The Big Picture - 'Bombshell,' 'Richard Jewell,' and What Happens When Movies Mess With the Media | The Oscar Show

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

Bryan Curtis stops by to talk about 'Richard Jewell' and 'Bombshell,' two new films about the media, the Kathy Scruggs controversy at the center of Clint Eastwood's latest, and how factual a movie about real people ought to be (1:04). Then, Sean and Amanda break down the just-released Oscars short lists and survey the Best Director race—and the probable absence of women from said race (38:48). Finally, Sean is joined by 'Bombshell' director Jay Roach to discuss his long career in comedy and the making of his new film about the inner workings of Fox News (60:36). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Jay Roach, Bryan Curtis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelley, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. As the year comes to a close, our staff is writing about our favorite sports moments of 2019. Jason Concepcion explains the year in 10 pieces of pop culture, and we break down the last 10 years of the Marvel Universe. Also, ahead of the new Star Wars movie coming out next week, the staff's discussing Baby Yoda, Rise of Skywalker romances, and what the Resistance will do if they win. You can check this all out on TheRinger.com.

I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about all the fair and balanced news that's fit to print. Later in the show, I'll have an interview with Jay Roach, the director of Austin Powers' International Man of Mystery, and meet the parents, but who is really becoming best known

for his comic docudramas about American politics, including Recount and Game Change. His latest film is called Bombshell, a film we're going to discuss right now in The Big Picture's Big Picture. This is a problem in the big picture, do you know what I mean? Joining us to talk about Bombshell and Richard Jewell and what happens when the media meets the movies is The Ringer's own Brian Curtis.

Hi, Brian. Why are they making movies about the media? No one cares. Who wants to see that? It's a curious thing. Sometimes this works out well. Sometimes you get spotlight. Sometimes you get all the president's men.

I don't necessarily dislike either Bombshell or Richard Jewell, but they have been interesting items of speculation and interrogation over the last couple of weeks. Brian, on your podcast with David Shoemaker, The Press Box, you guys have talked a lot about the controversies around Richard Jewell. Let's unpack some of those quickly before we start getting into the nitty gritty of the film. Maybe you can help us understand specifically what role a person named Kathy Scruggs plays in this movie. Yeah, she plays a problematic role. I think we should say she was a big figure in the coverage of Richard Jewell.

She was a co-byline on the very first story. In this movie, she is kind of a suggestion of a character, more than a character, probably. The big news, of course, is that they, in the movie, they suggest, or I guess more than suggest, right? She sleeps with an FBI agent after he gives her a tip that they are investigating Richard Jewell. Yes. They don't literally say, she does not literally say, I will now sleep with you because you have given me this information. But that happens in rapid succession in the span of 30 seconds. It's kind of like the Trump-Ukraine call.

It's a quid pro quo. Exactly. You don't have to say it. We know what happened. It was a perfect bout of sex for information, as Trump might say. And Olivia Wilde, and I think you can talk about this, but Olivia Wilde has suggested that she was in a relationship with this FBI. This is, again, some reporting that she was in a relationship with this FBI.

This is, again, some reporting that none of us were aware of before this. That's not what's in the movie. The movie is, hi, here, give me some information and I will do you a favor. And then the FBI agent, played by Jon Hamm, says, oh, so we're doing this, which would suggest that they were not doing this before the exchange of information. Yeah. Yeah. So this controversy has swallowed the movie up in a lot of ways. And I did not think that was going to be the case. And over the course of the run up to the release of the movie, Warner Brothers released a statement sort of defying the Atlanta Journal Constitution's rebuttal of the movie. They were very proactive in identifying the fact that this is a movie and that there is some fictionalization and some dramatization

happening here. I wanted to talk to you guys especially about what happens when a movie takes liberties like this. Because generally speaking, for art's sake, I think movies should always be doing this. Movies should always be stretching and redefining and reimagining and recontextualizing these stories to tell better stories. It's not the job of movies to make good journalists. It's the job of journalists to make good journalists. But this seems to be a situation where Clint Eastwood, obviously the director and grandfather of this film, has some very specific points of view about authority in the media. And there is an expectation that he brought a lot of those ideas. Do you think that the movie

suffered greatly because of this conversation? Or is this just something that we talk about on podcasts because we're all in the media? Dave Weigel, political writer, had a great tweet where he said all this controversy convinced liberals that they didn't want to see Richard Jewell. But the controversy wasn't big enough to convince conservatives that they could own the libs by seeing Richard Jewell. So it kind of put Richard Jewell in this weird half state. I'm with you. I'm all for historical fiction and broad license to do it. The exception I would make is in a case like this, because you could have just picked a random person, but you picked a real life reporter who's not famous. And you are telling the world the one thing you should know about this woman,

other than that she broke the story initially about Richard Jewell being under investigation by the FBI, is that she slept with somebody to get the information. So I think if you're going to do that and then take the additional step as Wilde suggested, that this is based in reality. This isn't Billy Ray writing the screenplay. Let's make something up. You owe it to show your work in some way, whether it's an op-ed, whether it's an interview or something, because this is beyond. This is not famous people having a conversation in the White House.

This is a real person. So this is a very pernicious and well-established trope in movies about female journalists. Female journalists in movies are always sleeping with the sources, which I, you know, I should just go on record in case you are not as involved in the media as we are. That's not what happens in real life. We're not all sleeping with our sources, just so you know, that's not allowed. But when I saw this movie, it was a couple of days before the kerfuffle started. And I was so shocked. I thought that either I assumed that this journalist, Kathy Scruggs, as portrayed in the movie, was not a real person.

And then when I Googled that she was, I was like, okay, either there is she wrote a memoir where she literally said this happened and I did this. And this is how I got the story and my involvement or else she's dead. And friends, it's option B because otherwise I was like, how do you get away from this, get away with this from a libel perspective? It's so blatant and so, and it stands out. And the other thing is just, it really, it undermines the movie. I don't understand why you have to do this. Because this is a movie about how the media was responsible in ruining Richard Jewell's life, which is like, that's fact, right?

That is, that definitely happened. But to put in this seemingly fictionalized or unsubstantiated and gross comment on a female journalist in the movie undermines all the legitimate, if tricky, cases that Clint Eastwood and this movie wants to make about the media's role in American politics and life. I completely agree with that. This man was trapped in his home with his mom for 88 days while people, everyone in America thought he was a terrorist who had set a bomb and blown up people. And it wasn't a case of some of these cases of guilt or innocence

where it's, oh, he was a little bit involved, but he wasn't. No, he was completely innocent. And somehow you've done this and taken him. He's no longer the sympathetic figure. And the journalist who was part of a team at the AJC that made mistakes in covering him and were not skeptical enough of the government's evidence and case, you've turned them into the sympathetic figures. I just don't get it at all. It's a bit of a confounding thing. I think a lot of journalists are struggling with the movie for the exact reason that you mentioned, Amanda, which is that I think it's actually quite a strong film and one of Clint's best movies in the last 15 years. And it's been completely cast aside in a lot of ways. Not that Clint needs another successful movie. He's had plenty in his career. But it's a movie

that kind of metastasizes a lot of ideas that he's fascinated by, kind of like libertarianism in the sort of like a single man's pursuit of success in the face of a lot of people working against him. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's response to this, though, I think has been a little bit curious. The long piece that they published, a sort of profile of Kathy's life, I think in some ways was very helpful in terms of saving her reputation specifically about these kind of allegations. But it also revealed a person who obviously had a lot of struggles in her life, who did some things that are, I think, just on the page people will look at and be like, oh, well, maybe she didn't do that, but it also revealed a person who obviously had a lot of struggles in her life, who did some things that are, I think,

just on the page people will look at and be like, oh, well, maybe she didn't do that, but she was that. It's actually, like, I thought, hyper-generated new conversation around her life and around the movie. Brian, what did you think about the idea of trying to memorialize her and defend her in the pages of the paper like that? Well, I thought, one is,

I think you just want to give her an identity. You know, she's being used. She's not really much of a character, as I said, in this movie. Clint Eastwood doesn't really care about the media in this movie, other than as there's this noise and this thing that's happening to Richard Jewell. He didn't care about that. The way that story got written was very interesting. Actually, it was a bunch of editors and writers kind of putting that story together imperfectly,

as often journalism is. So they were trying to give her an identity. I think we've kind of gone now over the falls where we've corrected, as you see, this horrible stereotype that got into this movie. And now we're kind of excusing what the paper did and what all the media did and saying, oh, her story I saw held up. No, they didn't. One, the guy was innocent. And two, there were actual mistakes in the piece, even in the first piece and in the paper together. So it's totally understandable that the paper wants to do this. But to me, at some point it becomes, okay, you're giving this woman identity. You're telling us the real story behind her life. And then there's this conversation about what the

media did to Richard Jewell, which is actually kind of separate. One thing that's a little lost in the conversation around this, and I wanted to get your perspective on it, Amanda, is when you're making something, let's say you're making a podcast or you're working on a story or you're making a media company every day, you're collaborating with people and you're interrogating all of the choices that we're making on a regular basis. You have questions about things. The Olivia Wilde defense of the character is one of those things where you think that at some point you might ask a question. You might not just presume. And I guess that's questioning maybe the integrity of what Olivia Wilde is saying in the defense of her character. But movies take a

long time. Even one take Clint's movies take a long time to make. And there's a long time in the making. So how did how was not everyone on the same page with this? Well, I'm going to say movies do take a long time to make, but relatively, this was like a very quick movie, at least in the filming. Like this was filmed over the summer of 2019 and it's December and now we're watching it. So that's pretty wild. And it does really seem like Olivia Wilde got one to two takes and it's like, oh, OK, this is the performance you're going with, which is, it's a caricature. I think it's a pretty ungenerous and cruel version of a reporter, which is fascinating because Olivia Wilde is the daughter of journalists. So I wouldn't say that this is a portrayal of empathy and understanding, at least from what I've seen. Granted, you only get a take or two, but the material is not there, and also her interpretation of the material is pretty

intense. But it definitely seems like it wasn't examined at the time, and it certainly seems like no one anticipated this, and no one got on the same page about their talking points, because Olivia Wilde has been all over the map. And I'm, you know what, I'm not sympathetic with the fact that she's answering for some male choices. Like, this is a movie directed by Clint Eastwood. It's written by Billy Ray, but also she knows what she's doing. She read the script and she gave, the first answer was like, it's unfeminist to say that women can't have sex, which. That was not ideal. That was not ideal. And that didn't go

over well. So once people really started talking about this, she did a longer tweet thread on the 12th. And, you know, here we go. I'm just going to read two of them. Contrary to a swath of recent headlines, I do not believe that Kathy, quote, traded sex for tips. Nothing in my research suggested she did so, and it was never my intention to suggest she had. That would be an appalling and misogynistic dismissal of the difficult work she did. I mean, I don't know how you play the scene with Jon Hamm at the bar without understanding what you're suggesting. But, you know, Olivia Wilde and I have different reading comprehension. Let me go to the second one. The perspective of the fictional dramatization of the story, as I understood it, the perspective

of the fictional dramatization of the story, that's important, as I understood it, was that Kathy and the FBI agent who leaked false information to her were in a pre-existing romantic relationship, not a transactional exchange of sex for information. That is so stupid and disingenuous that I don't even know what to say. I don't, I think she's just kind of making stuff up because it's very clear no one thought about this. And I don't understand how anyone didn't think about this.

Well, it's one of those rare cases too where the ultimate author of the movie, Clint Eastwood, is not doing a lot of press. He's not going to respond to this kind of a controversy. Billy Ray has also gone on the record to talk about it and said he firmly stands behind the script that he wrote. I think you may have mentioned this on your show, Brian, but there is some irony in the fact that Billy Ray wrote and directed Shattered Glass, really one of the best films, one of the more realistic seeming films about the journalism

industry and how some of that stuff works, even though the story of Stephen Glass is almost impossible to believe many times. What did you think about Billy Ray's staunch defense of his script? First of all, I love that there's a new PR defense as the daughter of journalists. Ay, ay, ay. Sort of a little bit of a curveball on what we're used to hearing in things like this.

My thing about Billy Ray is that I think there's a problem with making movies about journalists, which is that journalists are really interesting. Their work product is often really, really interesting. Their day-to-day work, as the three of us can attest, is often very boring. You're sitting in front of a computer terminal. You're making phone calls. That's what Kathy Scruggs was almost certainly doing every step of the way of the story. So how do you dramatize that?

Well, I know we're going gonna have to go sleep with somebody. And to me, it's almost like a just creative dead end that you hit as much as anything else. So you come up with this misogynistic thing to do. And you're also, it's much more dramatically interesting to make that the moral question in the piece, rather than should the AJC have printed this or not? And what was like the journalistic responsibility

and like your duty as a, you know, ethics in journalism or whatever. Because that, I mean, that's ultimately what it's really about. I believe that the AJC ultimately was not found in- They never settled and they never paid. A lot of other newspapers and news outlets did pay the Jewell family because of what they published, but the AJC stood behind its reporting.

I mean, it's a difficult kind of case to report in a lot of ways. And there really is, there was only one stream of information, which is the FBI was running the investigation. She acquired information from the FBI and she reported it. She claimed she had it double fact-checked. That seems to come under some doubt in the aftermath. It's a really complicated kind of thing that is not ultimately, like you're saying, the dramatic tension of the movie. So maybe it is just easier to write a character this way. Right.

It's not fake information. That's what's so hard. Right. The FBI absolutely believed they did it, and the press was reporting accurately to an extent what the FBI thought exactly problem is they were just doing a lot of credulity and this guy and this whole idea of this lone bomber profile that just was seemingly invented you know for Richard Jewell and this idea that oh well he was a wannabe cop and he was this and he was that and it's like he was also just a wannabe cop it's a it's a tricky thing Do you guys think that the movie suffered at the box office because of the sort of owning the libs narrative that you're talking about, Brian?

I think there's that. I also think this is a pretty, I mean, when I saw that this was a movie, I'm interested in this kind of thing. It's the 90s. I remember this obviously well and it happened. I just didn't like, this was not like a terribly interesting topic for me for a movie. Right. Richard Jewell, the movie. Right.

I have some thoughts about that that I'm going to save for another segment. But Sean, did you know this story? Oh, I knew it well. You knew it well. Yeah, I followed it. But I mean, in 1996, imagine me as a teenager being obsessed with the Olympics.

I mean, that was a high time for this kind of a thing. And also it did feel somewhat similar. It reminds me of an event like Desert Storm, where it felt like a hardcore CNN story that if you just turned on CNN at any time across those 90 days that Brian is talking about, this was the lead story every day. And so it felt inescapable to me at the time. Yeah. I mean, I was very familiar with it because I was 12 years old living in Atlanta, Georgia when this happened. So I, you know, and I remember, I remember the bombing.

I remember following this. I think I was 12 and stupid. So I'm pretty sure I thought Richard Jewell did it at some point, you know, which I like. We all did. I think, I mean, we all did. And that also speaks to kind of the way the media worked in 1996. I saw it with my husband who was like, I didn't know that story at all. And I did wonder whether it is kind of a specific story for media nerds and, you know,

people who are interested in these sorts of, it's like, it's a very, it's a symbolic American story, but you kind of maybe don't remember all the ins and outs of it unless you're looking for those. I think, but I think that Clint Eastwood in the past has been able to overcome that kind of did you or did you not know about it. Like if you look at the movies that he's made recently, especially some really successful ones, American Sniper, obviously based on a true story and a true life.

The 1517 to Paris, which is a very unsuccessful movie, but it's based on a true story. Sully, obviously a story that people far and wide knew very well. And even last year's movie, The Mule, which was based on a New York Times story by Sam Dolnick, I think. He's been using these kinds of tales of standout, standalone people trying to overcome the machinery of power to further, I guess, like his maverick legend in some way. But most of these stories are just one click away. They're very like Wikipedia stories. Yes, it did. This movie, I didn't hate this movie either.

I liked it actually better than I thought it was with portrayal of Kathy Scruggs aside. It's pretty effective. It's pretty effective. It did have a feel of a TV movie ripped from the headlines of the old network TV movie days where we take something that happened 15 minutes ago, we cast it kind of well, and it's pretty good. It's pretty effective.

I thought, was it Paul Walterhauser played Richard Jewell? He was great. Tremendous. And when we talk about capturing like the subtlety of that case, he did. Because he was like, I'm, you know, somebody who really likes authority. I really secretly want to be an FBI agent. So, of course,

I'm going to cooperate with these guys. Often to my detriment. I thought that was really good. And Clint got a lot of great stuff in this movie. Kathy Bates was pretty good.

Not really kind of a thankless role, but she was good at it. She struck me as authentic. Like, that was what Bobby Jewell would have felt in those moments i agree i think that's basically what elevates it is you've got many many minutes

of the movie that are just kathy bates sam rockwell and paul walter hauser in a room talking and that's just going to work as movie going goes it's just going to be entertaining enough the film itself it feels like is just kind of going to fade away now it feels like we had our 10 days of controversy it It bombed at the box office. Forgive that terrible pun. And that's it. It's just we're not going to talk about it anymore. I guess that's true. I think my only question when I saw this, there is a climactic scene when Paul Walter Hauser, Richard Jewell gets to kind of tell off the FBI and my the entire theater started applauding when I watched that. I know. And I was like, oh,

this is going to be a thing. And I kind of expected American Sniper vibes. And I was like, this should be interesting. And it does seem like it did not find that conservative Clint Eastwood audience at all. I wonder whether it could over the holidays. I mean, I guess at this point it's so the box office is so low that it wouldn't. But I kind of do feel like all of the conversation and controversy has and even Richard Jewell being on so many critics list, which it was, which I was kind of astonished by, is not the targeted audience of this movie. And this movie has not found actually who it's for. And maybe it won't. But we were surprised by American Sniper.

That's all I have to say. That's true. I think the TV movie quality that Brian is describing is one reason why it probably will play pretty well at home for people. It's going to play really well in airplanes for people. It's the kind of movie that they're like, yeah, I've got two hours to kill. I'll watch this.

But it's not a drag you into the theater kind of a movie. But speaking of the conservative reception of movies, let's talk about the other big media-centric release of the weekend. It's called Bombshell. It is the story of the women of Fox News and how they took down Roger Ailes. This is a sticky wicket. I'm very excited to talk to both of you about it. Another movie that I think, perhaps against my better judgment, I actually quite enjoyed, but I will share very quickly with you the reaction of someone I watched this movie with. I had seen it once before to screening,

and then I got a screener in my home and I watched it with my wife. We're watching the movie the second time around. I'm kind of looking at the performances. I'm looking at it a little more closely. I'm like, this is really entertaining. It's got like rhythm, you know, Margot Robbie, she's doing something interesting. I like what she's doing here. Movie ends as soon as the credits hit. My wife deep sigh and said, well, I hated that. And my wife is not the kind of person who would say I hated that about most things. But she deeply and profoundly said, I just do not want to watch a movie where Megyn Kelly is the hero. Brian, you saw Bombshell over the weekend.

And as the husband of a wife who saw it with my wife last night, who actually quite liked it. I really liked this movie. Again, I was quite surprised how much I liked it. Me too. When I saw it, I got the vibes from Dick last year, where I'm going, oh no. Vice.

Excuse me, Vice. Dick, a great movie. Dick, a great, sorry, Dick, wrong. Sorry, I mean, my political movies make that. I got the vice vibes where I was like, oh no, it's going to be people that I know and I'm not going to be able to suspend my disbelief that they are the real people. And it's going to be so liberal. It's going to be so caricature-ish. But I thought Jay Roach really rode that line really, really well.

It's hard, right? First of all, I got the suspension of disbelief, right? Because half the movie, you're like, that is Megyn Kelly, right? It's unreal. Whatever uncanny valley Charlize Theron went in, I mean, it was like, whoa. And I think actually that is one of the movie's best assets. Absolutely. You absolutely believe it's Megyn Kelly the whole time you're watching it. It's one part, Kazuhiro, the makeup artist who also did Darkest Hour and Gary Oldman for Winston Churchill.

But the second time I'm watching it, I just couldn't. I was floored by the voice. The voice is unreal how pitch perfect she is to the way that Megyn Kelly speaks. This movie, though, I wonder, does it have the same responsibility to the quote unquote truth that a movie like Richard Jewell does? Because this movie is also taking a lot of fictional liberties with how things played out at Fox News. Yeah, I enjoyed watching this movie. And I think that Charlie's performance is memorable and extremely weird. The first 20 minutes, you're just kind of watching her walk around being like, how are you doing this?

Which is good. You want to be sucked into a movie that way. Even as I was watching the movie, I was like, I don't know why this is a movie about Megyn Kelly. And I do, actually. I know why. It's because the Charlize performance is so captivating, and it is also because Charlize Theron is a producer of this movie. That's the big reason. And that's the big reason. And I was watching it and I was like, okay, because you have Charlize and because you have this like amazing effect, you guys have kind of repurposed this story in a way to make it about a person who it's not really about. And who is like somewhat complicated, but is ultimately, the end doesn't quite fit for me. It makes me aware of the manipulation

and kind of what they are including and what they aren't including and the real lives of these people and also kind of some of the things they've done after this and that they are not heroines. And it's, you know, I couldn't get past that. And there was something about like the forced perspective of it that made me aware of all the things about it that are a stretch, if that makes any sense. And conscious of who I don't know,

cockeyed, almost satirical approach to serious real-world events and shoots it through the eyes of several different characters. In this case, they're all operating inside the Fox News building, but you're seeing the movie through Megyn Kelly's eyes, but not just her eyes. You're also seeing it through Gretchen Carlson's eyes and a character named Kayla Popasil, who is a composite played by Margot Robbie. And, of course, Roger Ailes in many ways, too. Brian, what did you think about that approach to trying to tell it through many different frames? Well, I thought they just did a really good job of boiling it down, right? Vice is a big swing to try to get this whole big life.

This was good and maybe boiled it down too much at the end, but they did a good job just telling a small story within Fox. I thought that was a big thing. To your point about Megyn Kelly, I totally share the queasiness. The problem is there are no uncomplicated heroes there. We used to see the producers.

I'm here and I feel bad about it. I know I'm working for the O'Reilly factor. I'm icky. I bad about it. Like, I know I'm working for the O'Reilly factor. I'm icky. I can be a good, I can have a Hillary Clinton poster in my apartment, but I'm doing something bad at some level. So that was, but I thought the biggest thing actually the movie captured was that there are lots of different stories, right? There's the sexual harassment slash assault story. So that was a story of ambitious people on television, right? That sort of gets lost in all that Fox thing and how you're trying to navigate this and be a big

star and all that stuff. And I thought there were small notes of that that really got into the movie well. And also it's like kind of what I wanted to know about Fox. We have read so much about this, seen so many versions of this is what were people talking about in offices? What is Megyn Kelly's calculation? Like what's she thinking about? When am I going to say, when am I going to say it? How do I reach out to people? That kind of thing. I think it like creates that atmosphere of Fox news and also editorializes that atmosphere of Fox news, like really effectively. It is, it's not a pro Fox news movie. It's not at all. Not at all. And, and, and it's quite funny and inventive about it at times. I really enjoyed it.

And I think it also, you know, the scene with Margot Robbie and John Lithgow as Roger Ailes in the office is just extremely upsetting and effective. And it is kind of one of the most memorable recreations of that sort of harassment on screen that I've seen in some time. And I remember watching it in a packed theater and it was like silent. You could just feel everyone taking that in. And that's a testament to Margot Robbie and John Lithgow and the filmmakers of actually creating that in an honest way. I think for me, the thing was just, Megyn Kelly is not at the center of this story. She's just like not. And there is something about putting her at the center of a story that is not totally hers

and that she kind of, you know, waffled on, which is interesting, but trying to make her the hero of it reminds me that this movie is also to an extent lionizing a real life person who I don't feel super comfortable with. See, I felt it pulled back when it got to the heroism part just enough for me.

When you would start to kind of root for Megyn Kelly, you know, kind of, again, forgetting. I felt it just pulled back enough to show that, you know, how complicated that idea is. There's one significant scene that we won't spoil for people who haven't seen it between Margot Robbie's character and Charlize's character that, to me, is the whole movie. It reveals what the movie really thinks about Megyn Kelly and what it really thinks about these people who are ambitious inside of Fox News, but it is not actually a kind of rousing philosophical speech. It's just a little under the surface, and you're just meant to see that everyone here is kind of poisoned by the idea of succeeding in this environment.

And also this idea, I thought one of the most interesting things about the movie was it captured something that I think other journalists have felt to have taken jobs they feel they shouldn't have taken, which is that sometimes you take a job and you're like, well, I'm stuck here forever. I'll never be able to wipe the grime of this place off of me. I'll always be known as the person who worked at X.

And Fox News probably has that reputation stronger and more deeply than any other quote-unquote journalistic outfit. In general, I think if you watch the movie, you would think that Fox News would have just closed forever once this movie ends. But in fact, Fox News is more powerful than ever and essentially pursuing the same exact mission

in the aftermath of Roger Ailes' exit and the end of his life that it always was. Do you guys think that a movie like this can reposition how we think about a place like that? No. Well, I don't know. I think it's serving people who don't like Fox News. And I actually respect that it takes a side

and isn't trying to bring as many people to the movie theater as possible. It's just kind of like, this is our perspective. So if you feel the way that, say, I do about Fox News, you watch this movie and you're like, uh-huh, yeah, that sounds about right. And I wonder whether, I don't think anyone who enjoys Fox News will watch this and be like, well, now I have to reconsider my fandom of Fox News. You know, because it's not like a proselytizing movie entirely, which is one thing I actually like about that. It has a lot of ideas, but I don't think it's prescriptive.

No, I don't think it wants to reposition Fox News. But I also think it's one interesting part, too, is we know in real life, and this was reflected in the movies, when the Murdochs are finally faced with this overwhelming evidence from their own employees that Roger Ailes is this poison and awful. It's like, okay, you know, it's a very cold calculation. Here's the guy that built the billion-dollar cash cow. We still want the billion-dollar cash cow. How do we serve both of those needs? And it turns out we're just going to get rid of them and then Fox News will sail into the future. So unlike Richard Jewell, this movie opened in just limited release over the weekend and was very successful at a very high per screen average.

I do you think that a lot of people will show up for this movie? That's a good question. I think it has the ingredients to that. I don't know what the public – there has been a lot of public fascination with cable news, even as a media critic person that shocks me. Like we – nobody watches cable news comparatively compared to any of the stuff you talk about on this podcast. That's true. Nobody watches these shows. A couple million people a night max watch these shows. And yet we have this crazy fascination with the lives of these people, with their product, with them as big political avatars and, you know, against Trump and for Trump and all that stuff. So I actually think it has a chance.

Yeah, I mean, it collides fame, sex and power, which tends to work at movies. And this one happens to have movie stars. And Jay Roach's movies of this kind historically do very well on HBO. That is where Game Change and Recount aired. And those movies were kind of events unto themselves, not unlike this sort of Richard Jewell TV movie that you're talking about. They were kind of, they're kind of a Tony version of that. And they've been awards season fodder, much as Bombshell thus far is really award season fodder in a way that Amanda, I think you picked up on like months ago that you were like, this is actually going to do very, very well. I mean, they are just three remarkable performances and three like very showy performances

from three actresses who people really like and who are nominated for awards frequently. So I think, and actors are a major voting body in the award season. So I do think it'll show up in the same way that Vice did last year. That's been my comp throughout. The single biggest problem with these movies to me is just, I said this a minute ago, it's just accepting that the actors you're watching are those people we all know so well. This movie has a few moments like the Giuliani showing up where you're kind of like, that guy kind of looks like my uncle who all kind of looks like Rudy Giuliani.

But most of the time, I think it's part of the reason it may do well or may win a lot of awards is because you just accept these people as the people. Even John Lithgow in that grotesque looks like makeup. I mean, that looks like here is Winston Churchill, right? Here is a guy in makeup. You know, after about like 20, 30 minutes, I was like, yeah, I credibly believe this is Roger Ailes. Yeah. So Megyn Kelly is not on TV right now. Do you think it would be better or worse for the movie if she were on television every day and reminding us that she's Megyn Kelly? Oh, that's a great question. I think probably ultimately better because awareness is really all you want from a movie. And I think she would also be reaching a different audience then I think this

movie has awareness among the same people who tweet things all the time same as Richard Jewell but I think this is another movie that I don't know does this movie want the conservative audience and can it get it that's the question because I think this movie will do well except I would not take my parents to see Bombshell over Christmas and I wonder how many people are like you know what we should go do is see a movie about Fox News and then have an argument as a family afterwards and that may be wrong because I think the family going at Christmas can go a lot of different ways but in my case you can either go to the movie and have the argument or not go to the movie and have the argument so not go to the movie and have the argument. So it's going to happen either way. I think there is this big Fox News fanboy, fangirldom in the world, right?

People that like the channel but are just obsessed with the personalities. There's that great line in the movie with like people like Megyn Kelly, not because she's arguing for the existence of white Santa Claus, but because she's the person who has the gumption to go out and say it. She'll just say it. So I think there are probably people that are Fox News fans who just want to know what was happening behind the scenes. Have you guys seen Megyn Kelly's response to the movie? Her Instagram photo of her son looking at the poster of the film? Yeah, really confused. What must it be like to be Megyn Kelly in the universe? That's got to be a very odd existence. I have to be honest, I don't really care. I think, like, what it means to be Megyn Kelly

is that you're rich as shit and successful. And she's fine. And she's posting the picture of her son looking at her on a movie poster and gets a lot of sympathetic responses from people. Megyn Kelly's fine. And that's the one thing where I'm kind of with Sean's wife on this, which is there is a dimension

to this movie that's unexamined, I feel, of these women are participating in a lot of things, not in sexual harassment. And it's a complicated situation. And the movie shows that to a degree. But it's also that these women are on Fox News in short skirts

and they know what they're doing. I think it might actually be a better movie about show business than media. And in many ways, Fox is in the business of show business. And the leg cameras and the sort of auditioning aspect of the film and how Ailes uses that to harass people, all of those things, they felt much more like a backroom Hollywood story than like a media story ultimately to me. I think that's right.

And that to me is what I took away with it. Almost, you know, I'd forget at times that it was Fox News. I just felt like a movie about ambition and harassment and evil. And yeah, I mean, like a lot of Hollywood stories we're reading right now, you know, it is very much of a piece with that.

And it was in a way in the timeline kind of one of the original pieces of that, right? We found out about this and then we found out lots of other stuff. If you want to hear more Razor Short Media commentary,

please subscribe to the Press Box. Brian, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Amanda, on the subject of media movies, it's now time for Hark. Yes. Hark!

Hark! Frighten! Hark! Here's my Hark. We got to get better at naming movies. Okay? Because you know why Richard Jewell didn't work? We talked a lot about the politics and the sexism and, you know, conservatives and whatever.

But, like, no one knows who Richard Jewell is. Like, no one went to see Richard Jewell because it's called Richard Jewell. What is that? What should we have called it? So I'll tell you. The original Vanity Fair article that this movie was based on by Marie Brenner is American Nightmare colon The Ballad of Richard Jewell. You know what's a great movie title? American Nightmare, colon, The Ballad of Richard Jewell. You know what's a great movie title? American Nightmare.

That feels like a word salad of headline writing that I have aspired to many, many times. You know, the sort of two strong words, colon, brief description of the figure inside the story. I was thinking the bombing of Centennial Park seemed like it would have worked well. That's a little bit of a 1979 version of the movie, but something that gives you some insight into what the action of the film is. Yes.

Obviously, it is really ultimately a character study of Richard Jewell, but I agree with you. We have to trick people. It's in the same way that we've had to alter our internet headline writing. It's just time for movies to start copying the same thing. It needs to be descriptive and long. You can't do the cutesy print magazine title anymore. I love, so you want to do movie SEO? Yes. How else are people going to see movies? Oh, that's a great point. Like, so let's do a couple more. What about, what would you have called the new version of the Lion King?

Okay. Well, that is just, that's SEO. That's the Lion King. Because one of the things of SEO is you want to get keywords that people recognize in the title. And guess what? People recognize the Lion King. But I feel like you could do it just with like the Warner Brothers slate. Because we talked about this with Dr. Sleep, which should have just been Shining 2, more Shining. Yes, that's a good point. Okay, Motherless Brooklyn.

No one knows what that is. Yeah, what should it have been? That's a great question. I mean, honestly, the Power power broker would have been better sure robert moses dunks on the city of new york right or um a detective story about i don't i don't know 50s you know there needs to be some art but it should just be like hey this is a mystery and edward norton's in it i don't know that would be better literally hey this is a mystery and edward norton's in it is better than mother i. That would be better. Literally, hey, this is a mystery and Edward Norton's in it is better than Mother's Book.

I can't say that was very good, but this has been a good hark. Okay. Okay, let's go to Stock Up, Stock Down. If it goes bust, you can make 10 to 1, even 20 to 1 return. And it's already slowly going bust. Amanda, Uncut Gems. It's here. It hit five movie theaters, and here's what it did. It broke a record. It is the highest per screen average in the history of A24. It made $105,000 in two and a half days on five screens. So this is really good business. I saw the movie again yesterday.

I had a nice opportunity to speak to Adam Sandler and the Safdies after a screening. Lovely fellows. Can a movie like this be a hit is a very interesting question to me, much like the bombshell and Richard Jewell's question, because it is a bracing film. And yet, it does feel like there's a lot of energy

going in the Uncut Gems direction. So there are two things it has going for it. Number one, Adam Sandler's in it. Number two, it's about the NBA in large part, which is, again, I love the Safdies. The naming of this is burying some of the major keywords, but that's okay. So should it have been called Basketball Player Diamond NBA Adam Sandler? I don't know. I'm just like, it's a nice little, it's a tiny little metaphor in the title, but you need, I guess you have Adam Sandler on the poster, so it's okay.

I really love this movie. I'll talk about it more later this month after more people have had a chance to see it. It did occur to me that it is also a truly great Christmas release because it is one of the most Jewish films I've ever seen in my life. And obviously there is a tradition amongst the tribe to go to the movies on Christmas Day. And I feel like this is just a hilarious kind of movie to go to see with your family on Christmas Day. I really can't imagine that. Though in a way, I saw this movie with Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan, Bill Simmons, and my own husband, which was like seeing it like my deranged Howard family myself. And that was the ideal way to see it. I'm still upset. I enjoyed it. And I'm also forever traumatized by it.

Long live the Ratner family. Let's go stock up to heaven. Anna Karina, the French actress who made seven wonderful films with Jean-Luc Godard, passed away over the weekend. I love what Justin Chang wrote about her this weekend in the LA Times. He wrote, We often speak admiringly of a performer's screen presence or charisma. Karina possessed something more flinty intelligence and deadpan wit,

dark feline eyes that could project playfulness and melancholy without her saying a word. She incarnated both a matter-of-fact toughness and an expressive glamour worthy of a silent screen star. It's a really good piece by Chang. In it, he talks about, he kind of diffuses the idea of the muse and how that has become a kind of misogynist and overwrought way of looking at the collaboration between a beautiful young woman and a male artist. But the movies that Godard and Karina made together are really some of the most important movies to the people who made all the movies I love.

So a lot of the 70s American cinema and now even a lot of the films that you see today are hugely influenced by her work and his work. And if you have not seen them, I would recommend basically all seven. They're essential.

It's just like watching an archetype and a legend happen in real time. It's like everything that is cool and French. Very much so. They're on screen. If you're interested in that, this is why. Very quick stock down, A Hidden Life bombed at the box office, which I don't, you know, it's a Terrence Malick film. It was purchased out of Cannes. It's not my favorite Terrence Malick film. I've been thinking of returning to The Tree of Life before the year is over. It's a movie that I love greatly.

I love many of his films. He's been on a little bit of a cold streak as Malick streaks go. I think this movie is kind of moving out of the awards race officially here. It seems like it. It has not been on any of the lists. I feel like we've gotten a lot of notes being like why are you guys talking about A Hidden Life

and this is why yeah and it's also just it just didn't work for me and I am not really excited about running down

what didn't work for me about it and I think for some people it was a kind of ecstatic religious experience as a lot of Terrence Malick movies are just what didn't rise

to that level for me this time this is a simultaneous stock up and stock down for all the films that were included and not included in the Oscar shortlist just revealed earlier today. Amanda, this is a list of categories that often go a bit overlooked in the Oscar conversation. That includes Best Documentary,

that includes International Feature Film, it includes Makeup and Hairstyling, Music Original Score, Best Original Song. These are the secondary categories. This year is probably a little bit more relevant than normal because we've got two films really, but mostly one big movie competing an international feature that is also in the best picture race. So of the 10 films, I'm going to list them very quickly for us. From the Czech Republic, The Painted Bird. From Estonia, Truth and Justice, a film I have not yet seen, from France, Les Miserables, which I just saw and is a wonderful movie, Hungary, Those Who Remained, North Macedonia, Honeyland, Poland, Corpus Christi,

Russia, Beanpole, Senegal, Atlantics, South Korea, Parasite, of course, and from Spain, Almodovar's Pain and Glory. I wouldn't say there are a ton of surprises here in this category, but you just pointed out to me something interesting about how the next round of movies come to be, how we get to five nominations. How does that happen? I also want to point out how we came to these 10. There's a remarkable amount of language as to how this category is put together in the Oscar announcement shortlist. Academy members from all branches were invited to participate in this preliminary round. I'm quoting, they must have viewed the submitted films theatrically and met a minimum viewing requirement to be eligible to vote in the category. Um, and by the way, they only picked

seven and then there were three added by the committee, which is, I, they'll never tell us who, but wouldn't you love to know? And then in the nominations round, Academy members from all branches are invited to opt in to participate and must view all 10 shortlisted films in order to cast a ballot. I do not think that there is that level of viewing requirement for most other categories. Not at all. I mean, there's an expectation that it's a lot easier to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than it might be to see, say, Truth and Justice, which is hard to track down if you're an Academy member. And, you know, hopefully that will hold people to, you know, good faith in the voting process. On the other hand, if Parasite doesn't win in this category, I'll be absolutely stunned.

I'll bet you dinner right now that it wins. Yeah, I agree with you, which is why I just wanted to talk about the attendance requirements and the viewing requirements. Because let's do this for everything. Let's check attendance. I just think that would make it so much more interesting. Classic homework Amanda coming out right here. Yeah, whatever I see all of them. Why can't the freaking Academy members? Likewise, I feel like in the documentary category, there's not a ton of surprises here. It's been pointed out in a couple of spaces that a lot of music-centric documentaries this year

kind of got passed over. You know, the Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese movie, the Luciano Pavarotti documentary that we talked about on this show, the David Crosby documentary, the Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese movie, the Luciano Pavarotti documentary that we talked about on this show, the David Crosby documentary, the Linda Ronstadt documentary. None of them appear here. Instead, what we've got is, I would say a little bit,

some classical entries, some issues-oriented documentaries this year. Advocate, American Factory, which we've spoken about many times, the Apollo, Apollo 11, Aquarela, The Biggest Little Farm, The Cave, The Edge of Democracy,

For Sama, The Great Hack, Honeyland, Knock Down the House, Maiden, Midnight Family, and One Child Nation. Off the top of my head, my guess is that this race is American Factory, Apollo 11, The Cave, For Sama, and One Child Nation. We'll see. A lot of Netflix here. A lot of neon here. These are the strong entrants in the documentary category of late.

Anything jump out to you about this group? I feel like American Factory is going to win. And I have also talked about how it's one of my favorite movies of the year. So there's some other great movies on here. Congratulations. It's very possible. The big One Child Nation push has started. Nan Fu Wong, who made the film, appeared on The Business with Kim Masters

over the weekend. Amazon doesn't have a ton of competitors at the Oscars this year, so they're probably going to put some weight behind it. It's an interesting film. It's very well made. For Sama, likewise, I feel like is very much in the mix. You know, the other categories here, there's only one, I think, notable snub that I'd like to give you a chance to talk about. Sure. It comes in the best original song category. In my least favorite category

which should not exist with the exception of Glasgow from Wild Rose was shortlisted which was great. That is how this category actually should work. Everyone else here

is a pretender. That's fine. You know who is not a pretender because she was not nominated and it was not nominated? Taylor Swift was not nominated for Cats. Deuces by Taylor Swift.

There was no Cats in the original song category. Which indicates to me that there will be no Cats at the Academy Awards. It's fine by me. On the other hand, what if Cat Sablanca is real? What if it's really good? We still haven't seen it.

I, no. We're going to see it. I'm already really upset. I'm on the record as being upset by every visual aspect of this film and also much of the you know themes and content can i tell you one song that we never talked about when we got into this category that i think um is evil but really fun is is catchy song are you up on Catchy Song? No. Catchy Song appears in the movie, the Lego Movie 2, the second part. It's by an artist named Dylan Francis and it's sung by T-Pain and Lele.

Oh, okay. So what I want to happen now is I want T-Pain at the Oscars. This is really important to me. This song is insane. Let's just hear like 20 seconds of it, Bobby. Imagine that performed at the Oscars. It would be the greatest thing that could possibly happen in my mind.

Way better than 3-6 Mafia. Way better than Eminem performing at the Oscars. It would be the greatest thing that could possibly happen in my mind. Way better than Three Six Mafia. Way better than Eminem performing at the Oscars. This insane song by T-Pain needs to win Best Original Song. See, I... Screw Beyonce. I don't... Who cares? I really like T-Pain and I also would love to see T-Pain at the Oscars.

I, you know, why can't he do it for his real artistry instead of for catchy song in a made-up category? Just my opinion. What do you think about a glass of soju from Parasite being in here? I didn't know about this until today and people were talking about it. You could see it being swept up in kind of the Parasite wave. Yeah, lyrics written by Bong. Great stuff. Also, my man Tom York for Daily Battles from Motherless Brooklyn.

Shout out Tom York. That's great. Radiohead, they're good. They are. Anything else here that's notable to you in any of these other categories? I mean, we just have a tremendous amount of Disney. And I suppose it'll be a tremendous amount of Disney. Yeah.

Look at visual effects. Star Wars, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, Avengers Endgame. A lot of Disney. Yeah. Stay tuned. We'll talk more about some of these categories as time goes on. Okay, Amanda, let's go to the big race. Well, mama, look at me now.

I'm a star. I've been thinking about Best Director a lot. We've done Best Director before in this conversation, but I think in the aftermath of those Globe nominations... It's time to address the elephant in the room. There's an issue. Not in the room is the case, maybe? Well, I want to know what you think about this,

because, you know, Greta Gerwig obviously was not recognized. There are a handful of films directed by women that are competing at the Oscars this year. And then the Annenberg study recently was released that showed that more women contributed directorial efforts to the top 100 movies, I think, than ever before by a significant number, not just an incremental number. So the industry, though always lagging behind the universe,

is improving in this manner. There have been so few women recognized for Best Director over the years. It does not seem like a woman's going to get nominated for Best Director again. Not that the Globes is significantly a bellwether for this kind of a thing, but the nominees in that category were Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Bong Joon-ho, Sam Mendes, and Todd Phillips. Right now on Gold Derby, I'm going to run down our top 10, okay? Martin Scorsese, The Irishman, Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bong Joon-ho, Parasite, Sam Mendes, 1917,

No Bound Back, Marriage Story, and then Greta Gerwig, Little Women, and then Pedro Al Parasite, Sam Mendes, 1917, No Bound Back Marriage Story, and then Greta Gerwig, Little Women, and then Pedro Almodovar, Pain and Glory, Lulu Wang for The Farewell, Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit, and Todd Phillips running in 10th for Joker. So, you know, I've heard a couple of other pundits talk about this, and they have said, if she's running in 6th, she's running in 6th. And actually, just jet-streaming Greta Gerwig into position as the number five or number four nominee is actually works in contrast to what the pursuit should be. Now, these awards are subjective. It's not an affirmation or a, I don't know, a rejection in any way of women's roles in society,

whether they're nominated for best director Oscar, but it does feel it is meaningful. And when Greta was nominated in 2017, it was meaningful, I think, for a lot of people. And it showed some people in the industry that she could do this. And it probably helped her get more creative freedom while making Little Women that she was recognized in this way. What do you make of this entire debate? I'm bummed out by it, first and foremost. I think there are a couple of things going on. You know, I think the first thing you alluded to the Annenberg study and the fact that there are more women directors in the conversation for Oscars this year, and there are more women directing movies. That's true. I mean, is it anywhere close to a proportionate representation of the number of women in

the world compared to the number of men in the world? Absolutely not. And the reason, there are many reasons why there have not been very many women nominated for Best Director, but one of them is that historically women have just not been allowed to direct movies and not gotten the opportunities that men have for a very long time. Another thing that I would say, and this is trickier, I do think that our idea of directing and what a well-directed film is, and even honestly, to an extent, what a great film is, is still somewhat gendered. And that's really hard to pin down. What do you mean by when you say that, though? That's a very interesting conversation.

I just think that we take a certain type of movie seriously, and we take a certain type of movie seriously. And it's usually, and we take a certain type of directing seriously, something that is, you can see the directing and it's athletic and it's visually ambitious and often grueling. And you can see all the tricks and, you know, I love to give you guys a hard time about your obsession with tracking shots, but you're just like, oh my God, look at what they figured out how to do with the camera. And that's not inherently gendered and none of this is. And again, I don't wish to reinforce kind of outdated notions of what men and women are interested in and all. But I do think if you look at the movies that are directed by women this year that are in the conversation, you have The Farewell by Lulu Wang, which is a lovely, it's a domestic drama. You have Hustlers, which is about, well, it's about a lot of things, but ultimately it's about friendship and female empowerment. You have Little Women, which is an adaptation of a movie about young children. And it's just like literally called Little Women.

And I do think that there are some people whose brains turn off and they don't think of it in the same way that they think of, say, a gangster movie or a movie about old Hollywood or like a very flashy technical film like 1917, a war movie or a movie about old Hollywood or like a very flashy technical film like 1917, a war movie, for example. The classic movies that we, classic types of movies that we take seriously are often more centered on male experiences. Yeah. And part of that, I think, is in the Academy's case, there were more men voting for the Academy Awards. The handful of women that have been nominated over the years, I don't think necessarily tells a clear story. Lena Verdmiller was nominated, I think, for Seven

Beauties in the 70s. Jane Campion for The Piano. Jane Campion, you know, is one of those filmmakers who, like, should be in that conversation with the masters of their generation and isn't always in many ways. And she has like moved on to television and is doing a lot of other different things. Catherine Bigelow, I think, is also kind of the elephant in the room because she makes a lot of films that look and sound and feel like the kind of movies you're describing that men are often recognized for. Yeah, they're quite testosterone driven. Yes. And she is an absolute genius filmmaker, but she is an absolute genius filmmaker, but she is also operating in a space. She works on a kind of action intensive environment

and succeeds really well at it. But it does almost reinforce that that stereotype that you're talking about. And then Greta. And, you know, I do think even if you don't like Little Women, you can't deny that there is a kind of cohesion in the work, the kind of like a vision in the work. The same kind of thing that we ascribe to Martin Scorsese or Bong Joon-ho. It just happens to be about a 150-year-old novel about girls. Right. And I think it's going to take another 10, 15, 20 years before people realize that the costuming, the way that that film is shot, the way that it's choreographed, the way that she splices the story and retells it. And

we'll talk a lot more about this when we talk about the movie in full on the show, that she's doing all of the same things that all of those great filmmakers are doing in this movie. The scale, the sense of place, the performances, the ambition of it all, it's much bigger than Lady Bird. Oh, absolutely. And it's so fully realized. But I just think that we are trained not to take that seriously. And I think even when the trailer came out, there were a lot of people like, why do we need this? And we don't say that about The Irishman, even though The Irishman is one of my favorite movies of the year and I think is a total accomplishment. But in our heads,

we need another three and a half hour movie starring the same guys about the mob because it's in conversation with all of the other movies about the mob and it's part of film tradition. And Little Women actually is about film tradition, but I just think that we don't take it seriously. I think if we're not talking about the gender bias,

the thing that is holding little women back is just that it's been adapted seven times before this. And that there is a feeling that you're describing that when people see the trailer, they're like, I've already seen this. I know what this is. Whereas when you see the Parasite trailer, you're like, I have no idea what this is. I've never seen anything like this. You know, there's a part of me, perhaps a bad and biased part of me that thinks, oh, well, you know, it's just kind of a tough year. Quentin Tarantino made one of his masterpieces this year. Martin Scorsese made one of his masterpieces.

Who could have predicted Joker? Who saw that coming? Parasite. This is such an abnormality that a movie like that could not just be nominated for Best Picture, but for Best Director, too. But then you could probably just do that about every year. You could probably just say, oh, well, bad luck. Sorry. Maybe next time Greta.

Maybe next time Lulu. And how to correct this, how to amend this is probably just going to be the work of a generational fleet of people entering the Academy and not something you can change by being upset about it. But there's still a lot of quote unquote masters that are going to keep making movies. And if that continues to persist, this balance is not going to come into place, I don't think, anytime soon. I think that's true. And, you know, I think that's okay. I think that Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino and Bong Joon-ho and Noah Baumbach made like absolutely tremendous movies. I think Pedro Almodovar made an incredible movie. I think there may be four or five total masters, depending on how you want to talk about and credit 1917. curious how Greta Gerwig and Lulu Wang and Lorene Scafaria must feel about having their faces

plastered on all these photos about voting actively for women. Because I'm sure they're just like, I made a good movie and I don't want to be a part of this. It's not that I don't want to be a part of this, but I don't want a consolation or a thanks for showing up prize. You want to earn it. I'm reminded of that great Nora Ephron tidbit when she was asked to write about what she won't miss when she dies. And one of the things she said was she won't miss women in film panels. Because, you know, there is this feeling like everyone needs to band together and celebrate cause. But in a way, it kind of like for a certain kind of man, it distances men from that. And what you want to do is just, you just want to see Greta and Noah as equals, not just as romantic partners or creative partners,

but as two directors who are both worthy of that kind of praise. It's going to be a while. I hope these, I hope all of the right people are recognized. The truth is it's all subjective. Amanda, we have a big couple of weeks on the show. Let's very quickly outline what we're going to be doing.

Okay. Star Wars is coming out. It is. I'll be speaking to Mallory Rubin about it on this show later this week. And then you and're going to be doing. Okay. Star Wars is coming out. It is. I'll be speaking to Mallory Rubin about it on this show later this week and then you and I will be talking about it

when we come back from the holidays. Then we got Cats. Yeah. You ready? I'm absolutely not ready. I was watching The Sound of Music

because it was ABC broadcast every year. I almost texted you and I didn't because I was too late and I hate you. I just like, oh, just watch it. Jesus Christ.

We'll see. It's a good time to watch it. It's during the holiday season. It's not technically a Christmas movie, but it's in the right spirit. Please just watch it. There's only one three and a half hour movie for me and it's The Irishman. I will give you my Amazon code so you can watch it on my account if you'll do it. Anyway, they cut from just a very beautiful scene of Sound of Music to the Cats trailer and that was like a salt and that's not

okay with me. I'm not ready for this. Please stop. We're seeing it in a matter of hours. I'm very excited about seeing it and talking to you about it. And then next week we'll talk about Little Women and we'll talk more about Uncut Gems and all the other great things that are happening. 1917. Yeah. It's actually a wonderful December here in movie world. So I'm very excited'll talk more about Uncut Gems and all the other great things that are happening. 1917. Yeah. It's actually a wonderful December here in movie world. So I'm very excited to talk more with you. Now let's go to my conversation with Jay Roach. Delighted to be joined by Jay Roach.

Jay, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. This is really cool to be here. Jay, how many political comedy drama scripts cross your desk a year? A few, you know, it's interesting. I used to only get the broadest comedies for obvious reasons. And now most of the things I get are, you know, did you hear this, you know, thing that really happened? And did you read this article? But there's a lot of stuff. And it's actually not all comedic. And that's, you know, there's obviously a lot of real life stories that have very little comedy in them.

But I do get a lot of those, as they call them, ripped from the headlines stories sent to us. Do you go hunting for them at all? Do you have any sense of that this is something you ought to be doing? It depends. I hunted for the game change story i hunted intensely for that before i knew there was even a book and i knew the hbo people just an example of that of how this went down i um i was doing the kind of publicity thing for recount and when uh in that september around the time that uh sarah palin was announced as the the vice presidential candidate and i remember going wow that's an interesting decision that's that actually i could see that working for john mccain at that time and but i was like that seems complicated and sure enough within a few days it was clear that she might be in a little

over her head it didn't work for a small moment no it elevated him for a while and often people say if it ended for the economy or any number of other things it might have actually really worked but it was it looked fraught you know and i and i wondered what was it like in that room when they thought oh this is the greatest idea ever and then when they thought oh no she's not really that experienced and not that prepared for this and i pitched it to lynn amato at hbo soon after that while we were just around talking about recount and i just said wouldn't you like to be in those rooms like what where these spin doctors are trying to hustle their way through uh you know first surfing her superpowers whatever you thought they were and then also coping with

all of her limitations. I'd like to, I think to hear what that story is, because clearly there's a, there's a sort of a deal with the devil thing of when it all costs and maybe it doesn't matter. And even though she might be president of the United States in this amount of time, let's just focus on winning right now. That that level of, I don't know, sort of, to some extent, selling out to that principal was fascinating to me. But I also thought, yeah, but as a political operative, I could see why you could make that argument that she was the right idea. Anyway, that's just, and I went hard for it. Then I found out, oh, we'd actually, they had actually bought the book. And there was a bunch of other iterations.

But it was just an example of once in a while, I'll be in a situation where I just need to understand it. And I actually think one way I could dig deeper into it is get somebody to commission me to do that and then talk about it with other people. Did you have a similar feeling, you said, wanting to be in that room when the sort of mechanics of the spin machine were happening for Sarah Palin? Did you feel similarly about Fox News and with Bombshell? I did. I watch a lot of Fox News. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My parents and many of my family members are very conservative. And I am obsessed with what makes ideas contagious, particularly ideas that, you know, I disagree with. Like, why, why is that the idea? Why are these, why are, why is this worldview succeeding? You know, and, and I argue with my dad, I have spent most of my existence arguing with my dad.

He's such a great guy and he's so, he's such a salt of the earth person. Um, we finally found something recently we can agree on is he finally decided he wasn't a salt of the earth person um we finally found something recently we can agree on is he finally decided he wasn't a trump supporter anymore um but he you know i since since very early on i i i kind of defined a lot of who i became by arguing with my dad and so and and now i'm like why am i arguing with this, you know, this 83-year-old amazing, but not, you know, he's not a big influencer out in the world. You know, why do I need to convince my dad? And somehow I think these stories are part of it. When I did Sarah Palin, you know, he said, no, you don't go messing with our Sarah.

You know, so they're always on my relatives. They're always on my relatives are always on my shoulder. In this case, I remember similarly when Megyn Kelly, uh, in the primaries dared to confront Trump head on and tell, recite back all these horrible things he had said about women in the middle of a primary debate. Um, while right at the time when he was starting to be kind of a ratings cash cal for Fox already. She's Fox's rising star. He's there and realizing, is this just professional wrestling? Like these are just, this is the Murdoch's and Roger Ailes figuring out, Oh, if we can pit these two against each other, we got, we got to, we got to show this is TV. And it, it actually felt that it was, was a something else like she actually seemed to

take him on and i was like how's that gonna work out i remember watching wondering if they would back her up and watching that and they they kind of flip-flopped and then of course they end up you know making her in months later do that that bizarre interview with trump which just seemed like a hostage video you know from megan's point of view. So yeah, I, again, was very, I didn't chase that story. The script came to me because Charles had written it with, you know, his producer, Margaret Riley and Anna Perna had developed it. Then they sent it to Charlize. Charlize and I had gotten to know each other. And at this time, I got it around February 2018. The Charles had, this had happened, the events had happened the year before the Weinstein news came out. Charles had actually finished the script before the Me Too thing really kicked in.

Obviously, Me Too's been around a long time. A woman named Tarana Burke started it many years ago. Went into the consciousness more. Yeah, it really hit a tipping point, right? And he finished the script before then so i got it after some of those those waves of reveals had begun to happen and but i'd remembered uh this moment with megan i remembered being i was at the gop convention doing research uh for another kind of game change-esque HBO thing

that we all still are trying to figure out how to do. Every time we think we know, it's trumped literally by Trump, and it becomes obsolete. So I remembered when Roger was getting fired, and when that was all going down. I was there in Cleveland while it was happening. So once in a while you get something and go, oh my God, this is close to all the things I've been thinking about, but hadn't been chasing. So I hadn't been chasing

it, but I did find it instantly compelling because of sort of the earlier times I had spent wondering what the heck was going on. Do you have any misgivings about potentially valorizing some people that you know are a little bit dishonest about the way that they communicate over the airwaves? Well, you know, it's something we talked about a lot in the process. It's interesting in our culture, you can make movies about hitmen with a heart of gold. You can make stories about con people. You can make stories, but you make a story about someone who's got a political bent that and has been part of a admittedly, you know, something of a, you know, if you're if you're on the left, you see Fox as a propaganda machine. Then you're suddenly not, you know, suddenly say, hey, wait a second. We don't know if we want to see a story about Megyn Kelly. And I don't you know, I I I just focused on what I thought.

This is a predicament. This is a competent, capable, smart woman who works at a company who's getting harassed. That should be a universal issue, despite what you may think about things she says on the air. And, you know, some of this stuff she's gotten a lot of hard time for. I was really, uh, interested to see, um, Ronan Farrow come out and say some of the stuff she was fired for the sexually, excuse me, racially insensitive comments were only a part of what, what happened. She was, um, actively talking about the Matt Lauer stuff and actively, uh, talking about NBC suppressing Ronan Farrow's investigation of Harvey Weinstein. So even that certainly was, you know, just something I was, you know, offended by what happened.

But I also was like, oh, there's more to that story. And that's what I find with these characters gretchen i'm like i i find what she did extraordinary and risky and and you know to take on roger ailes and the murdochs at this time um when a year before again a year before the me too thing happened and to risk everything she never worked in broadcasting again after she took you know she's become a documentarian now and she's one of her cool things is lobbying congress and state governments to drop the nda thing which is the way uh companies prevent women from talking to each other about predators like okay so so you disagree with stuff she has said uh on fox news but are we allowed to have her be part of the

conversation look what she's up to you know look what she did by taking this guy down when when it hadn't really been done in a corporate level at that scale ever before then as far as i know there have been there had been bill cosby and michael jackson and the i guess the catholic church you know in a certain way you could say but this particular form of it, there was a wave of these kind of men that went down after this. But at the time, she couldn't really count on, you know, on getting a lot of support. So I thought Gretchen's story was compelling. And anyway, just a long rambling way to say, yes, these are complicated issues and complicated

predicaments. These are complex characters. But isn't that more interesting and more surprising? And might we be able to cross over and talk to Fox watching women who identified with Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson at some point and say, we should all be part of this conversation. We know there might be some political divide that separates us from talking about it, but might that be some way to recognize it as a unifying issue instead of the typical divisive issue? I don't know.

These are all probably overly optimistic ideas, but it kept me going while I was doing the movie. I think that makes complete sense. I was looking at your filmography, and you have directed some of the funniest movies of the last 25 years. But even Recount and Game Change are very funny and almost serial comic in the way that they're executed. I feel like as you have gotten older and your career has gone on, your films have gotten more serious and even more grave at times. Trumbo, certainly, but even some,

there are some traumatic scenes in this movie that feel like as intense as anything you've done. Is that something that you feel conscious of as you're taking on new projects? That's an interesting observation. I don't think of it that way, but there was something about this one that was deeply emotional.

We've been screening it an awful lot, and the way people come up and talk about it, we were just in Santa Barbara yesterday, and some women came up. And, you know, you get to start hearing stories and you realize the responsibility you have of even being involved in the discussion, particularly, again, as a man,

just instantly acknowledging, I don't know a lot about what women have been through and once you once you sort of open your mind and we you know when i started listening to stories from the women that had experienced this this this abuse of uh you know with roger ailes and with other men at Fox and then started realizing, well, this is obviously about something much bigger than Fox News. It's about what, and it doesn't take long when you screen the film to have people come up and tell you,

no, it's everywhere. I was talking to an airline pilot up there, a woman airline pilot, and just the look in her eyes when I asked her, is this something that you recognize in your business? And she's like, are you kidding? So it's just, it's impossible to be too kind of ironic about this stuff. It connects on a level that's, to me at least, as I came across it.

And I hope that men experience this film this way. The way I kind of experienced some of these stories is just, oh my God, I had no idea. I thought I knew. I thought I'm, you know, I think of myself as a feminist, but I had no idea. And the sort of humiliation, the shame, all the weird things that you think a victim shouldn't deserve,

when you start to tap into that, to the cost, the human cost of this stuff, you know, it's tough to be cute about it, you know, in the way you tell the story. On the other hand, to be too self-serious and too preachy or too sort of luxury or I don't know what the right words are, but that would also be not fair to the people's stories that you're telling because they weren't coping with it that way. They had a dark sense of humor. Every woman I talked to has a very interesting, weird awareness of the absurdities, the lunacies, the insanities of some of the shit they're putting up with at Fox in particular,

because that's who we were talking about. And they, just like, you know, Kate McKinnon's character and the stuff in the scenes that she's in with Margot, a lot of them would joke about how, you know, Fox worked and what the insanity of some of the, which I'm sure is true of any company. But to be too serious seemed fake. And I also knew that I wanted people

to open their minds about it. And sometimes a little humor at the beginning, and it gets darker as the story goes, but a little humor at the beginning gets you to to i was just watching jojo rap and going oh man that guy is so tapped into how to how to pull you into places you didn't think you wanted to go yeah and uh you know that's what i hoped a little bit of the humor at the beginning of our story would do i frequently on the show ask filmmakers bad questions about balancing tone because I don't know how to ask about that. And I think I have a way to ask you about it that

maybe will not be completely ephemeral to you. You have a couple of sort of flourishes in the film. So you mentioned the women sort of testifying about the experiences that they had, which is something that you show in the film and you show their faces and you hear their voices or what sounds like they could be their voices. But then also in the film, you have that great moment where you talk about the Fox News logo and it burning into the screen and we see it burn into the screen the way that it might on someone's television. Where are those decisions coming from to give the film a different kind of energy than your straight ahead docudrama of what happened. Yeah. It's one of the things I loved about the script that everything you just described

was in the script. Charles Randolph, who also wrote the big short and showed how to make a very dry, you know, probably avoidable topic, you know, compelling and interesting. And Charles had, he, you know, he, like me, had grown up in a conservative family and that story about burning the Fox logo into the TV was in the script. Some of, it was a little, we had a little more of that

sort of breaking the fourth wall stuff in the script until we started shooting and saw how compelling the stories were. And we realized we don't have to, you don't have to sort of tap dance. Yeah. Tap dance our way into people's hearts with this movie that what these actors are doing is so compelling.

We will, we do want to, Hey, say, come on in. We're not going to, we're not going to lecture you. We're going to try to entertain you,

but then we're going to sneak up on you and try to deliver the wallop of some of these women's stories. But we didn't have to do that as much as we thought. And once we started testing, you know, I sort of, testing is the wrong word, just sharing it with friends really at the beginning. And I like to screen films a lot and talk about them. That's the comedy training. Yeah, it's the comedy training.

You know, i screen them and then have people come over and my editors are fast enough and we and now you don't have to do like temp mixes and so you can there's so many great ways to turn the movie around and try it different ways and then have long long talks and i always run my own focus groups or discussions afterwards so we started realizing we don't need we can just it actually i will actually give credit to someone who gave me amazing advice jason reitman came to one of the early screens a really good friend and known each other a long time or had worked with charlize obviously too and he saw the screening and he said that almost the way i just said it like you you have so much that's

strong about what's going on in the story and what when these performances you might not need as much of this other stuff as you think you do and charles was with me so he was always with me in the in the in every part of the process uh charles the writer charles randolph and we both said yeah i bet he's right let's try one where we strip that back a little bit and it actually started working a lot better i don't think we could have this conversation if I didn't ask about the Charlize transformation. It's pretty mind-blowing. And I know that Kazuhiro is a brilliant artist and that she's an incredible actor. Maybe you can help me understand what part a director plays in something like that.

It's mostly talking about it with the actor. I talked at length with Charlize about it, about how much of an obligation we felt to kind of match... talking about it with the actor to you know we talked at length with Charlize about it about how much of an obligation we felt to kind of match across the whole film really she and she was a partner and collaborator in this too as a producer so she was talking about her own performance but also everybody in the film we we talked a lot about it and I've had some experience with these questions with portraying Sarah Palin and John McCain and portraying Lyndon Johnson and everybody really that's been a part of Katherine Harrison, the recount movie that Laura Dern did. And it's always an issue of how, you know, how far really the performer, the actor wants to go to feel like they're actually channeling the

persona of that character it's that's almost more important to me than how close the the match wants to be for the audience or for the because i trust that the audience will go with it probably whichever decision we get to charlize had a very specific feeling that she was going to go really close on the accent and really try to really capture Megan's body language and attitude. And she just said, I really don't want to look in the mirror and see Charlize Theron, you know, see myself talking like that. I think it'll be weird. And she wanted to go all the way. So we, you know, right. We, she knew Kazu from, I think Mindhunter, which she wanted to go all the way so we you know right we she knew Kazu from I think Mindhunter which she produces and he started trying some things with her and as soon as I saw

it you know it's you throw out all that thing oh it's going to take a long time it's going to be expensive since I saw her uh in the in the test I was like oh this is incredible and as you you know as you're pointing out, people, really sophisticated film viewers don't know at first whether it's archival footage. It's so weirdly close. And that is a credit to the makeup, but it's really a credit to Charlize. She worked so hard on her voice.

She actually injured her vocal cords at one point and had to kind of rehabilitate them. She was so determined to get that sound and that energy right. And, you know know she really cared about uh honoring whatever megan went through whatever you know she has said this whatever disagreements she would have she really thought it was a compelling story and it could be something that other women might might connect to too so it was again just an obligation to her to get it right

someone like john lithgow kind of was the other thing. He didn't really, wasn't sure about prosthetics. He'd done so well as Winston Churchill in The Crown without any prosthetics. Well, ironically, Gary Oldman in The Dark Star is having Kazuhiro do his makeup and transform him. So, you know, I thought, I actually, I love John so much and he's very funny and I kind of gave him a hard time, but he goes, oh, I go, I said, oh, I get it. You, you're, you're beyond prosthetics. You're like, you're like a shapeshifter you don't need any of this and he said okay okay i'll try it you know and um he did and in a way it was liberating because so much of what he does when he's not doing prosthetics is almost a theatrical contortion thing and this he could just lean back and kind of be Roger because Kazu had done so much of the physical work.

And so he, I kind of, with Charlize, I was kind of going, oh, maybe I don't need so much. You look a lot like her. With John, I was like, let's try more. Let's try more. And John, and it kind of worked on both, you know, on both levels. We got too close on some of our other characters. The lawyers started worrying about, you know, Geraldo. Kimberly Guilfoyle. Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Kimberly Guilfoyle. Yeah, there's a couple of them that I'm like, this is bizarre. Bill O'Reilly. Yeah, yeah. So the lawyers actually made us put a disclaimer at the bottom

saying, if it's not someone in an archival scene, archival footage clip, these are all, these characters are played by actors. Seriously?

That's what we have to put? But now, you don't trust the, and he goes, well, you know, these are really good matches. You don't want to seem like deep fakes.

It's true. It feels that way sometimes. And Lithgow, I think, is a little bit unheralded in the movie because obviously it's these women's stories, but his performance

is really complicated and strong. And he's obviously a reviled figure, so we're not excited to celebrate that but it's more disturbing though i think because of that uh he's just so you know it's more of the silence of the lambs you know thing where i was something like you know like there's just so many layers to the to roger's character i've talked to a lot of people on the left who knew him and were uh

kind of blown away by his charm and his charisma and his actual you know um media savvy his ability to help politicians and and and looks to change the you know change the world through the way he sold news on fox so he for for him for, for John, he went and talked to a friend who worked with Roger Ailes years ago and described him this way. And I actually interviewed, I talked to a journalist who knew him really well. And he said, if you don't, you know, he had actually read the script. And he said, I just don't get the humor that Roger had yet. So we started asking around about the way he talked. and john really did his own research on that too though the weird

humor the weird uh how comfortable he was even in his and we have his scene where he says that i look like shit but i feel you know i'm roger ailes like and that's that's kind of what he was he didn't he didn't have he wasn't he wasn't a Clark Gable movie star, you know, that he probably saw himself in his mind, but he was really charming. So anyway, all to say, John nails that. And it's humiliating, you know, psychosexual control over her by the end. You know, she doesn't even, and that's why she's so confident coming in. And he's so charming. It just, you can, that one scene kind of captures all the dynamic range that John was going for in, in the whole movie really.

And he just, he is, I appreciate you saying under, under heralded or whatever, underappreciated because it's, it was extraordinary watching him. So I think that sequence is some of the best stuff that you've ever done in your career. It's really horrifying.

And, and it is like, I don't argue with that. Yeah. Margot's character is like a bit of a horror movie um margo's character is obviously a composite of sorts you mentioned interviewing some people did you talk to a lot of people to help build that figure what did you and charles do there yeah very much so charles had done a lot of research and really there's a lot of public information and stories that were told but then because i

think because of my experience doing these films i've, I don't even know really how to feel confident unless I go to talk to people. And even on stories that happened years ago, I talked to the Trumbo daughters a lot before we made that film. I talked to people who worked with LBJ on it all the way, and certainly everybody in recount and game change. And in this case,

we had to start late in the interview process for a lot of reasons there was some you know a lot of complexity in our in our studio situation with when we were in prep um but once we got going i tried to talk to as many women as i could uh and we both did uh and those the the thing that that brought in my opinion was charles had done such a good job in the research a lot of the story beats and the structures were pretty accurate and we got authenticated by talking to the women but what i felt like added other layers was actually collaborating i really think of it this way they were i tried to make them collaborators and ask them i get what happened but I would like to know what did it

mean to you? What mattered? How did it undo you? How did you cope with that? And what did you think about the person, especially about Roger, but the person that was abusing you in this process? And the feel of it, I feel like I, I was able to help by just really offering that information to the, to Margo and, and, and Charlize, especially. Is it hard to get people to trust you in a situation like that? You're a successful Hollywood director. You're a man. Do you know? Yeah, I, I, to some extent, of course, but I think because I do, I think it's clear that I care so much to get it right and that I have tried to, that those films come across as authentic. And, you know, that it's not the same as a journalist who the person is worried that you're going to quote them.

Because we say right off, I say, listen, I'm not quoting you. This is not an interview. I'm going to, especially in these cases where the women still have not told their stories in public and aren't named in public, I'm not going to reveal ever that I spoke to you unless you do before I talked to you. And so it's a completely off-the-record conversation. They know I'm hoping to add layers to the story that will make it authentic. And many women in this case were so eager to have the story told because they knew telling it to somebody even it was just the paul weiss investigators back then already helped to some extent because it got roger ailes fired

talking to us and having this story told on a wider venue in a wider venue um they believed might also continue to contribute to the situation and so it was um it was I don't know, people seemed pretty open and eager to have this story be told and be told right. They all talked about like, don't mess this up, which of course is like, oh, great. Yeah, no pressure. But of course, that's how I start. I want to, you know, again, especially as a man to just right away, I have an incredible, I'm married to Susanna Hoffs, who's, you know, a musician. She used to be in a band called the Bangles and she's been through so many of these crazy things. She knows friends who've been through crazy things in the music business. She, she's just, she's just so blunt and direct and also is a collaborator with me. So I would go and tell her these stories too.

And she was like, you cannot mess this up. You know, you just have to keep working. And so I have a wife that, you know, pushes me in a really helpful way to just never settle for some half version of this. Speaking of your wife, I'm a big Petra Hayden fan. Oh, you just hit a magic bell. I love those records that she made where she's sort of vocalizing scores. And I love the

score in your movie. I wish your listeners could see the smile on my face that you brought her up because she is such a force in this movie. So she collaborates with Susanna Faramacci and Susanna played a lot at Largo together and Petra does these albums that are all acapella music like you know doing films

she's done like Taxi Driver and it's hard to Cool Hand Luke and Superman is like my favorite thing those are my favorites

by far didn't she do a whole album of reproducing a Who album I can't remember which one was it Who's Next or what? I forget.

As all acapella. Who Sells Out, I think? Maybe. Yeah, yeah. So Teddy Shapiro is the composer on this movie. He knew all about Petra and her music. And he also knew, and we talked about Laurie Anderson a little bit, but we also talked about Roomful of Teeth,

which is another interesting obscure very cool group that um a woman named caroline shaw is part of and so between all those influences teddy had you know you know we sort of all talked about them but he actually said well why don't we just try to have some pieces be all women's voices and it's obviously and i and you know i thought well it could be it could be amazing but it could be heavy-handed it's you know oh guess what we may but when you see that elevator sequence you see what we started with because that was he wrote that that the pieces of that sequence before we shot a frame he just got it from talking about these women especially petra's music. And he then recorded what he called suites of these, these hunks of,

of score. And he got Petra and Susanna, my wife, and later Caroline to record and then used a kind of combination of their actual, you know, singing some of it, improvise some of it,

stuff he was directing them to do, and then programmed it into the keyboards. And in a weird way, in a way that fit metaphorically with what Roger tries to do with the women of Fox, he tries to kind of puppeteer them and fit his little cult of Roger Playhouse, you know, weird, whatever his mythology. I always pictured it as kind of a bizarre cult that he didn't always succeed with. It was mostly stuff he would try to get women to conform to. in his mind yeah yeah like exactly like a puppeteer like that and teddy sort of thought something semi-repetitive and mechanical almost a philip glass kind of thing

might um get that mood and so when you see the elevator which is also the music in the teaser you know um and you can hear petra's voice you can hear suzanna uh all three and then caroline's in there too and that some of the elevator stuff and then caroline does this incredible riff that's the last minute of our credits of just this tribal angry cool thing that's all loops of her of her voice um so yeah those those, those women, I would say, especially Petra Hayden had a huge influence on us and the way we came at the music. So glad you asked. I love what you did with that. It was really very smart. And the intentionality is even better. The movie's in the middle of the awards race and it's opening up in theaters, you know, for something like Recount or Game Change, there's,

there's viewership, but it's not quite the same. How does it feel to be having a theatrical experience with a movie that is as high tension as this? It's interesting in how it's, you know, it hasn't even come out yet, and we've already screened it. The studio had this idea, since they actually witnessed some of the discussions

that we had in our screenings that I would conduct, you know, that they were always extremely charged and, and, and inspirational, but also upsetting. Like they were really fascinating conversations after every single screening. So they've, they had this idea of let's, let's do that, you know, as part of how the film gets introduced to people. And so we've, we've screened it in a lot of places and that has been you know that that's a kind of unusual way to start to have a film come out but it in a way it was I don't felt it felt organic to how it evolved and it was about listening to people talk and tell their stories so that's been the best part of this process obviously I'm you know I know it was part of how you

get word of mouth going, which is more of a publicity thing. But in terms of a process and a conversation that we hoped we would be part of anyway, it actually had a very earnest and, I don't know, like felt constructive, you know, as opposed to also just getting it out there as part of the award season. And so that's been great. Again, we just screened it in Santa Barbara yesterday. I got a really inspiring response. Same up in San Rafael the night before and just landscape i i it's the first film where i've been involved in where there was so much energy behind it to have it be considered uh for awards

for me it's always then that means oh if it gets some notice then that means more people be talking about it that's always a good thing but it does it does become kind of surreal um in a certain way uh as as the um the process goes forward but i just try to look at it as oh it's you know it's it's the story beyond the story it's the it's what we're doing right now is actually i hope um gets us all just again especially men uh asking more questions about this stuff do you know what you're doing next i'm'm not sure. This is almost a two-year process. It's been a really interesting up-and-down thing just to get it made. You were untitled Fox News drama for so long.

Untitled Fox News. It was Annapurna. Then it was Braun jumped in and rescued us from something that was going on in Annapurna. Lionsgate. For Braun and Lionsgate to have taken this chance, this is something I'll never forget, just the gratitude that Charlize and I feel very strongly that they really saved us.

So I'm kind of just, I've really put, we've all put a lot in trying to get this right. So I haven't really paid enough attention to what to do next. The one thing I would say is that we hope to get a limited series going about Kent State, about the National Guard shooting that happened, you know, on a college campus in 1970 in Ohio, and four dead in Ohio, the Neil Young son. And so Tina Fey, Tina Fey's company, because her husband was at Kent and we've all been trying to get that going now. We used to, we were thinking about doing it as a feature, but it's something we want to try to do as a limited series. It's the 50th anniversary next year of that event.

And I have a few other things, but it's interesting, like almost because of the surreality of this phase of film coming out out, and before it's even out, so it's only just now getting wider response. It actually is so, what's the right word, identity challenging. I don't trust my decision-making process right now. That's actually reassuring to hear you say that. A couple of quick ones for you. One of my favorite things that happened on TV this year is, um, Bill Hader's audition for you and Barry. That was, that's just some great shit.

Uh, how did you get involved in that? That is one of the, I don't know where that came from. I, I still, and we were shooting when I went and shot that. We had a weird day off after Thanksgiving because it was shifting our schedule. And I actually think I must have been, I can't imagine that I was always in mind for it because it came at me so close to, I must have been a replacement for some other much, potentially much funnier and better director, actor who was supposed to do it. But it was, I've known Bill a long time and Bill's auditioned for me before in real life.

And we almost got to do this really great project together years ago called used guys about a future where women run the world and men are obsolete and are kind of bought and sold like clones. They met the only men are clones. That's a good idea. And Bill played the David, which Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey were the, the kind of used guys.

It was called these guys cause they had been traded in, and now they were being bought on a two-for-one money-back guarantee, and all they had to prove is that they were useful enough to get kept. And it's my own awareness of how mostly useless men are in relation to the capability of women. And I'm not saying that facetiously. Based on my own wife and the women in my life, I am pretty sure women should run the earth but and it's that it is a comedy it was a comedy

anxiety dream and bill hader of all things was the david who was the ideal man who could do it all was sporty and domestic and anyway bill was so he we he auditioned for me a few times and he wasn't a likely choice for some funny reasons, but he was who I wanted. And so for me, for him to then now have me play the guy he's auditioning for in the film was a weird meta, in his show was a weird meta thing. And we also had in that room, in that scene, Alison Jones, who had cast Bombshell.

Very famous casting director, yes. Yeah, and Ben, her amazing, also a casting director on our film. And so we were all on the scene together. So, you know,

I'm just waiting for him to call me back now and say, okay, now we're going to shoot that scene for that movie that I now, because in the scene, as you remember, I sort of said, well, he really didn't give a shit that scene for that movie that I now, because in the scene, as you remember,

I sort of said, well, he really didn't give a shit. I think that's what I like about him. And so I'm hoping he'll call me back and say, okay, now we're going to film me trying to make that work on the actual film set. Maybe that's what you'll be doing next. Jay, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers,

what's the last great thing they've seen? I don't know if you've been able to see many movies. I don't, I haven't seen a to see many movies. I don't. I haven't seen a huge number, but I will say I saw Jojo Rabbit last night. I think I heard you guys, not necessarily your favorite of all the movies. I didn't hate it.

It's not my favorite. And I didn't mean to put you on the spot about that. That's my job, actually, to talk about how I feel about movies. You get to put me on the spot. I get to put you on the spot. But I, you know, I've known Jemaine and Taika for a while

and watching him, I don't know, just watching him, his career. And I really didn't know what to expect. And just something, that film is so, sneaks up on you. It's so, his performances are, but those kids and the way you're so surprised that you're going with it and just the audacity of it.

And it was beautifully shot, too, by the way. It's like a it's just so beautifully composed. The color is controlled. And like for something like that, I was delighted by the care of the of the film grammar of it, you know, the craft of it. But I just was, I think it's because I needed a break from all this other stuff. It was just hitting me so hard. And,

and I was, I was really appreciative of it. I found myself laughing and crying a lot throughout that whole movie. So that's, that's my Jojo rabbit story. It's an incredible defense. Jay, thanks for doing this.

Thanks. defense jay thanks for doing this thanks