The Big Picture - Ben Affleck's Next Movie and Five Behind-the-Scenes Hollywood Stories We Want

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to talk about Ben Affleck's recently announced new movie, an adaptation of 'The Big Goodbye' about the making of the film 'Chinatown.' Then, they pitch other chaotic behind-the-scenes stories they'd like to see captured on the big screen (1:30). They also discuss the streaming horror hit 'Host,' now playing on Shudder, as well as the less successful Shia LaBeouf crime drama 'The Tax Collector' (34:00). Finally, Sean is joined by writer-director-actress Amy Seimetz to talk about her new horror–black comedy 'She Dies Tomorrow' (46:27). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan Guest: Amy Seimetz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by An American Pickle. An American Pickle stars Seth Rogen as 1920s factory worker Herschel Greenbaum and his great-grandson Ben. When Herschel falls into a vat of pickles, he is perfectly preserved for 100 years and emerges in present-day Brooklyn. An American Pickle tells the uniquely heartwarming story of Herschel and Ben as they learn the meaning of family. Stream the new Max original, An American Pickle, now only only on HBO Max rated PG-13.

I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture. Amanda is on vacation and so we are joined by our pal Chris Ryan on today's show. CR, what up man? What's going on? Later in this episode, I spoke with Amy Simons, an actress you may recognize from Alien Covenant and last year's Pet Sematary remake. Amy is a filmmaker as well, and her second feature, She Dies Tomorrow, arrived over the weekend. Had a really fun chat with her about this combo horror-thriller-black comedy, so I hope you'll stick around for that. But first, Chris Ryan, let's have a little bit of a grab-bag conversation. How was your weekend? What did you watch? I watched Colin Morikawa become God. I watched the PGA Championship on Sunday

with a bunched leaderboard. All those guys dogfighting at 10 under and Colin Morikawa, nobody cares except for you and me and all the golf fans. I hope people don't unsubscribe for the big picture. But it was like, it was so dramatic. It was like a real Sunday final final round a real sunday sports moment so that was very refreshing but i also watched a bunch of stuff this weekend including

host on shutter which is one of my favorite movies of the year great call best films of 2020 so far number one first cow number two maybe host number three colin Colin Morikawa's tee shot at 16. Do you think Kelly Reichert was watching the PGA Championship on Sunday? I definitively do not. I don't think that she is interested in that mode of entertainment at this time. Anyhow, Chris, let's talk really quickly

about some news about the movies. Something fascinating happened over the weekend. And that is that Ben Affleck's new movie was announced. It was announced that he will be writing and directing an adaptation of Sam Watson's The Big Goodbye. The Big Goodbye is about the making of Chinatown. Chinatown probably, I don't know, is it one of the greatest films ever made? Is it in the top five? Where do you put it, Chris? Definitely. Definitely in my top five. Probably one of the most formative films I've ever seen in terms of, I didn't know you could

do that kind of moments. And I didn't know that life could be this complicated kind of moments. I mean, mothers and sisters, you know, you just, that's not something you get taught in high school, you know? Definitely not what happens to the mothers and sisters in Chinatown. And this movie, you know, it's, it's an interesting bit of business that Affleck is pursuing this because there are some thorny characters historically. I think as soon as this was announced, people's brains immediately went to, who will play the key figures? Who are the key figures in this story? There's four key men, Jack Nicholson, obviously the star, Roman Polanski, the controversial director of the film, Robert Evans, the producer and studio head behind the movie and Robert Towne the author of the screenplay largely considered the most perfect screenplay

ever written by many people who care about that sort of thing and it's going to be complicated because Polanski just a few years after the making of this film was accused and later pled guilty to some heinous crimes including the rape of an underage girl and his reputation in American movies has changed significantly over the past 20 years. Despite making some of the best movies of the 20th century, not just Chinatown, but Repulsion, Knife in the Water, an adaptation of Macbeth and Rosemary's Baby, he is undoubtedly a problematic figure to center a movie around. So what do you think about Affleck choosing to make a movie largely about someone like this? Yeah, well, first of all, I'll just say that it's funny how movie announcements have become the new movies.

You know, it's, it's, it's like definitely become what we like have left over to feast on while we're waiting for the real meals. This is a strange one. Uh, Hollywood really likes to write love letters to itself. There's nothing.

Uh, I even think that the success of Argo somewhat had to do with the idea of like putting on a play and putting on a production and, you know, making a film. And that was like the whole idea of like kind a play and putting on a production and making a film. And that was the whole idea kind of behind Argo was that it was a backdoor

love letter to movie making. I don't know that you can make a straightforward love letter to movies with Chinatown, even though I would say that when people are like, man, they don't make them like they used to,

why can't we just have that mid-budget adult drama with a little bit of genre sprinkled on top of it? Like, this is the platonic ideal of that. This is the platonic, like Chinatown is the movie I think a lot of people think of when they're like, I wish they made them like that now. So how do you make a film about that?

Also a film that most people still hold in really high estimation. How do you make a movie about that while still being honest about what happened in and around the making of that film? And that's what Sam Watson's book kind of gets into. It's going to be a tall task. Be fascinated to see what he does.

This has inspired an idea for this conversation though, which is that the kinds of movies that we want to see that are like movies that Ben Affleck is making. So the making of a certain kind of movie is a well-worn documentary trope. We know about the Apocalypse Now making of, we know about, say, Burden of Dreams, the Fitzcarraldo making of.

I was curious what movies you'd want to see the making of in narrative feature form. So we both picked a few. What's on the top of your mind with this? Well, you teased me a little bit there with Apocalypse Now. So I'm going to go with this number one. But what I'm actually going to say is I want to see a narrative film about the making of Hearts of Darkness, which is Eleanor Coppola's documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now and really tells it's the story

of a marriage. It's the story of being the partner with a tortured creative genius. It's a story of excess. And it's a story of making one of the great war films of all time. I'm going to give this to you right here. Cast it already. Eleanor Coppola, played by Sofia Coppola, making her grand return to screens. Sure. Francis Ford Coppola, played by Nicolas Cage. Oh, wow.

Wow. So we keep it in the family. And I just think we should be like, I would just, I would love to see that. And I think that there actually is a very interesting story to be told about that marriage because you've got two people,

especially in Francis, who's like a control freak, but then it's basically these two dueling filmmakers who are trying to make something at the same time during this incredibly tempestuous time, both in the world, in the Philippines where they were making the film, and in Hollywood where all the money was flowing from. And I just think that on the casting alone, I could spend like an hour talking about this. I must say, even though they are related, I can't picture Nicolas Cage and Sofia Coppola speaking to one another, let alone starring

opposite each other in a movie. How are you going to make those energies work? I don't know, but I do think that we're ready for the prestige. And I know also it gets complicated because essentially these two people are related, so can they really play a married couple? But I do think that we're

due a prestige award-run Nick Cage role. couple but i do think that they were do a prestige award run nick cage role like a revived get him out of the making seven movies a year about vampires who are dentists and and and get him back in like a leaving las vegas type role so that's just my first one off the top of my head uh that's a great one that's um it's kind of shocking that that hasn't already been made you know because that the stories are legion from the making of that film and coppola has gone back to it so many times to kind of recut it and re-edit it it's officially in that blade runner status of which version is the official version i've lost track now sure yeah um and obviously

hearts of darkness maybe is that probably the most famous making of a movie documentary ever made? It's definitely my favorite one. I mean, the interesting thing about this question, man, is that I think that you and I probably enjoy movies like The Player and State in Maine and Hail Caesar that are like... State in Maine's a little bit more about the actual production of a film,

but The Player and Hail Caesar are more about like the margins of Hollywood. Like the movers and the shakers and the agents and the associate producers and the people who are kind of in the shadows. So it's interesting to consider making a feature, as Affleck will have to, about the actual making of the film. And as soon as you start casting someone to play Francis Coppola, someone to play Martin Sheen, or in the Big Goodbye case, someone to play Francis Coppola, someone to play Martin Sheen or in the big goodbye

case, someone to play Jack Nicholson. God, do you think Affleck's going to cast himself? I really don't think so. Jack Nicholson's like 5'8 and doesn't look at all like Ben Affleck. So I don't see it. It doesn't make sense. I know, but they're doing incredible stuff with Avatar. You know, I mean, like... Are you saying that Jack Nicholson's going to be Na'vi? No, I'm just saying, like, do you think that... I mean, they could get Nicholson to play Nicholson and just de-age him Irishman style. Wow.

You know, I've been circling a Nicholson episode of this show. And... But that's like Goodfellas for rewatchables, where it's like, when do you actually press the button? Somebody just posted on Twitter a quote. This is just an incredible sidetrack story. So someone on Twitter was just remarking upon how incredible it was to observe Jack Nicholson in his prime as a famous person, not just as an actor. And there's this great story from Richard Dreyfuss that he gave to Rolling Stone a number of years ago in which Richard

Dreyfuss had just won his Oscar. And he walks into an elevator and there's four or five people in the elevator and standing in the back of the elevator is Jack Nicholson, completely silent in the elevator. The elevator goes down six, seven, eight, nine, 10 nine ten floors finally it arrives where it needs to arrive the doors open and just as Richard Dreyfuss Richard Dreyfuss is about to walk out of the elevator Jack Nicholson says bet you're feeling good that I didn't make a movie this year huh and that energy is very hard to capture yeah and I don't I don, you know, Affleck, he's got a great sense of humor. I'm just not sure if he has the look for it, but maybe he'll cast himself. We know that he loves to put himself in the center of the frame,

and with good reason. I have a pick for a movie that I'd like to see made, but you have made me kind of reflect on all the choices that I made, which is all of these picks are about the disastrous makings of these movies, as opposed to The Player or State in Maine or those kinds of wry satires that you and I respond to because they reveal Hollywood to be this kind of...

Well, who wants to see a movie about like we did it? Like, would you watch a movie about like the making of Ocean's Eleven? Just guys just be like, fuck, this is a great scene. Truthfully, I would. You look amazing.

I would and I would enjoy it, but I know what you mean. There's no narrative tension in a success. Right. So randomly, a movie that I watched earlier this year on Amazon Prime is called Winter Kills. I'd never seen it before. It jumped out at me because Jeff Bridges and John Houston were on the poster. And I was like, I don't even know what this is.

I've never heard of it. It's kind of a 70s thriller. It's in that kind of parallax view, three days of the condor mold and the backstory behind it. I had no idea until I started kind of hunting around for famed troubled shoots, but the movie was originally produced by a pair of soft core porn producers, Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg. And to the best ever do it. Yeah. Well, you, you were a soft core aficionado. So that means I lost interest in porn when it got hard. You know, it was, uh, it was always soft core for me.

Bobby, do not cut that out. We're going to preserve that quote forever. Um, anyhow, Sterling and Goldberg, these guys secured funding from the mafia to make this movie. And during the production, Goldberg was chained to his hotel bed and shot in the head and presumably by the mafia. One would hope. Otherwise, that's a terrible coincidence. Yes. Sterling later was imprisoned for 40 years for marijuana trafficking. These were very scurrilous fellows who made this movie. The set was also shut down three times for failure to pay the crew on time. And this movie is just a mess. John Huston, Jeff Bridges, Anthony Perkins, and Elizabeth Taylor are all in this movie.

It's almost unwatchable, but it sounds like the making of it was downright illicit. And so I think that you don't need to make, it doesn't need to be the most famous films of all time to make for a compelling film. You know, we know that from like Adaptation like adaptation for example is about adapting a book you know the orc a thief that was a bestseller and a good book but was not you know tale of two cities and i think sometimes you have to look a little bit deeper to find the right source material so i'd

love to see something like winter kills which is pretty seedy and also the kind of crime movie that you and i both really dig yeah what else you've got you're touching something really interesting which is that like i think that the easier ones or the ones that would just be more obviously ripe for adaptation or for, for, for dramatization

would be stuff like Apocalypse Now, if you have Fitzcarraldo. I had Miami Vice, the Michael Mann film with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, which featured like

three hurricanes, a shooting, Jamie Foxx refusing to featured three hurricanes, a shooting, Jamie Foxx refusing to take boats or planes, an ending rewrite. Colin Farrell told me and Bill on Bill's pod that he just doesn't have any recollection of really making this movie. So there would just be a lot of sex and drugs and rock and roll going into that. But I think another one that I do think actually would transcend just what a disaster, let's make a movie about it and get some interesting themes would actually be Ishtar. And one of the reasons why I think this would work is much like Chinatown and Big Goodbye, there's a tremendous amount of reportage around Ishtar. There's a lot

of great Peter Biskin Vanity Fair article. There's a lot of the great Peter Biskin Vanity Fair article. There's a lot of information out there about it. But what it really gets down to is this triangle of Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, and Elaine May, but specifically the creative partnership between Elaine May and Warren Beatty. And just so people kind of have a sense of what happened. Elaine May, obviously, Nichols and May stand up, and she's a great filmmaker in her own right. And she had kind of arrived at this point where she had done some uncredited work on Reds, which was Beatty's Oscar-winning epic about the Russian Revolution and this journalist named John Reed who had covered it and then got involved with it.

And it's a fucking incredible movie. And Elaine May had, in some ways, I think Beatty even said, saved that movie in some ways. So Beatty wants to make a movie with her. He's coming off of like Heaven Can Wait and Reds and his sort of apex. And Dustin Hoffman has done Kramer vs. Kramer and Tootsie, and he's rocking. And Elaine May wants to make this Hope and Crosby style movie that's set in Morocco and then gets into like US involvement in the Middle East. And essentially it's like three people who think they're always right. But it's also about like the sort of sense of debt that Beatty felt he owed May for saving Reds.

And it gets into like ideas of credit and it gets into ideas of credit, and it gets into ideas of vision, and whether you can have multiple artistic visions. And that's actually what filmmaking is all about. It's like, we get into auteurism, we get into, oh, this director and all his films. It's like, that really has nothing to do with it. I mean, you can have very exacting directors, but so much has to go right for a movie to be good, and so few things have to go wrong for a movie to be bad. And I think this would be really telling story about the precarious nature of filmmaking itself and of creative endeavors themselves. So, and also, I mean, I just would love to see them recreate some of these stupid scenes of them dragging camels across the Sahara.

Okay. So I'm going to cast this for you. As Dustin Hoffman, I'm going Jason Schwartzman. As Warren Beatty, I'm going Chris Pine. And as Elaine May, I'm going Catherine Keener. What do you think? Where do we sign up? HBO Max, drop the bag. Where do you stand on the great Ishtar debate? You know, this was obviously, as you pointed out.

Ishtar is actually good? Like this thing? Yeah. I gotta be honest. It's not a movie that I'm like, I gotta go. It wasn't like, it didn't make me angry enough to reinvestigate it.

You know what I mean? I remember seeing Ishtar and being like, God, that was pretty long. But it wasn't unamusing. Wow. That's what people come to the big picture for,

that kind of scintillating criticism. What do you think? Well, I feel like it's one of those things that has gone into the slipstream of, of movie thought where there have actually been too many takes about Ishtar. There have been too many thoughts about why it was such a bomb, why it needs to be revived, why it's actually a masterpiece, why actually maybe it isn't a masterpiece. And sometimes you can be exposed to too much rhetoric about something that it's a little bit hard to see it. I think when I saw it when I was whatever, 13 or 14, I definitely didn't get it. I didn't get it because I'd never seen a Hope and Crosby movie. So I didn't really even know what it was trying to riff on. And the decision to kind of have Beatty and Hoffman flip roles, you know, to make Beatty sort of more of the nebbish and to make Hoffman

more of the dashing leading man is interesting, but is it actually a good idea? Probably not. Those guys are good at what they do. So I don't know. I'm down with any movie that has Isabel Johnny and Charles Grodin though. I think there's no downside to having those two people in a film. Did you have other ones that you were kind of thinking of here to make? Yeah, just a couple. I mean, like I said, everything that I listed is like the making of a disaster. So I thought about Jaws because the stories are legion there as well about how Bruce the Shark never worked.

I thought about Bonfire of the Vanities. There's that great Julie Solomon book about just what a misbegotten production that whole thing was and how miscast every figure was. I thought about alien three and David Fincher's kind of, I don't know, his baptism into the world of studio filmmaking and how that could have been a kind of interesting, but very dark making of eyes wide shut about the disillusion of a marriage,

basically in real time on the set of a film over the course of 18 months. There's been a lot said about twilight zone the movie there was a there's a series on shutter speaking of shutter um i think called cursed films that chronicles the makings of disastrous films or films that have had you know this mythological backstory and there was one about twilight zone the movie and that terrible incident that happened to two young child actors and Vic Morrow when they were killed during the making of the John Landis segment of Twilight Zone the movie. And at first, you know, I was thinking back on that and thinking like, oh, well, that's such a dramatic, high stakes, tragic moment.

That would be good. But on the other hand, I'm like, that isn't even a that's not a movie. You know, it's not a movie to just show something horrible that happened. Yeah, it's a data point. Yeah. Yes. It's not a movie you know it's not a movie to just show something horrible that happened yeah it's a data point yeah yes it's not like a story and it's i don't i don't know i mean it could be a story about negligence i suppose or corporate you know corporate greed or something but it's it's interesting you you want to try and find something that has incredible characters and incredible thematic kind of necessity for existing and it's it's not just necessarily like, man, it rained a lot. We lost a ton of money.

Yeah, it did. Thinking about that idea, though, of the disaster movie did take me to one movie that I thought would be fascinating for a variety of reasons, but specifically in 2020. And that movie is called The Conqueror. If you haven't seen The Conqueror,

this is a movie in which John Wayne plays Genghis Khan, if you can imagine. The movie was not shot in former Mongolia. It was not even shot in Asia. It was shot in Utah. And it was shot downwind of a Department of Energy site in Nevada where nuclear testing was being conducted. And the making of this movie is obviously absurd because it would be deemed immensely culturally insensitive right now because of who portrayed

the figures in the film. And just because John Wayne as a movie figure is pretty complicated. His politics, his point of view of the world, the way that he made movies, all of those things have not aged well, so to speak. But this movie is the grand scale version of a movie that I talked about last week on the show, which is Stalker. So Stalker, the Tarkovsky movie famously shot near a nuclear testing site. And many of the people who worked on that film eventually contracted cancer and died, including Tarkovsky. It's largely believed that the making of Stalker is what led to his death. This movie, The Conqueror, which is bad and which should not be rewatched, almost half of the people who worked on the movie eventually died of cancer, and most of which are believed to have died because of the making of this terrible film.

And so, like, how can you tell a story about the degradation of an art form and then the degradation of these people's lives because of this shitty movie that they made? I thought it would be fascinating. It's probably more of a miniseries ultimately than it is a standalone movie, but it's just a, it's just a wild and upsetting story. Um, and Oh, by the way, it's a Howard Hughes produced movie. So Leo back great so so we can get leo back wow you want to bring leo back sure leo the conqueror no we could bring him back to play hughes though yeah yeah of course i hear i follow you um chris are you in on genghis khan in general where you think he was a good guy you know i mean he hasn't really been canceled has he genghis because like is genghis

uncancelable because he was such a bastard? If you're associated with being a piece of shit and you're just such a terrible scourge on the earth and I don't really know what he meant for Mongolia's geopolitical kind of present and future. But yeah, I guess I'm not really into Genghis. I was curious about whether or not he would be a problematic figure to make a film about today. Probably.

Chris, let's do a hard pivot. Let's go through all of the dictators over the last thousand years and decide whether or not we should cancel them. No, but pre-industrial revolution, right? So let's just do a lot of guys who had fiefdoms. Do you have any other movies that you want to see a movie made out of?

No, I mean, I think, uh, I had, I just, the only, the only other one that I would put in there is sorcerer, which is William Friedkin's absolutely awesome, but completely doomed Roy Scheider movie set in South America about a bunch of smugglers trying to carry explosives across rickety bridges.

There are some scripts where you're like, how did you guys think that you could make this? Freaking built multiple bridges in multiple countries, all of which were destroyed, or the riverbeds just completely dried up and you couldn't shoot. This just goes back to real old school, I'm out of my mind,

auteur as God filmmaking. But I think there is something about, sometimes people start movies with the best of intentions and you're just like, yeah, we'll make a Vietnam movie. This is how we'll do it. And then it goes bad.

I feel like you could just tell when you read the script for Sorcerer, you're like, you guys are not going to be able to make this. That's a great call. I think there's so much call. I just also want to bring the Tangerine Dream score from Sorcerer back.

You're always doing that. You're trying to get Michael Mann into everything that you do here in movie podcasting at The Ringer. It's just shameful. Miami Vice, Tangerine Dream, always. Chris, you mentioned Host, the Shudder movie, as something that you loved. I know your wife loved it too.

You guys love, you love to bunker down and check out a new horror movie in the comfort of your own home. Yes. So why did this movie work for you? And explain it too. Explain what it is. Yeah, okay. So this is a film directed by Rob Savage. I guess we can call it, I don't know if it's the first, but it's certainly the most prominent quarantine horror film. I believe it was shot during this entire

quarantine during the COVID era. Features some COVID paranoia, like masks. We're all at home. We're all largely communicating over systems like Zoom. This is a horror film that takes place in Zoom. Now, in and of itself, that is not that remarkable. You and I both have expressed affection for the first Unfriended, which really pushed chat horror, I guess, and online social networking horror to its farthest, farthest extremes. But I don't want to be hyperbolic here because Host is about 56 minutes, I think. I mean, it's only barely a movie in some ways. But I got incredible Blair Witch vibes off of this movie.

And I'll tell you why. So in the same way that Blair Witch kind of came out during a really nascent internet that was starting to really share urban legends and conspiracy theories on a mass level. And also at the same time, a spirit of like DIY filmmaking where there was a feeling at that time

that you could get a Sony Hi8 camera and make a movie with your friends. And you were starting to see a lot of people after the independent explosion in the 90s, people starting to go to film school, including myself for one year. And it seemed to capture a moment, right? It seemed to capture like a,

like me and my friends went out and made a movie and this is what happened moment. And also grabbed this, like every place has a story like this. The Pine Barrens Devil, the Blair Witch, urban legends, and just stories like this, that folklore that kind of permeates.

I think Host does this too. Because all of the scares in Host and a lot of the atmosphere is entirely built out of Zoom, out of the things that you're normally seeing on Zoom. So for instance, like one of the characters, Caroline, is seeing on Zoom. So for instance, one of the characters,

Caroline, is kind of lonely. And so her background of her Zoom is a loop of herself walking in and out of her room. And she's like, oh, look, see, I made a friend. I made a friend to come in and out of my room. That winds up being one of the most haunting images in the movie itself. And it's the kind of thing that you could only really make out of Zoom technology itself. And the same thing goes for people's face filters they're doing. There's a lot of stuff about talking over people and not being able to hear people, but they don't lean too heavily on that. Almost every podcast does the first six minutes are jokes about Zoom now, but that's not really what they do it is part of these people's lives and i think also in terms of blair witch i'll just say this last thing is that the characters are all very strong and the performances are almost

uniformly really good but you don't really notice like you never really have a like this has to be the star so she has to be the final girl feeling. That feels very unstable throughout the film. And yeah, just the window into the very particular anxieties of 2020 that shows how we're seeing little class differences through Zoom. You start checking out how nice somebody's house is and how nice their quarantine must be because of that. It's just kind of ingenious all over the place while never really showing off about it.

I thought it really just worked into the story really well. And more than anything, I think the reason that it works is because of what you cited at the beginning, which is it's 56 minutes. It's not trying to do what so many horror films I think do, which is make an effort to stretch to get to 84 minutes to become a kind of a theatrically bound release that can play, you know, 3000 screens. It doesn't, it's disinterested in that. It doesn't need to be that. And that it's kind of got me thinking about what's happening with movies right now. And I've talked about it a lot over the last six months and just how everything, the shape of a movie and a TV show is so different. You and I even were having a text conversation last week

about the things that arrive that we don't even really realize. TV shows land and they have eight episodes and these streamers have spent millions of dollars on these shows and they come and then it's as if they've never existed before. And I don't want to single any show out too much because I'm probably living in a bubble of my own design in many ways. And there's some people who might love a show that I've never even heard of, but this is the kind of thing that in a very subtle and, and understated way, basically just redefines what a good movie experience can be, um, in the way

that it's made and the way that you watch it. You don't have to be in a movie theater to watch it. In fact, it's probably better if you're not in a movie theater watching this. I think it would be weird to watch Zoom screens in a movie theater when all this stuff hopefully opens back up again. In fact, I don't really want to see a Zoom screen when I go to a movie theater. That's the last thing I want to participate in. I don't even know if I'd ever need to see it ever again after this. I don't want this to be a new genre in any way. It's funny that you should bring this up because Greenwald today on The Watch was talking about how he wanted to have you on

to have this conversation somewhat about some of the movies that have been released on streaming services over the last couple of weeks about basically the invention of the mid-movie or medium movie where it's like a movie that seems to just be

just a little dialed down. We were talking about American Pickle and comparing that to Longshot and how Longshot had these huge action sequences and tons of locations and extras and a huge cast of June, Diane, and Raphael just showing up and going off for three scenes and how American Pickle just is kind of

very, very small small and contained, but actually works on its own terms very well. And on the other side of that, I think that we're seeing in a weird way, an explosion of very bloated cinematic television, where it's people trying to start essentially their own Star Wars with a pilot episode or a first episode of a first season of a TV series. And even that goes all the way down from Brave New World on Peacock all the way down to Perry Mason on HBO Max, where it's like, we have to do so much. We have to show all of our cards to get people to tune in again. And so we're in this really interesting place. And then something like Host comes along

that feels fresh and new, even though it has obvious influences from a ton of stuff. And at 56 minutes, you're like, do I need any more? I don't want to spoil anything, but the basic premise is a group of friends get together on a Zoom call and have a seance. Now, there is a version of this movie where a lot more time is spent on the ghost. And what does the ghost want? And is there a larger cinematic universe that we can explore, like where this ghost lives

and has ghost friends that are also doing things like this on Zoom calls? And I'm sure we'll get a host too, but it does feel like this movie was like, no, no, no, no. This is what we're going to do. People have 56 minutes to kill. They want to get scared on a Friday or Saturday night. This is a great, great use of their time. It's a great call. And I'm relieved,

frankly, that they did not lean too aggressively into expanding all of that. And frankly, this is the history of the second half of the 20th century of horror movies. Really, if you look at Night of the Living Dead, it's a film that largely takes place in one location. If you look at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's a film that largely takes place in one location. If you look at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's a movie that largely takes place in one location. The modest, the small, the low budget, the make what you can because you have to experience is so endemic to horror. And Host is a perfect and fascinating example of it. There have been, you know, Shudder is also just this really interesting, I don't even know how to describe it necessarily. I guess it's just ultimately a library, but it has released, I would say, four or five of the most interesting

movies that have come out during quarantine on its service exclusively. And it's been the home of some really cool stuff last year. One Cut of the Dead was there, an Asian zombie film, and Tigers Are Not Afraid was released there, I think a Mexican horror film. So it's got this great international cash. It's also got movies like Hellraiser and a lot of Giallo films. But they're releasing these original films now. And The Beach House was one that came out a few weeks ago as well, that is a sort of Lovecraftian vacation movie in a way. And I don't know. I mean, they've kind of drawn me in. I'm just

kind of willing to check out almost any new movie that they put up, which is, I can't say the same for Netflix or Amazon Prime or all of the other major services. They've kind of got this, and this is strictly for horror fans. You really have to be a horror fan to care about this but they have this imprimatur of of quality in a weird way and this only helps that i mean i do that sometimes like i look at like ifc midnight site and see like what because that stuff usually i think has like a baseline of of of competence and kind of i'm engaged enough with it. And I obviously forgive horror for like almost anything. Like as long as it's like decent,

I'm usually pretty engaged. I will say that with Host, I can always tell a horror movie is effective if in the third act, I lose feeling in my hand because my wife has been grabbing it so hard. You know, and that definitely happened in the last 30 minutes of this movie.

And you pretty much are it's it's kind of a wild thing because especially you know i watch so much tv and you know you'll just start second screening you'll just start like looking at your phone or like getting up and going to that room and they for as much as we're taught like this is the golden age of television and you should watch every scene because it's as good as a movie there's so much stuff that you can just be like i I know what's going on here. And it was sort of, it was kind of nice to get the muscle memory

of being completely locked in back and just being like, I can't miss a scene. And you can't miss anything that happens in the background because it's so important. Like these little clues and these little flashes happen. So if you have a chance to see it, I can't recommend this movie more highly. It's one of my favorite movies of the year.

Would you say the same thing about The Tax Collector? Dude. So let's just be 100 with each other, right? If there were two people in the world willing to get into this movie, willing to be like, I watched Tax Collector this weekend, AMA. It was great. It would be you and me. I was excited. I was excited when I heard about it. I was excited to see David Ayer go back to the down and dirty, harsh times, street kings, nasty, you know, east side Angeleno crime story. Those movies, I like those movies.

They're whatever. They're problematic. They're not safe. They take a lot of liberties with who should and should not be in the center of those movies. But those movies are really well made and they're whatever they're problematic they're not safe they take a lot of liberties with um who should and should not be in the center of those movies but those movies are really well made and they're interesting and he is i have at times been an interesting filmmaker and in the last like five years i think people think of him as kind of a joke because of bright because of suicide squad and he had lost a little bit of credibility amongst crime movie fans. And this seemed like it should have been a revival, a resurrection. And it's not that, dude.

Yeah, because I think film nerds want him to be Don Siegel, right? We kind of want there to be this bare-knuckle, tough-guy filmmaker who makes a movie every 18 months that's just like Fury, like Street Kings, like you were saying. And I think you're absolutely right. A lot of his movies need to be very critically examined

in terms of what they have to say. But this actually is not, for as offensive as parts of Tax Collector can be, I just felt like it was, something happened to it. It looks gauzy. Like it,

it has like this weird filter over it and the performances seem to be not happening all in the same films. Um, there's chunks of it that feel like they were left out. Like there was just story that's left out. And, uh, yeah,

I just found it to be a really disjointed and kind of boring movie, honestly. I agree. I found a slog really hard to get through, which even for some of airs, I guess, lesser successful films. I think most people seem to think end of watch is maybe his best movie kind of end to end his most inventive

and using that kind of found footage, body cam technology to tell the story. I have a, I don't know if you can say, a place in your heart for a movie as evil and intense and violent as Sabotage. But I think Sabotage is like a badass action movie that didn't even really get much acclaim at the time, but it's just incredibly well made. And even Fury.

Yeah. I think you and I saw together. It's also just like, it's kind of amazing that that movie is only six years old it just feels like a that it feels like that was another lifetime ago but is uh also to tie it all together seems like a movie they should make a movie about the making of that movie about um about all these guys get going straight method and knocking their teeth out and you you know, sort of paying homage to the greatest generation,

but also being like greatest generation. But what if they were the wild bunch? It's, it's really an interesting, and it's, it's another, another very fascinating Shia LaBeouf performance as is the choices he makes in the tax collector. I think that there is like a degree of which what shia does in tax collector is abhorrent

but he is also clearly like the best part of this movie and is is like there is a movie about this character i guess that might be interesting and you can see why he would i guess want to do this but jesus like it just really like misses it misses the ocean after falling out of a boat yeah you know so i've talked about this movie actually a couple of times on this podcast but Jesus, like it just really like misses, it misses the ocean after falling out of a boat. Yeah. You know, so I've talked about this movie actually a couple of times on this podcast because I had heard about it two years ago when I think it was when it was originally filmed. And a friend of mine was telling me all about it. They had seen it because air had been screening it or the financiers had been screening it in an attempt to get someone to buy it. And it had been passed around Hollywood for a long time and no one was interested in buying it.

And when it was described to me, I was like, I don't know, this sounds kind of amazing. It sounds pretty dark and maybe even offensive, but it does sound like a movie like this could have an audience. And the way that it was positioned was that it stars Shia LaBeouf as the titular tax collector, the person who essentially works for a crime lord

and picks up money from you know various residents in the city local level street gangs and stuff yes uh for you know for a cartel functionally and that is sort of what the movie's about but not really um shia isn't even really the star bobby soto is the star of this movie and he is also a tax collector shia plays a guy named creeper who is the you know wild off the handle he is also a tax collector. Shia plays a guy named Creeper, who is the wild, off-the-handle, loose cannon type. And there's always a loose cannon type in a David Ayer movie. If you look at many of his movies feature pairs,

you know, Harsh Times and Street Kings and End of Watch and Fury. There are all these paired up guys. Even Bright is a movie about a pair of guys. And one flies off the handle and one doesn't. And Shia is, I agree with you, the character is very ill-conceived. He's this kind of white guy, this gringo operating inside of this Latino crime community. And he has affected many of the social ticks of the culture around him.

And the movie doesn't actually explain that he's a white guy, though David Ayer has clarified that publicly since the movie was made. That's canon. It's canon, that's right, in the wider tax collector universe. Yeah, I'm doing a lot of Creeper fanfic. You know, I'm just trying to write Creeper origin stories. Yeah, but it does feel like, I mean, Shia is in many ways the best thing in the movie,

and I don't even know what that means anymore. He keeps making not great films that he is the best thing in the movie and i don't even know what that means anymore he keeps making not great films that he is the best thing in with the with the exception i think of the two movies that he made last year which is honey boy and the peanut butter falcon which seemed to be a part of the new shia like a slightly more i don't know sensitive self-aware this is not the the desperate angry person who made Nymphomaniac and who made Charlie Countryman and somebody who was trying to figure out who he wasn't or who made Fury, frankly.

What do you think about where Shai is going? What kind of star should he be? I think it's a little unfair because like you said, this was made two years ago. So I think that it's difficult. Look, I mean, I'm very interested in him as a performer. I think that he's one of the great what-ifs of probably that generation of actors

and going back to Kingdom Crystal Skull, you just kind of wonder where this was all going. I mean, he did a bunch of Spielberg-adjacent movies that seemed to be setting him up to be the biggest movie star of his generation, uh, obviously has left the, the stratosphere in a lot of ways and is sort of starting to come back down.

I don't know that we'll ever get to a point where he's like Chris Evans, like, no, nor would he actually want to be. I mean, he is obviously one of the most sensitive people working, you know, when you hear him talk about both his himself and his craft,

like it's, it's just so charismatic because it's so vulnerable. Um, I think I always have an interest in seeing somebody like that. Just do a straight movie and, and just try to like bring a lot to a more traditional role and not one that's so self-flagellating. But yeah, we'll have to see when we start getting back into movie production, what he chooses to do with his career and honestly, what the tolerance level is for

what goes along with him. So let me just put a little cap on this conversation. What do you think about Shia LaBeouf as Jack Nicholson in Ben Affleck's Chinatown movie? I don't know. Can you do that? How old was Nicholson when he made Chinatown? So Chinatown's released in 74. Nicholson was born in 37. So that would make him what? 36? Yeah. At the time of the making. Yeah. Right now, right now, shy is 34. So it's pretty close, Chris. And he has that weird live

wire nervous energy. He can be funny. He can be menacing. He can be a bit weak and pathetic. He can be all the things that Jake Giddes needs to be. I don't know. So Affleck basically revives this guy's career. He sends him through. It could happen. And why not just a dollop of problematic on top of all the other problematics in this movie and affleck casts himself as john houston see the thing i saw on twitter a bunch of people just being like it's got to be daddy houston like daddy houston has to play john houston that's true you saw a bunch of people say that who are those people like two people you know how like that happens on twitter where like one person says it and then like another person retweets and you're like wow god

this is just this is mass hysteria is freaking out about this. I need to find the Twitter where hundreds of people are saying that Danny Houston needs to portray his father. You're closer to that Twitter than I am. Chris, anything else you watch? Anything else going on with you? What's up with your movie consumption, man? You good? Yeah, I'm, it's, it's, I'm taking a lot in, you know, I just finished Perry Mason and there's a,'m taking a lot in you know i just finished uh perry mason and there's it's a there's a lot of tv on right now but i'll watch almost any movie that comes out at this point i'm so desperate for it you know i say perry mason is a good double feature with chinatown it's interesting look at what would happen if they tried to make chinatown today

yeah which is to say what um slightly more more sensitive to the viewpoints of other people aside from Jake Gittis. Interesting. Okay. Strong tease, Chris. But I wouldn't say necessarily that Perry Mason is in the same ballpark as Chinatown in terms of how good it is.

Well, that's going to be the complexity for Affleck in trying to tell the story, right? Is how do you celebrate this thing that is probably what feels like a perfect piece of art made by a bunch of people who are very complicated with some distance. CR, thanks for coming on, man. Always good to see you. Of course, man. A pleasure. Hopefully, we will talk before too long. Before we go to my conversation with Amy Simons,

let's hear a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by An American Pickle. An American Pickle star Seth Rogen is Herschel Greenbaum, a 1920s American immigrant who has accidentally brined in a vat of pickles for 100 years, emerging in present-day New York City. Seth Rogen also plays Herschel's only surviving relative, his great-grandson Ben, a mild-mannered computer coder living in Brooklyn. From the producers of The Disaster Artist, then 50-50, An American Pickle tells the uniquely

heartwarming story of two men from two different generations who must learn the true meaning of family. Stream the new Max original and American Pickle now only on HBO Max rated PG-13. Okay, everybody expects us to have an anime podcast. Michael Peters, Justin Charity, at long last, are they

podcasting once again about anime? No. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Micah Peters. Honestly, this podcast might turn out to be like the Eddie Murphy Martin Lawrence movie Life, except neither of us is in prison

and in fact, we're not even taping in the same location. But we will be talking a lot about the millennial life. You know, music, video games, strange stuff from the dark corners of the internet that piques our interest. People think this is going to be, oh, a little topic A, oh, what's topic B, oh, a little, you know, chit chat. No. Every time you tune into this podcast podcast we are going to lock you into a room for 45 minutes and we are going to do criticism we are going to get to the bottom

of every scooby-doo mystery that the discourse produces for us each week mark my words man that was that was a lot but anyway we are excited about it. We are excited. We're excited. We're super excited. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Micah Peters. And this is Sound Only. We're back on August 11th. Catch us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go. Delighted to be joined by Amy Simons to talk about her new film. Amy, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for having me.

So Amy, a lot has already been said, and I'm sure you've been asked 10 million times about the remarkable timing of your new movie and the anxiety and fear that it seems to be responding to. But I was hoping you could tell me when the idea for it first struck you. There was a lot of things like layer upon layer of like coming together with the idea. One of the first things was dealing with my own anxiety, my own sort of existential dread or just anxiety in general. And then in addition to that, you know,

I'm a news junkie. So I had been watching leading up to the 2016 elections and then even still day to day with what's going on COVID wise. And I realized that I was part of, you know, this sort of spreading of these ideas and watching sort of the headlines come and it'd be like complete panic. And then suddenly then like three days later, it'd be a new headline that we'd all have to panic about. And then another headline we'd all have to panic about and just, you know, the sort of 24 hour news cycle of, of, of panic. And I'm not trying to blame anyone for it. It was, it just is, it just is happening. And, um, and so I was trying to figure out, you know,

how to sort of use that as a macro idea and then my own anxiety and allow it to be very personal. Uh, cause I also felt like when I was, when I was telling my friends about my anxiety that I was, I felt like I was spreading the anxiety or my anxiety that I was, I felt like I was spreading the anxiety or I felt like I was, I was keeping like passing off the burden or burdening them in some way. And so that was the, that was like sort of the, the, the impetus for the idea. Do you have that same issue where if you're going about your day and having an okay day and someone sends you a news story that upsets you deeply that it can kind of just torpedo your day

yeah yeah yes i do and and i immediately go and try to like watch the news like it's not just torpedo like maybe emotionally but i definitely whatever plans i had just get sort of sucked into the news did was the idea then to because i I mean, you've said before that the film, that Caitlin Shields' character in the film is named Amy and reflects you in a very serious way. Did you know right away that you wanted to make something that kind of put a proxy for you right in the center of it? Yes. I mean, Caitlin, well, Caitlin Shields, my proxy all the time, but, uh, but, uh, but in these different,

in a very different way, cause, cause, you know, as a writer or at least the way that I write, I sort of excavate parts of myself. A lot of times, like a lot, it's more, way more interesting to sort of excavate the faults you have, you know, and then, and then push them to their limits. Like, I'm not saying like in sun, don't shine. It's not like I'm going to kill somebody or, you know, but taking this little piece of me and like really like twisting it and allowing it to spin out. But with that, with, with sun, don't shine, or then even with the girlfriend experience,

even though there's pieces of me and all of these things, the decisions that I, that I was making, you know, you can't, even though they're pieces of me, you can't make every decision personal because at some point the character takes over. So it's like, you can't do this because the character wouldn't do this, you know. And then, but in this in particular, because I was exploring something I didn't really know how to quite put into words, but it was all sort of this much more visceral feeling and much more you know it was it was for me it was beyond words and I was trying to explore it that I didn't want to get trapped in uh character I guess in a traditional sense I wanted like Kate and and Jane and all of us to feel the freedom to like access the feeling as opposed to what this character would do next you know you mentioned

sun don't shine and girlfriend experience you know obviously girlfriend experience was a major undertaking but why was it eight years between uh feature film directing for you did you try to get anything going in that interim or is this just the right time for this movie i I tried to get a few things going, but I, but you know, creating a series and writing a series is extremely time consuming. So when Steven asked me to do the girlfriend experience, it was around 2013 and I had been acting on the killing. And so once I finished that lodge and I started writing the girlfriend experience and it wasn't until that was in 2013 and once we got the green light to write all of the episodes uh which was sometime in 2014 then we started writing all the episodes and we were finished by the end of 2014 and then

we started shooting the girlfriend experience in 2015 and then sorry just just to give you a timeline of like how long it takes then we shot it you know we were in pre-production January to mid-March and then we shot that all and all the way until mid-June then I was in post all the way until October of 2015 and then unlike many other television shows as a director both lodge and i were in the post process like hands it wasn't like we had a director's cut and then we passed it off to the network the whole idea was what steven wanted was for us to have our hands in it the entire time like an independent film so it wasn't like traditional television where i could go direct an episodic like one episode do my director's cut and then hope whatever I did made it into the show it was like we the final cut

uh was with Stephen which in turn basically meant we had final cut because he didn't change anything that we did so so it so and then we got we tried then we started getting you know then I did Alien then I did then I would go and act on things. And then I did my second season of TV, which again, you start the process all over of writing it. And then you have to do it the same way. So I didn't have time. And I also really enjoy acting. So in order to give space for that.

And for me, I didn't feel... It's funny because I kind of look at content and I look at the girlfriend experience as these long form movies, but it's interesting having these conversations with people. Cause they're like, why did it take so long to make a feature? And I was like, I've already made many. It feels like I've been making features, you know? Cause, cause we treated the girlfriend experience like a long format movie, if that makes sense. It does. I didn't mean to imply that you were slacking in any way no no no i know i just i sometimes feel like it's like to i think people need to know how long and that was and the reason because that brings me to the next point is

like the reason also that i to explain that also leads me to um at a certain point when i was developing the next television show that i was have been writing I was like so frustrated in the development phase not because anyone's not doing their job it just takes so much time and I just sort of like that not flipped out because I don't really flip out but like I was like I need to shoot something right now like I need to direct something I have to like I it's it's it takes so long as a director to actually be able to do your job. So I was like, we have to do this and I'm going to self fund it and we're going to shoot it. And we're just going to like make this thing that I want to make. So, so that was, she dies tomorrow. Yeah.

Oh, interesting. Okay. I mean, I only ask because I think I certainly saw sun don't shine when it came out and I was like, boom, we have another person that I'm excited to see all the things that they do. And then, you know, years go by and you don't necessarily see a film. And so you're like, I hope that person makes another movie, but maybe that's not something that they're going to be doing. You know, you mentioned the experience of the girlfriend experience in terms of how you got to make it. I was going to ask you what you learned from that or picked up from that, but it does sound like it was somewhat similar to the sort of independent filmmaking that you had been doing

in the past. Yeah. I mean, I didn't realize how lucky we were because I was, you know, sometimes and I say this in interviews and I don't mean it to say that I don't know anything. I think sometimes my, in some of the work that I've done in the past, including the girlfriend experience, because I mean, I had acted on television, so it wasn't completely naive but um Stephen said treat it like an independent film and I was like okay and I didn't have any I didn't have any perspective as a director to know the difference you know like I was like I don't know how tv is run I mean I've acted on it but I have no idea like how it's so when he said like do it like an independent film, I had no, there was no question of like of comparison. So I was just like, okay,

shoot it like an independent film. And it, and he, he was a buffer between us and the network and also to give stars credit. It was the, I can't believe that they allowed us to, you know, they were like, there were no notes, there was no notes. And they just, they basically, Steven went to them and was like, what's the, the amount of money that you would give to these filmmakers to make whatever they wanted but you're not at risk right like you'll have content and i'll make sure you have good content but what what would be the

amount of number that like you don't fuss with it and they gave him a number and then we made a show but like that's not how television that's not how television works so i coming out of girlfriend experience i didn't realize how lucky i was you know when as i'm developing things but like i didn't realize how what a rare experience it was because i had no reference point yeah that's that's not my understanding of how tv works especially a show that gets renewed which is you know that's to get two seasons under those circumstances is awesome. Um, so for this film, how did you, how did you go about raising money for it? How did you explain it to people? I feel like it must've been a tricky task to get it off the ground. Um, I, I was not, I, I financed it myself. So I fully, wow. Yeah. So I just, I had one conversation about maybe it getting financed and I realized I

didn't because, because of the nature of why I wanted to make this thing and the amount of money that we were talking about receiving, I was like, for that amount of money, I don't want to answer questions. And I have that money. And I also am not like a fashionista. Like my money goes back into film anyways so you know like I don't spend I'm not a big spender I'm not like yeah so I'm pretty frugal so I was just like basically just treated my pet cemetery check like it didn't exist and put it into the movie

that's pretty amazing so what was your hope then I mean I know obviously it was supposed to play South by was the expectation that, you know, you get a big theatrical experience and all that. I mean, I didn't, you know, with,

with, with something of this size and with, even with sun don't shine, you make it and you're just kind of like, hopefully I guess I liken it to like raising a child, even though I know it's not like raising a child. Cause parents will be very angry at that. I say that,

but hopefully all the mommy blogs start complaining about me. Have you ever seen those things? Have you ever seen this? They get so angry. It's amazing. I like scrolling through. It's the most vitriolic of anything. Twitter doesn't even touch the mommy blogs. I think us childless late millennials, we have to stick together. Yeah. But it is like you hope you instill all the ideas into this thing that you've made and then you send it out into the world and you're like, hopefully you communicate with people well. And so, you know, that's specific to the independent films I've made. With television, it's really interesting because you know you're going to have an audience. With independent film, you have no idea, right? So I was really was really and not only that I was like super busy on top of it so I didn't even

have time to like sort of make these visions of grandeur for She Dies Tomorrow I was just like super proud of it and excited for people to see it and I'm quite honestly the neon buying it and and what is happening right now is sort of beyond what I could have even dreamed. It's like saying, I mean, I loved my movie, but it's like saying to your kid, like, I didn't realize you're going to get into Harvard. Well, it does have that feeling though. It does have the feeling of like, it's like a little mini event. And part of it is the circumstances that we're in. But part of it, I don't know, it just feels like the energy around it is big for something

that you paid for yourself. And I read that you shot it in your own house as parts of it. I mean, that's pretty extraordinary that it was so grounded and in your control. And now so many people are going to get a chance to see it. Which is really great. And I should say, while I'm sort of downplaying it, you have to understand, I've been making films with these people for a very, very long time. And the way that we shoot it is very like and and also i'm extremely lucky because they also are at the top of their game so even as scrappy as the movie is i get i i get to work with these

people who are incredibly brilliant so even though we're making it and it was like very much a labor of love and there was like so much love on set. It's basically a coming together of some of the most talented people that I know. So it's sort of a no-brainer in some ways. But yeah, it's quite surreal, not just because of the timing of it, but also because there was such there was, there was such a hands-on experience of making the movie. It wasn't this massive machine, you know. You know, talking about anxiety has become way less stigmatized in the last five, 10 years, but there are so few movies that seem to kind of be actively intellectually about that. Did you like go back and look at anything? Did you, was there any like source material or inspiration material for trying to make

something that manifests that? No, you know, I mean, I, I, I love movies. I mean, I love tone heavy movies just period, whether it's anxiety or just like, where are we eerie? Which is why I love genre movies because genre movies get away with these very, very strange tones in a way that very, very rarely do just straight dramas get away with. I mean, obviously things break through

and become popular culture and stuff. But I hadn't really seen anything. I mean, I love the softies films and I've known them for a really long time, like Good Times and then their newest one uncut gems and and actually ronnie bronstein's work early on too frown land is also it's actually a really good example of anxiety sort of drama you know or anxiety i don't know what it's almost like a comic book movie in a way it's got like this pulpiness to it and then um but i i was really trying just you know i there's i've watched so many films but i wasn't consciously trying to

execute anything because i was trying to get to something so personal and to see how i could translate it but you're right but i also think it's really fascinating because not my generation but like the i guess the younger generation behind me, they're constantly talking on social media about anxiety and depression and all of these things. And what's interesting, and I think it's great to talk about it openly, but for me, sometimes words can't touch what the feeling is. Like there are no words sometimes, and you can talk about it all day long and that is a form of therapy in its own sense but like i like me talking about it doesn't really solve it and it doesn't really

actually get to like what it feels like to be going through it you know yeah that's amazing how do you and you mentioned that you like genre how do you feel about this movie being categorized as horror do you do you like that it gets dropped in a bucket and that that's how people will find it? I think it's, I mean, I think it's a, it's tricky.

I, I, I do think that it is horror-esque and I do think it in a intellectual way. Yes, it's a, it's a horror film. And I do think that it's, I definitely intentionally am playing around with horror tropes,

like specifically with sound design and, you know, and this ratcheting of tension and sort of the arc of it. But that sort of comes with people who expect something from a horror movie because one of the things I love about horror and some of the stuff I'm playing around with is there's a contract with the audience

of like scares and like taking you to these, like there's a contract that they have and there's a language that they use and the audience is familiar with it where it's like whether you subvert the you know the scares or the jumps it's like the audience has signed up and they know the language of horror which I think is really fun um so so it's interesting because I do think it's a horror film but I also know there's certain things that people want from horror films that might be like, what the fuck is this? You know?

And so I think it's, I think it's better to not know what you're getting into, you know? Yeah. I was thinking about just the notion of kind of ambiguity in your movies too. And the, you know,

your, your ability to kind of withhold at times and defy explanation at times. Can you just like talk about the decision to maybe not explain everything yeah i mean soda soda burger and i talk about this all the time which all the time like as if every conversation we have is about this every day every day i call him i'm like let's talk about our favorite topic. He and I talk about it. We've talked about it maybe twice. And then we had to do interviews and I brought it up.

And now it's sort of, I say we talk about it all the time. That's an exaggeration. We have talked about it before. Is that you want the audience to be asking the right questions. Right? And so sometimes if you give too much information, they're not asking the right questions or they're not left with the right questions. That said, you, you never want, there's a difference between ambiguity and confusion, right? So you always want to make sure that your audience is never confused um but but but ambiguity can be quite a wonderful and lovely thing because it it's it keeps the viewer engaged so like at the end of each scene

you want the viewer to be like wanting more and to be asking the questions of what's happening what's happening what's happening and um and then eventually at the end of the movie or what my goal with with with this is like to like the movie ends and then it's like, what's happening in life? And so, you know, to be left with that question of like, oh, my God, we are going to die, which is just a fact. It's not, I guess it is morbid because that's the definition of morbid. But, you know, it's just a fact. It just is. It just is.

It just, we are. You're going to die. I'm going to die. it's just a fact. It just is. It just is. It just, we are. You're going to die. I'm going to die. Everyone's going to die. But, like, it's sort of, that's the question I want to be left with. And I think with, like, some of the ambiguity, and I do it in Sundown Shine, too, it's like, and then also in the girlfriend experience as well. But it's to, the mystery sort of allows the audience to bring whatever questions

they have to, to, to fill in the blanks, you know, and there's also a comfort. I don't know if you notice, I don't really like exposition, but not, not because I don't, it's not that there's a time and a place for exposition. And I shouldn't say that because I do have exposition. It's just in these very subtle droppings like throughout the movie, but the, but exposition in some level stops the audience from questioning or trying to figure out what's going on and

therefore they're like less engaged and it becomes something other right it becomes uh almost comforting even if i were to show the violent scene of like what happened to Kentucky AKA Craig in the movie, even if I were to show like what happened and it was extremely violent, there's something, it's a bit of an explanation for the audience and therefore like a comfort and it sort of distances them from it. If that makes sense.

It does. I mean, just the whole concept of, I want you to keep thinking about my movie after you've seen my movie rather than just walk away and say every knot has been tied and so i get it i that that makes a lot of sense yeah is that narcissistic i want you to keep thinking about my movie you want to be understood as an artist right no it's true i'm just joking but it would be different at the ending i was like i want you to be thinking about me the character's name is amy you know don't forget that at some point

yeah the real magic trick for me is the tone and there are times when the movie is horrifying and intense and psychedelic but it's also pretty funny and especially the scenes with katie azleton and chris messina and, I don't know, as a, as an Angeleno who's been at the occasional like birthday dinner party with the banal conversation. Like I just, I think that scene is so,

is really great and clever. How do you, how do you balance tone is a dumb question, but how do you balance tone in a movie like this, which is so reliant on making people kind of be sensory the whole time? I mean, that was a real balancing act that I, I will be quite honest was like a lot of exploration of figuring out

what was too, what was going too much in, in, in each direction, because there's also the fear of as, as the filmmaker, there's also the fear of, of having the comedy release the

tension because laughter does release the tension but it but but finding that right balance of like keeping it kind of manic you know because it because the humor is is it's very important for me for me personally of what i was trying to explain with anxiety or any of these things or self-indulgence at all, is I constantly laugh at myself for being overly dramatic. And that's what brings me out of a mood. But it was sort of a balancing act with a lot of the stuff, which is, and again, my recommendation is cast very good actors who can oscillate between the two but but but but

allowing it to breathe and like laugh just just enough time to like keep everyone off balance and go back to this sort of weird this weirdness and the anxiety back again so like and even in the editing is like keep everyone on their toes where it's like this is funny wait now oh god now we're back no no like it's like this sort of like the constant sort of uh cycle of dread and then humor and then dread and humor and then silence you know and and utilizing that in a very the movie is extremely manic but uh uh in in a way intentionally so i noticed the the second time when i watched it i noticed that aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson produced this movie. I really like their movies a lot. And it actually made your movie make more sense,

sort of like in the constellation of films like this with that kind of a tone. What did they bring to the movie? I met them in 2012. Their movie Resolution was going around when Sundown Shine was going around. And we stayed friends. And while I was trying to put this together, I mean, I initially was just going to produce it myself, which is just too much. And so I asked them, you know, initially I was asking them about maybe finding funding through their deal because it's like genre-esque, you know, initially I was asking them about maybe finding funding through their deal, because it's like genre-esque, you know. And then once I realized I wanted to self-fund it,

Dave Lawson, who produces for them, he was like, just let me know anything you want me to do. And they said the same thing. They're like, just let me know anything you want me to do, like, whether it's like union stuff and da- da da and uh and then i was like okay and then i did like you know like some people like they say that and then the other person's like oh okay and then but i was like great because this is happening so tomorrow can you come over so it was like happening so fast and they're like oh okay um so so they just helped in any way they could but dave was like on the ground and they have their their rust um so so they just helped in any way they could but dave was like on the ground and they have their their rustic films is is justin and aaron and and dave so dave was on

the ground um they would be really excited there was a scene that i had of them in in the movie that that was cut that they loved talking about um where i i had this funny idea that like you know after we have this moment that we show sort of like these this isn't funny it's very dark we show people sort of like dead like that it's all spread and like they were these tennis players that were just dead in the middle of like the tennis courts and that was them but it made the cutting room floor. Because I was like, I shot that. And then I was like, I don't like this idea. I want it to be left in this other way. But Aaron and Justin are very bitter about it.

It's very funny. How'd you land on the Mozart piece as the musical signature? I was listening to a lot. I was actually listening to a lot, trying to listen to classical music while I was writing other things in them. With this in particular, I've always been obsessed with requiems in general.

Just the idea of just intentionally writing about your own death and creating this piece of music seems just so overwhelming in a way, you know, overwhelming and, and maybe the most important thing that you could do, but like, how do you do that? Cause I, when I write, I have to, I have, I have to allow myself mistakes. So like I, when I sit down and I go, this needs to be brilliant. I can't write.

So like there's something like sort of paralyzing about the idea of writing your own Requiem. So I was listening to it and it just feels, it's so perfect because it also follows the arc of sort of, it gets like really huge and then like kind of tapers off and follows the arc of whatever I was trying to explore. But also, you know, I'm not alone when I say, like, when I'm feeling incredibly indulgent,

I will put a song on repeat over and over and over again, as if it's going to solve something. Very relatable choice. I think a lot of people are going to sync with that. Can you talk about what your next TV writing thing is i don't think i can't quite yet and i do and not just i bet i could i just there's also an element of like i like secrecy so that nobody talks about it before it's a thing do it like because sometimes i've had this actually happen and i won't say who said this but like with sun don't shine like way

back in the day somebody i don't even want anyone to draw conclusions somebody watched it and was like i guess i expected more from this idea and i was like what are you talking about like this is the movie i made what movie did you write in your head for me that like now you don't even like people if i put an idea in people's heads they're like oh great like it's hard not to get your imagine and then like when you watch the thing you're like oh that's not what i was expecting and it's like it becomes so hard for them to like actually watch the thing so that's why i don't talk about it yet expectations can be a bastard um amy we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen?

Are you watching stuff in quarantine? I, Oh my God. Is it, isn't everyone? Yeah. I've watched so much as a wash, but I I'll,

I'll talk about the, the most recent that I am obsessed with. Well, surely with by Josephine Decker Decker. Yeah. I mean, I feature for your film. Yeah.

I love, yes, exactly. If you, if you can, if you can withstand that level of anxiety, sure. with by josephine decker decker yeah the double feature for your film yeah i love yes exactly if if you can if you can withstand that level of anxiety sure what what did you like about shirley it's just a whole new language do you know like it's it's it's so it makes me so it makes me so sick but there's and even though it's like kind of surreal and it's it's very much it's there's a like a who's afraid of Virginia Woolf sort of quality to it but there's also just like you don't know what's gonna happen like you don't know if people are gonna get like stabbed and like the emotions but also there is this familiarity for me and the family that I grew up in of like,

just like this household is just so tense and it doesn't, it doesn't ease up. Not so much in the intellectual realm, like not so much as like people that are writers or anything like that, but there's just that tension and you don't know what's going to happen. But I also like understand, I, as a woman I understand Elizabeth Moss sort of like anger at the world and bit like in in that bitterness and like if you ever met Josephine Decker she is most delightful and wonderful and funny and you don't like there's

no this is no reflection but I know like I saying, as I take these little pieces of poison inside of me and spin it, you know, and like push it as far as possible. It's like, she also has so many layers of understanding all of these things. So what I, what I loved was like, she accessed something that's like, oh, I do have that drop of bitterness inside of me it just doesn't manifest in this way but you manifested it and it felt extremely cathartic to sort of exercise it and um and just the filmmaking of it is just so you just don't it's just it's just so original you know um and then i also need to shout out to this television show I May Destroy You which is incredible it's like I've never seen something that deals

with it's funny again it's funny but it's also really upsetting and I've never seen such a brilliant performance about trauma like where somebody's trying to ignore their own trauma and like you know it's just,

it's, and also just the filmmaking of it is so beautiful. And she's so, she's just brilliant. I mean, I don't know if you saw chewing gum, totally different tone, but she's hilarious and genius.

Michaela Cole. Amazing. I'm trying to imagine a Shirley. She dies tomorrow. I may destroy you like film festival. That would be a pretty intense day of watching it. Right? It would be so intense, yeah. Those are great picks.

Amy, thanks for doing the show. I appreciate it. Of course. All right, take care. Thank you to Amy Simons and Chris Ryan. And I wanted to note a correction we made to this episode. On an initial recording, I said that Roman Polanski had been accused of the sexual assault of an underage girl and could be deemed problematic by some. That was not acceptable, and wrong. So we've updated the episode to reflect the change to be more accurate, which is that Roman Polanski in fact pled guilty to statutory rape before he fled the United States.

Thank you as always for listening to The Big Picture.