think she appreciated that, that we didn't do this. We didn't make her a mother. We didn't build the story around these, these men. And the fact that, you know, I was very clear with her that I had no intention of making a movie in which a woman fell apart because she was too emotional about a man. That's not what this movie was. In fact, the affair that she has is a symptom of her larger struggle to understand what her life is supposed to be.

And, you know, so I think it was the amount of empathy that she saw that I would bring to it. And, you know, you have to, when you're going to give a performance like that and go to the places that this movie takes her, you have to trust the director who's taking you there that they're going to protect you. And, you know, she and I just hit it off right away and you know she really brought such a swagger to this role you know you could see her and Sam Shepard in the in the right stuff together right like she just had that you know walking away from the tarmac with the burning plane behind her kind of swagger to her. And, you know, that was new. I haven't seen that from her before, you know, and she just had such a confidence to her. And, you know, it was sort of fascinating that even when she falls apart in

the movie, what I liked is that, is that in the end, when she decides that she's going to go and confront Jon Hamm, it's a mission. She's on a mission. And that means in her mind, you got to suit up. You got to equipment up. You got to get there on the road, T minus whatever. She's a checklist person. Right.

And so, therefore, there's never a moment. There's never a pity, self-pity moment, or she's never unstrung in that way. She's a problem solver. She's just solving it the wrong way. Did you watch any films before making this? I mean, it's not quite a space movie, but it is a magic realism astronaut movie. So, you know, I looked at Sorrentino, the great beauty and youth and movies that mix both the literal and the figurative visually, which I had seen a while ago. And it's such, I mean, you can't make a more beautiful movie and a more human movie. And what's amazing about it is, I mean, it's a three-hour film, but they start with test pilots and it's maybe 45 minutes before they get to astronauts. And so you're with Sam Shepard for like 45 minutes of breaking the speed records, et cetera. And then he's not chosen to become an astronaut, but the film doesn't abandon him.

You keep going back to him. He's really the heart and soul of the film. And I thought that was so interesting. And, you know, so there were some films like that. I mean, you know, one rewatches Gravity just for the visceral thrill of it. But, you know, Polly Morganes Gravity just for the visceral thrill of it. But, you know, Polly Morgan is the DP and I, we had a lot of visual references that we went through. Do you personally relate to the, one of the themes of the movie of seeing the kind of great celestial beyond and then being brought back down to earth and then having to cope with it?

What is it about that idea that you caught into? Well, I think what's interesting for any creative artist is the biggest part of telling a story is the conceptual origins of it, right? And I often think about many ideas that I have as something at first I can only see out of the corner of my eye. And if I turn to look at it directly, it's gone, but, but you have to, but then when you see it, there's a sort of epiphany quality to it. But if you're on the verge of that epiphany and your kids come running in and, you know, there, there's a way in which your real life, you know, can interrupt that process. And then maybe it takes a while to get back to it if you can get back to it, et cetera. So, you know, I understand it to some degree on that level. I mean, also as a kid who grew up in

New York city, who'd never been West of Pennsylvania before I was like 22 you know Wyoming and Utah was a huge um eye-opening awe-inspiring experience to see nature of that scale of that sort of like alien landscape to a kid from New York of just that awe of being in a in the canyon lands and like to be alone, you know, hiking alone and feeling the scale of nature and your place in it. So I certainly have those memories. Will you make more films?

How did you feel about the process of doing this versus the series work that you'd done or the novel writing? Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I mean, I never made anything you could watch in one sitting before. People are challenging that every day streaming. I know. really interesting i mean i never made anything you could watch in one sitting before um people are challenging that every day streaming so i know uh you should watch in one sitting before

um and that was you know that was a a realization that i came to really in in the editing room right which is you know there are some pieces that in TV you go, I like the scene, doesn't really fit here, maybe I can use it in this other hour. You can repurpose things, you can build images over episodes and build up to things. But here you have this one journey that you go on and I said to the studio at one point, I said, I'm okay if it's slow in the slow parts. You know? But overall, in sculpting the experience for the audience, you have to be aware of pacing and you have to be aware of moments where they're going to get restless or feel distracted

or, you know, mostly you have to be aware of redundancy where you're like, no, no, no, I think this point is clear. I don't need to do it again. And so you tend to, you want to overshoot and you want to over script on some level just to make sure that you have it. But especially with this film in which there's her emotional journey and her psychological descent. And you have to be with her for that. Because if you're not with her, you're in judgment and then you're outside of her.

And then there's the fact that she does run up against a kind of soft institutional bias of being told she's too emotional and, you know, finally running into a problem she can't solve and how that adds to her break and the calibration of that editorially and making sure that we were saying what we needed to moments, like the fact that she does almost drown in the middle of this movie, which I realized as I was doing the final sound mix that sound mix to like remind the audience oh no no she's she's it's still a ptsd moment for her all those things because at the end of it you what you have is this object this two-hour object and when you're done you're done you know so that's both exhilarating and kind of terrifying i'm a slightly type a person i don't know if you are a type a person i feel like this is an interesting examination of what happens a slightly type A person. I don't know if you are a type A person. I feel like this is an interesting examination of what happens to a type A person who perhaps pushes a little bit too hard. Yeah. I don't know if that was an aspect of the character that you connected to at all either. Yeah. I mean, it's a movie about failure, right? And, and, you know, for most of us who,

who start failing early and fail often, like by time you reach your 30s, you're like, what's the worst that can happen? We fail, right? But for Natalie's character, who made it all the way to 35, let's say, without ever failing, she never even came in second at anything, failure is catastrophic. She has no tools with which to address it emotionally. And so that was a huge part of it is she had never met a problem she couldn't solve until this moment.

And so she refused to surrender to it. And she designed her own mission. And by that point, of course, she's not entirely rational. But at the same time, she also doesn't surrender. You know, I had a thought as I was editing this movie that Lucy Cola is no different than Ethan Hunt. You know, Tom Cruise and Natalie Portman, they're the same, right? He's a crazy person who refuses to take no for an answer, who continues to risk everything. And yet, you know, he's a hero and rewarded for it. And obviously her film is more of a cautionary tale. But if you look

at it in that light, you know, there isn't much difference between the two of them. It's true. Two people on a mission. One thing I wanted to ask you, you've made a lot of television. I wonder, was there anything significantly different about being on a film so even that isn't necessarily unique to film to to movies you know there is a still within hollywood a kind of cultural bias um toward movies you know when we went to the Golden Globes the first year of Fargo, there's the main floor and then there's a ring one step up. And that was where our table was. And Billy Bob, who's always been in the film world, said, oh, we're not winning because we're up here. Because he's used to being on the floor with the movie stars.

And of course, we did win, but we're TV, right? It's a wonderful metaphor. Yeah. At least for the Globes, if nothing else. Yeah, and so I think that there's still that kind of bias about it in town. The Oscars are still more important than the Emmys, you know. But logistically, it's the same. And, you know, honestly, I was hoping to have more of a film schedule

where you shoot like three pages a day, but that wasn't what happened for us because it's a space movie with a big underwater sequence, but that's about 20 minutes of the movie. But it takes about a third of our production schedule, which means suddenly you've got 22 days to make the movie and then 12 days to make those visual effects sequences. So, you know, we're doing TV hours. We're doing, you know, five to eight pages a day. And luckily I was trained for that. Yeah. Speaking of TV hours, I'm a huge fan of Fargo. I'm very excited Fargo is coming back. What little information can you share with us about going back to Fargo? There's nothing little about Fargo this time. It's, you know, I've literally 22 actors pictures on my wall and that's not the whole cast. Wow. You know, it's really an American crime epic this time that's about the history of America on some level and the collision in 1950 between the end of the wave of Southern Europeans, the Italians coming

over, and then the migration of African Americans up to Northern cities and that collision of these two cultures, um, to, to, to neither of whom was the mainstream economy available. And so they started an alternate economy, which is crime. And, and, you know, so it is a story with a lot of moving pieces to it with a lot of weight to it. That's about assimilation and, and, you know, capitalism at and capitalism at that phase. But mostly it's like any year of Fargo. It's about basically decent people who are probably in over their head and the idea that, yes, we have problems, but look who's solving them. So it's a really – I never know when I finish if there's going to be another one. I was going to ask you that.

How long do you think you could do this? I don't know. You know, when I finished the first year and I kind of had the idea for the second year already. But then the third one took a bit of time. And then I thought I was done. And then, you know, what happens is you go, oh, yeah, I could do that. You know, and I never really know where the idea comes from. You know, I just had this idea about two brothers for the third year, you know, whose dad dies and leaves one of them a stamp collection and the other a car.

Right. And the one the older brother takes advantage of the younger one. And like I thought, oh, that's that sounds like a Coen brothers story to me. And then this time I had the idea about these two rival crime families who keep the peace by trading their youngest sons as an insurance policy, basically, so that the one family has to raise the one child and the other family has to raise the other child um and i thought oh that's interesting that's an interesting way to talk about assimilation but also there's a rich sort of setup of things that you can that you can do with that um but i don't know and then i go oh that's interesting let's see where that goes and where

it goes is to chris rock and jason schwartzman and ben wishaw and jack houston and tim oliphant and uzo adubay and uh and four italian actors including the guy who's the star of gamora uh oh no kidding coming over to um cause a ruckus well that sounds great one thing that we always talk about here at a significantly smaller scale is we make we have a website we have a podcast now where we make some video stuff. We do some documentaries. It's always about what is the best output for the thing that we're making. Right.

So it's not just, there's an idea. Good. It's where does it belong? Yeah. You now have novels and TV and films. It's interesting to hear you talk about coming up with the ideas for the Fargo seasons.

Has anything superseded another thing in terms of where to put it? Like, how do you determine where a story should go? Well, it's a luxury, right? To have an idea and to be able to think, well, what medium is this? Is it a book? Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? Some of it's about sustainability, both creatively for me and, and, you know, you, you sort of have to game it out in your mind in order for something to be a book for me, it has to be something that I can live with for two or three years. So it has to be about enough thematically on a character level that, that I can keep

digging and keep asking and answering questions as i tell the story um you know what i loved about fargo was was the kind of reinvention of the limited series of the mini series you know which is fargo for me is a 10-hour movie and a 10-hour movie is not a two-hour movie and it's not a television show it's its own unique medium that i think we're still only exploring the edges of what that can be you know why it works for me is as an ensemble writer as someone who likes to look at story from a lot of different points of view, you know, who believes that the content, that the structure of a story should reflect the content of a story, you start to think, oh, I see.

Well, what could I do? Each episode needs to have its own structural conceit, but fit within the larger structural conceit. So we had that episode last year of Fargo, which started with the Peter and the Wolf narration that each character is represented by an instrument. And that felt like a really interesting way to kind of look at each of these characters, but then to use it over the course of that hour. And, you know, so that level of creative play with the structure and the material, you know, is kind of unique to that, um, medium and then film you, you have less runway, you have less time, you know, in the first 20 to 30 minutes, you have to set up what the movie's about,

introduce the central, central crisis and conflict. And then, you know, you're on your way to resolving it. And a lot of those elements that you think, oh, this would be a really fascinating part of the true story, but it doesn't fit into this shorter medium in a 10-hour movie, you could build a whole hour around that detail and have it ultimately help thematically solve the larger issues. No, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing that they've seen? You are a filmmaker now officially, I suppose it could be old or new,

anything that you've seen that you really dug. Yeah. The last great thing. Um, you know, I really thought escape at Denim aura was, was great. I really did.

Speaking of the pushing the limits of what a mini series can be. I mean, and you know, obviously Patricia Arquette and, and, and, um, those performances were so amazing, Speaking of pushing the limits of what a miniseries can be. nuanced and unexpected and real. I kept waiting for the joke. I kept waiting for Ben to surrender to that comedic instinct, and he never did, and he showed such restraint. And, of course, he directed all of them because he's a feature director and he thinks you have to do that.

I like my kids, so I decided I'll direct one or two, but then I'm going home. But I did. I really found it got to the heart of something real and tragic about these characters that was really refreshing. Noah, thanks for doing this. Awesome. Thanks again to Noah Hawley, and thank you, of course, to Jason Concepcion.

Please stay tuned to The Big Picture. Next week, we'll be back, probably talking about a lot more Joker, if I'm being honest. I'll be chatting with Amanda Dobbins, and she'll be reckoning with her feelings about the movie then, so please tune in.