The Big Picture - Cults, Sex, and the American Dream in 'Wild Wild Country' I The Big Picture (Ep. 56)

Episode Date: March 27, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with 'Wild Wild Country' directors Maclain and Chapman Way and producer Mark Duplass about the arduous process of making an in-depth documentary that features a 64,000-acre ranch in Oregon, a spiritual guru, ritualistic group sex, assassination plots, guns, drugs, and bioterrorism.You can find the official Ringer web store here:http://bit.ly/ringershop Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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end up doing the things that they did? And part of the thing we were hearing back from them was this wasn't internally that pushed us, which is what a story of a lot of cults are. There were external pressures here that caused us to do the things that we ended up doing. I'm Sean Fennessy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. About a week ago, a strange and fascinating new series landed on Netflix. It tells a true life story that is almost impossible to believe. It involves a 64,000 acre ranch in Oregon, a spiritual guru, ritualistic group sex,

assassination ploys, guns, drugs, bioterrorism, and honest to goodness human drama. And it's arriving just as the fascination with cults and popular culture is reaching a fever pitch. The series is called Wild Wild Country, and it chronicles the story of Rajneesh Puram, the controversial community that the followers of the spiritual leader Osho built in the Oregon desert. Wild Wild Country is a lot like that community, a sprawling six-part story directed by Chapman and McClain Way and delivered to Netflix by way of Mark and Jay Duplass' production company. Mack and Chap had only made one film before this, a short documentary about a forgotten team in Oregon called the Battered Bastards of Baseball. This story is

much bigger and told with an intriguing objectivity, never tipping the scales too far in favor of the Rajneeshee and Ma'anan Sheila, the charismatic woman who was Osho's personal secretary, or the people of Antelope, Oregon, the small town that was essentially swallowed by Rajneesh Purim. Wild Wild Country is a woolly fusion of ideas that touches on themes that resonate in 2018, like government land use, immigration fraud, the separation of church and state, gun rights, and religious persecution. I visited the Highland Park house that Mark and Jay Duplass

use as the creative way station for their myriad projects and talked to the Way Brothers and Mark about squeezing God, death, sex, poison, and the American dream into six hours. So, without further ado, here's Chapman Way, chapman way and mark duplass the directors and producer of wild wild country a literally crazy new documentary six-part series on netflix guys thanks for coming in thanks thanks for having us let me change that you actually came uh upstairs i came all the way to the offices of duplass industries so thanks for having us. Let me change that. You actually came upstairs. I came all the way to the offices of Duplass Industries. So thanks for having me. Guys, where the hell did this story start?

Yeah, it started about four years ago in 2014. Mac and I grew up just north of Los Angeles. We were born after this whole saga happened in Oregon. And we had never heard the name of the guru, Bhagwan Roshanish, and never even heard of Roshanish Purim. And it wasn't until we got a tip from an archivist who had basically over 300 hours of archive footage that had never been transferred or seen on what he called the most bizarre story in the history of Oregon. And so that was kind of our first jump into the story. Yeah, it was kind of funny. This was like right after our first feature doc had come out,

and I felt like people were pitching us ideas, and they were predominantly either sports ideas, and the vast majority of them were baseball ideas. And so when he told me about this story that he think would make a great documentary, I was expecting it to be on another kind of like Portland baseball team or another Portland sports team or another Portland sports team. But then when he started telling me about it, I was just immediately captivated, almost to the point where I didn't believe the pitch, the story he was telling me.

He was saying that the followers of this Indian guru came to Oregon in 1981 and they buy this 64,000 acre ranch and they spend a hundred million dollars building this utopian compound out there. And then he's like, they take over this town called Antelope. They bust in these homeless people. There's this mass poisoning of like 750 people. And so almost immediately we did a couple of things. We started just like lightly digging into the story and digitizing these tapes that were kind of the base of our source material. And I think when we started getting the tapes back, it was like visually we just were so attracted to the story for reasons that like might not seem obvious. But it just looked incredible to see people like dressed head to toe in red in the middle of the Oregon desert looking to see what like looking as if they had built a city.

And then there's like guns, too, in the footage. And it was just immediately just something that kind of captivated us. And I think just to jump in, what makes it really cool is we call it like an archival verite documentary, because the archive footage we were dealing with wasn't just what aired on the local news. We had like the raw news footage that was shot. So they were all these pneumatic tapes filled with hours and hours of raw 80s archival footage. And so it really gave us a chance to like go inside the commune and kind of show an audience really what was going on. The story is so extraordinary. And yet I don't know a single person who knew anything about this. I know a lot of people that are, you know, a lot of people that work with us are under 30. Mark, did you know this story before this came across your desk? No, I didn't know the story. And

I immediately went to my parents who were in the early seventies. And I was like, how did you guys not tell me about this story? Like, this is such an incredible story. And they said, what story? And they didn't know about it either. I grew up in Louisiana and I think it, you know, we can attribute some of that just to the nature of media back in the early 80s, that there might've just been more of a local storm of media, which certainly happened. And as the documentary is released, we found people from Oregon just spilling over onto us through social media saying they remembered it and whatnot. But it was shocking to me how few people had heard this story. And I keep thinking

about how did they miss it and why? And there's quite a few events, I think, that contextualize it. One, I think that the nature of Jonestown having happened just a few years before was so incendiary and people were so wrapped up in that that that may have clouded over it a little bit. But it really is still a mystery to me that people miss this one. So you guys have 300 hours of raw footage to carve through. Are you literally sitting and watching

every single tape that's getting digitized? Yeah, exactly. We're a really small team. It was pretty much Mac and I and my wife, Juliana, who produced it. And we had an editor, Neil. And the four of us kind of just went through all that footage with a fine-toothed comb. We didn't really have any assistant editors. It was really just kind of the four of us. And we had kind of laid out the six-episode structure. So we knew kind of what archive footage would play where in each episode. And it was just really important for us to kind of make sure nothing uh got lost in the yeah it was almost like such a complex story that um i think we can we'll get better at this as we make other

projects but it's like almost dishing that off to an assistant editor which is what most i think documentary film productions would do just didn't seem to work for this project because it was such a complex story we did we did like a year of research you get to know the characters the faces in the archive and it's like i we kind of reached a point where it's like we're the only ones that can that can really do this and so that actually we had we actually ended up saving time doing that because as we edited this into like a six and a half hour kind of like long documentary um we would know the archive. We were so intimate with it and we knew the scenes and the people and where we could find certain shots if we needed them. What's it like to commit this much time to something?

How do you practically make that happen for your life? Because this is before Mark comes along, before Netflix comes along, I assume, when you're starting to do the project. So are you like, yeah, we'll just try this for two years and then we'll see if we can sell it to somebody? I always, the quote I always use, like documentary filmmaking, I say is like, you jump off a cliff and you have belief that you'll build wings on the way down. And you have to have a little bit of a screw loose to like dive into this. You have to be a little bit of having a little bit of an obsessive nature to kind of go after these stories. Because the truth is, you don't know where they're going to lead. You don't know what's going to happen. In our favor,

archival stories, you kind of do at least know the kind of beginning, middle, and end. So it's not so much a leap of faith as a modern day story that's unfolding in current day. We kind of dove in having no idea what would become of it. We knew pretty early on that there were so many issues in this story that it needed to be told in like a bigger canvas and like a longer form episodic and that we really felt like the feature length would kind of cheapen the story in some way or another yeah no there was just kind of like themes that we were immediately attracted to like and i think that there's some of the central questions of the series like what is the difference between a cult and and religion

and we kind of edited it to hopefully keep the audience on the fence in terms of like who's telling me the truth here and who's reliable and who's not and who's on the right side and who's a hero and who's a villain and i think that you can do that in an episodic when you have a bigger canvas it's a little bit easier like we did a feature documentary in 2014 it's much that documentary it's much more clear who the protagonists are and who the antagonists are as we were kind of working our way through the storytelling of this six-part series i think we are constantly trying to um give both sides essentially a fair shake yeah i want to talk about that objectivity but the way that you guys do that

is by essentially talking to as many people as you can and the interviews the the film really turns on a lot of the conversations that you're having these people so how do you compel people to participate who and who was was it difficult to get people to participate yeah it was one of those things where since the story was so unknown i think both sides felt like we have maybe five or ten years before this story just gets permanently lost to like the dustbins of history. Whether that was kind of the perspective of people who lived in Antelope and that was certainly the perspective of the Roshanishis who built the city. And both sides were hesitant to participate or most people were very hesitant to participate because I think for both sides, this was a story that in a lot of ways was both painful and traumatic for a lot of people involved.

I think ultimately the interesting thing is that both my experience talking to people was that they both saw Rosh Hashanah as a warning of sorts, and they wanted it to be remembered by a younger generation as a warning. Now, granted, each side has a totally different perspective of what that warning is. I think for Sannyasins or Rosh Hashanah, they saw Roshanish Purim as a warning of religious persecution and government overreach and those type of themes and stories. I think for Antelopean ranchers and neighbors of the Roshanishis, they saw Roshanish Purim as a warning to the dangers of cults and what brainwashing can do to people. And so it was fascinating getting to talk to all these different perspectives. But at the end of the day, I think everyone decided that they wanted the story not to be forgotten

and talked about and kind of brought back into the mainstream. Yeah, I mean, and from my perspective, you know, watching these guys and how they operate was a big part of getting these interviews. You know, I think it is fair to say they wanted to tell that story, but you got to remember back two years when nobody really trusted you guys at all. You had made one tiny documentary and this is such a massive story with so many people's livelihoods and reputations staked on it. And they had to kind of slowly work their way in and and and build that trust and you know in the five days you spent with Sheila I mean that to me that sort of makes or breaks this

piece in a lot of ways and and you know I think it's just a testament to kind of the filmmakers that that these guys are that they were able to not only gain the trust but make them understand that like listen I'm just here to let you speak and tell your story. Let's talk about Ma Nan Sheila. She's kind of the centerpiece of the whole movie. She's the personal secretary of Bhagwan, who's the leader who comes over from India. You guys had to go to great lengths to go see her and be with her.

What did you do and how did you convince her? Because she is quite a wily and self-interested character in some ways. Yeah. So when we kind of first started digitizing and transferring the footage, the first character that really jumped out at us was Ma Anand Sheila. And she was this young Indian woman who was basically the right hand arm or man of this organization and really was in charge of building this religious empire. And in the footage, she's challenging, she's provocative, she cusses a lot, she speaks her mind, she doesn't really take shit from anyone. And we kind of knew right away, we have to go talk to her, we have to go

meet her. Yeah, I knew that she was running like these retirement homes in Maesbrock, Switzerland. And I reached out and I told her kind of what I was doing. It was interesting because I think Sheila's actually very aware of her reputation, of how she's talked about, of how she's certainly remembered. And although we came from Los Angeles, we were essentially coming from, we were these two filmmakers that had just made this documentary on a baseball team from Oregon. And Sheila certainly remembers how she was remembered in oregon so there was a little bit of an immediate kind of like hesitancy which which i understood um i think that and i think for sheila we quickly found out that there was

like a side of the story that she wanted to tell and that she felt had never been told and i think she knew we were coming to this interview and meeting her, having been told by other people that Sheila is like, quote unquote, pure evil. We have government officials, we have government officials called her pure evil. She's been branded as a terrorist, essentially, that orchestrated one of the largest biochemical terrorist attacks in US history. So I think that the questions for us was not so much this true crime angle where it's like, well, who done it and what's the evidence and who's innocent and who's guilty? I think that the criminal facts of Roshanish Purim are well known and documented by those who know the story. So I think for Chap and I, we are immediately interested in pulling those layers back and seeing how does kind of not just Sheila, but a peace loving group that's come

to Oregon end up doing the things that they did. And part of the thing we were hearing back from them was this wasn't internally that pushed us, which is what a story of a lot of cults are. There were external pressures here that caused us to do the things that we ended up doing, which whether you take that at face value or not is a big debate. But we found that at least interesting to talk to these people about. Yeah, you guys are very poker faced about how you actually feel about every single character, which is pretty impressive. Mark, like at what point do you come into the picture here? And what do you see first? Yeah, so a good friend of mine, his name is Josh Braun, he's one of the producers on the project.

He sold all of my movies. And he really is kind of like a godfather of all small documentaries in the world. He really is. And he approached me and said, look, these guys, Chap and McWay, I was like, I know them. I love Batterbests as a baseball. I'm already a fan. And they're brothers, which that's already huge for me right there. So I'm like, yes, yes. He says, look, we got this story.

We got this raw footage. It's big. We've been taking this thing around. We've been trying to sell it. And it's like a tough market right now. And we think, you know, partnering with you guys, honestly, might be the thing that really like pushes the needle on it, you know? And just quite candidly, it's something that my brother and I have gotten really into lately

is like, whatever our brand is worth, whatever our name means, if we have the opportunity to help when I met Chap and Mac, which are essentially me and Jay 10 years ago, get their thing a little bit forward, I was like, I'm willing to do it. I knew battered basters of baseball was good. I didn't know if that was luck and if they were going to be able to tackle a six hour, you know, so complex story form, but I was excited by it. So I jumped in with them and then we were able to sell it pretty quickly to Netflix, who was really excited about it and move them into our offices here. And at that point, I kind of start to figure out, okay, what am I in for? Like, are these filmmakers good?

And are they going to be on their own mostly with me lightly guiding? Or is this going to be a train wreck? And I might have to come in and spend a lot of time trying to get this thing on its feet. And I remember they said, look, we'll just kind of like make you like a rough cut of the first episode according to the plan, and we'll see how it goes. And they were very like, it's got a lot of problems, but just check it out so you can see. And I watched the first episode and I was like, I think this is going to be the big docuseries of next year. And I think that they already know more about documentary filmmaking than I know.

There's no false modesty. And I added what I could creatively at that point, but I knew they had it. And it was such a wonderful collaboration for all of us. They really kind of became a part of our family. I mean, you mentioned we're in this house where we make all of our stuff here. We make the Creep movies with Patrick Bryce. We make Miguel Arteta's new movie. We edit Room 104 here. We all kind of watch each other's projects and help each other out and it was just

such a it's such a great fit and i mean i i've told them this directly it's no secret it's like this has been one of the most rewarding producing experiences because not only was i able to use whatever i could to foster it for them but like i learned so much about documentary filmmaking in the process because i'm a fan but i'm not really that skilled at it. It's not something I do. So it was really great for me. It was just an amazing fit because like he mentioned, it was just, we had made a 72 minute documentary on a baseball team, you know, and we had pretty much financed it all ourselves. And then we had, we had, we had, we had success with it that we had no idea we would have. We got into Sundance and netflix bought it there but even going from that to the pitch is now well we want to make a six and a half hour documentary on this like deeply

complex political story that has religion and philosophy and and it's international and it's it's it's about a movement it's about this religious movement that comes to oregon and they're like great but you're like collectively 26 years old so like it was it was a hard it was a definitely it was a hard pitch and we knew we were getting a little bit nudged in a direction not but we were nudging ourselves in this direction too which is like well do we just make it as a feature but we just knew like we knew it'd be such a different story if it was a feature we knew it wouldn't be as complex or provocative we knew it would be maybe one more one-sided whether that be pro or antelope or poor russian i don't know but it would just be harder to do what we really wanted to do and um mark was just like it seemed

on board from the get-go and it was just so critical like he was a gardening angel on this project from like day one i really don't think we would have had the opportunity to make it as a series without his backing. It works so much better as a slow roll too because every episode you're like, what the fuck? It really does. How did this happen? It's hard to convince that to people, which is like you go in and you're pitching a story and you want this huge canvas to do it on. And then you're also like, but listen, it's okay that you don't know anything about the story. And it's okay that no one else has ever heard anything about this story.

There will be interest in it. I think anyone's gonna have some hesitations about that um and we we experienced that but um eventually it just was like the last thing that we needed was just like kind of mark and jay coming on board and pushing it with duplass brothers productions was huge even up until the very last reveal sort of the like sort of what the state of the ranch is now i i was like i'm glad I stuck it out through every single minute of this because it's an incredible capper. I won't spoil it.

We're at the ranch right now. Do Plus Brothers Productions has bought the ranch. And we are now a cult. More wild, wild countries than you might be able to. So what happens in terms of putting the story together? Do you guys have to keep going out into the field and doing more interviews? Once Mark and Jay are on board and they're working with you guys, are you locked with everything that you've done and just compiling? Or do you

learn more and more and more as you're going through it? Sure. The first thing we did was we kind of said, all right, there's six episodes, they're one hours each. And Mac, Julie and I sat down and we basically scripted out the entire show as if it was a fictional show. You know, what's our opening? What's our page eight moment? What's the end of the first act? How does the first episode end?

What's the cliffhanger? And we wrote what we called basically was our Bible. And, um, although that changed a lot from our first draft to what we ended up with, it really kind of was like this guiding light for us um that we knew if we could tell this story it would work in a narrative sense um as you mentioned the first episode is a little bit of a slow burner it's setting up the characters it's setting up the movement but we were really excited in let's set up this chess board in the first two episodes and let's set the pieces up and then episodes three three through six let's let them go

to battle let's let it go to war um and i think it just has you know it allowed us to create like a really thrilling exciting documentary yeah i think the other big kind of conversations that we were having early um which weren't so much on that like quote-unquote bible that we made because that was a little bit more the plot which a, which, which we look, we're attracted to these kinds of weird forgotten stories. And I think that that's one of the great things that we love about archival documentary filmmaking is you get to look back and you can kind of look at it as maybe a three act structure or a long form thing like wild, wild country is. Um, but the thing that I think wasn't on that Bible that we started finding in the edit room was these like really fascinating

personal journeys, these like character arcs of like our talking heads. But to me, they're more of like a cast, like, and we were really selective of who we wanted to talk to and tell the story. We talked to a ton of people for research, but when it came to who we wanted our kind of storytellers to be our cast, we were selective. And I think we have a little bit of a pet peeve in documentary filmmaking, where it's like, if there's a lot of talking heads, then you don't really feel as connected to their journey and their stakes in the story. And the other thing that we wanted was we wanted to talk to the people who were like really on the front lines of this issue. Like I love documentaries that kind of have like, like an academic or a PhD or someone

who's really knowledgeable about an issue come in and provide like very solid based analysis for the audience. But we didn't really want that in Wild Wild Country. It was clear to us that like the people we were talking to, they were all brilliant. They were all really smart. They're all really, really well spoken, but they each had their own stake in the story on how it's being told and how it's being remembered. And so for us, that was really fun to kind of use that to tell the story with kind of the plot points that we had kind of paced out. guy when we think he's essentially a ranch hand and we come to find out he's an heir to like a Nike fortune you know we meet someone else who we think is sort of a sweet elderly woman who we learned maybe was an assassin I always say documentary filmmaking it's as much like

what information you leave out at certain times as much as the information that you like kind of include it's kind of like a little bit of an informational puzzle game at least that's how I feel when we're in the edit room kind of figuring out what goes in and what doesn't but yeah that was certainly part it's it's you never want it to feel like like manipulative but you're hoping that like you're along for the ride the roller coaster and that's like as a filmmaker as a director that's what

you're trying to make you're not you know trying to pull the rug out like i said to to manipulate people but hopefully to create something that's enjoyable and entertaining and ultimately thought provoking. Who'd you guys most like talking to? I would have to say the five days that we spent with Sheila were probably the most fascinating. Like Max said earlier, this was someone government officials called pure evil and a psychopath. And so you never really know what you're getting into. You brought your own snacks. But it was clear to, we did a lot of research and people that knew Sheila before she joined this movement, when she lived in New Jersey as a college student, family members, we talked to her sister. It was clear that this was a very bright, precocious, ambitious child, became a young woman

that people were attracted to. She was charming. She was funny. She was intelligent. And it was really interesting to get to see another side of her. I think about five years ago, I talked to someone who had worked closely with James Marsh on Project Nim and Man on Wire. And he told me that James actually goes and spends a lot of time with his documentary subjects before he interviews them. And I remember thinking, wow, that's really interesting. A lot of documentary filmmakers just come in, they set the camera up, they interview, and they get what they get. And that advice really stayed with me. And so we actually visited Sheila, I think, three times before we even interviewed her.

Having dinner with her family, with her group, getting to know her. And it was really interesting that you pick up on little things when you go to her house. When we went there, you know, she had this incredible artwork on the walls. And, you know, she was an art major in New Jersey, and she's still an artist today. And you have to reconcile this person that you're talking to in modern day with this, you know, horrible, atrocious criminal activity that was committed 30, 40 years earlier. And, you know, we spoke at length that we we're not going to go and this isn't an interrogation. We're not going to, you know, we're really going to have a dialogue with her and kind of walk through, you know, how she went from this young woman to this person that had committed these crimes. Yeah, I remember, I think, for me, she was great. But John Silvertooth,

who's the mayor of Antelope, and he kind of wears the overalls in the series. Like we interviewed him in like the dead of winter. It was in this like kind of like town museum in Antelope. And so we're like setting up there and like ready for the interview. And it's like, I don't know, 17 degrees outside. I mean, it is freezing. And he has this like really loud heater on like in the room that's like warming it up. And then I have to go tell him like, hey, listen, we got to turn the heater off because the sound is awful and uh and he was a trooper about that and like it started getting so cold in this room like really fast almost to the point where his teeth

were shattering and i felt so bad because we were getting such great material and like it's hard to get out to antelope and we were shooting this and so we'd like take a break for like a half hour and john goes to his house and he comes back and he has this like huge green sweatshirt on and we're like halfway through the interview and like I remember almost thinking like I'm not gonna say anything and then chap's just like yeah you gotta go tell him to take that off like it's not gonna cut together at all and like at this point I remember telling John like hey do you remember you might you mind taking that sweater off like we're gonna have to do the rest of the interview without it on and so John was like the biggest trooper i would say he like they gave us like eight hours of his time in this like almost torturous conditions that these two documentary filmmakers put him through so

i think what was really interesting is i don't know if i can speak for mac but i think he agrees with me and that is that starting this neither of us are very spiritual we're not very religious people we've kind of always had a knee-jerk dismissal of people that join cults and movements and spirituality. It's just not who we are, what we're into. And getting to know those people who joined this movement was really eye-opening to see what really attracted them, what drew them to this, and getting to know and spend time with them was a very rewarding experience. And then also on the flip side, too, you know, Eastern Oregon is completely different than Portland, Oregon. East of the Cascades is a very conservative. It's very local ranchers and cowboy culture out there. And, you know, what people can call

being closed-minded or bigoted or prejudiced and actually getting to spend time with them, you know, and those ranchers was really interesting to get to know their culture, their way of life, what they value. And I actually walked away enjoying a lot of those characters as well. So it was a really interesting process for us as not just documentary filmmakers, but as humans. Let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. With the Google Assistant, you can complete over a million actions on your phone, in your car, and around the house. For example, hey Google, add chips and salsa to my

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receive 10% off, plus free ground shipping on a Swift series laptop, including already discounted models. This offer is valid through April 30th and limited to one per qualified order. Windows Hello. The password is you. Windows 10. And now back to my conversation with Mac and Chapway and Mark Duplass. I wanted to talk to all three of you guys about the themes that are resonating in the story that feel very present. You know, you talked a little bit about sort of that fine line between cult and religion, but there's land use rights and there's gun rights and there are all these very 2018 ideas that are happening. What specifically jumped out for all three of you guys that resonated? Yeah, I mean, you never really know what is going to click in terms of a parallel and what will be read into it because this has been underway for four years. And certainly one of the things that really popped up for me is right after our election in 2016,

I was so struck by how dug in we are on the right and the left and how little discourse there is. And I'm a pretty liberal person, and I would go on these conservative podcasts and try and find connections. And it was sometimes successful and sometimes not. And then you watch Wild Wild Country, and you see these two sides who it went too far before they could make some sort of amicable understanding. And they dug their heels in in and it went real bad. And I keep thinking about that when I watch it now about, I've only been alive for so long, but from what I can hear from people who are older than me, like this might be the most bipartisan and divisive this country's been in a long time for sure. And so that parallel really has stuck with me the most.

Yeah. It's not really operating in micro there in that little town. Yeah. What about you guys? Yeah. I think what Mark said, it really is kind of a warning sign of what happens when two totally different cultures or communities just refuse to communicate or come together. I think one of the things that interested me most was this issue of the separation of church and state and really digging into how it is a two-sided coin. On one hand, it's to prevent religion from controlling government and taking over government,

which we all, most of us agree with as Americans. But then on the flip side, it's also to prevent government overreach and intrusion into religion. And I couldn't help but think as America moves forward as a country, there will be more communities based around spirituality, based upon religions, based around people that believe the same way you do politically. And I think it's going to be, I think this show challenges viewers to say, where do I draw the line on how I feel about these kinds of faith-based communities? And there are no easy answers. It's not black and white. And hopefully the show is provocative in an interesting way to really make you dig into these issues. Yeah, I think for me, it was kind of similar to what Mark talked about a little bit, which is this idea that I think hopefully as you're working your way through Wild Wild Country,

you're starting to take a stand on an issue that you didn't really think you had an opinion about. And then hopefully 10, 15 minutes later, you're then questioning that position that you took. And like forcing, not forcing, but hopefully that's fun. Hopefully that's like entertaining. But like having audience members watch Wild Wild Country and then engage in that critical thinking of like, oh, well, at first I felt this way about Antelope. But now I'm starting to question that position. I think that's just like healthy and a good way of questioning our own positions on other issues that we take in our lives. Like I'm just as bad as everyone else is. If I read the news every day, I have like a real knee jerk reaction on like that side's totally wrong and

our side's totally right. And that type of thinking does make you kind of entrenched. But if you're willing to kind of take a step back and just, if you think Antelope is like great in this story and the good guys, that's fine. But as long as you got there through kind of a set of just critical thinking, that's great. And if you think it's the Roshneshies that were totally victimized, then that's fine too. But it was kind of this process of just like making you question the stances that you take as you work your way through the series that I found most interesting.

Was there ever a time when any of the three of you guys were kind of at loggerheads and had to tell this story? Because there's so many moving parts that I could see there being some difficulty in knowing like what the right pace is, what the right choices are. There were a couple of moments and we really have to give it up to Netflix too too as being actually a true creative partner in this honestly like really you know ben kotner um our executive over there it came from the documentary world as a filmmaker and netflix puts out a lot of great documentaries they like know what they're talking about um and i remember early on we talked a lot about like how can we set this table correctly slowly patiently without boring people in 2018 who have 400 other things on their queue to watch? And so we talked quite a bit about that, about what can we afford to burn in terms of patience. And that's kind of how we came up with this idea of doing kind of a cold open up front to give you a little bit of what's coming.

And then I guess there was some issues of, some issues of like, you know, God, should we have tried to make this an eight or a 10 part thing? Because there are still more story elements that could have been told. So there were little bits of regret, but I don't really recall any crazy, like, you know, head to head stuff. The real challenge was just that there's like three huge legal components to the story. One is the land use issue. Can you build on farm use land only, which is very specific to Oregon. So how do you make that understandable to the whole world? The second issue, which I previously talked about, was the separation of church and state issue. Can this religious community have their own police

force? Can they have their own school system? And then the third issue was this was the biggest case of immigration fraud in the history of the country. And trying to figure out how to spread out those three different legal stories, I think required the most juggling because if you get too much into the weeds on the legal stuff, it gets a little dry pretty quickly. And so I think that was kind of the biggest challenge as far as filmmakers was just keeping it fresh and interesting, but diving into those three topics. Was there anybody that you guys really wanted to talk to that wouldn't talk to you there was one character um that we tried you know very hard we tried for about three years and that was the original mayor of roshanish purim uh swami krishna diva who now goes by david knapp

um worked directly under Sheila. And then at the end is kind of the one that kind of flips on the community, turns state's evidence. He went into witness protection after this. We were able, with a little bit of forensic internet searching, we were able to kind of track him down. Talk to him, but just from day one, no interest in participating in this. And it was one of those things where it's a good lesson for me because I kind of maybe arrogantly thought like, well, once I tell him that this is going to be a Netflix series, because that wasn't always the case. I had reached out to him before that.

I thought that that would compel him to want to get his voice in the series, but it didn't. And it's like, as a documentary filmmaker, it's like no one's obligated to participate. He has his own life to live. And I understand that um and for me it just it did personally like give me a tremendous amount of respect for everyone that stepped forward in our documentary series um not just because we wouldn't have a documentary series without them but just there's a lot of courage that that that that it takes to to have two people flip a camera on and start asking you questions about a really confusing, difficult, traumatic part of your life. And so like any opportunity I get, regardless of how

you feel about our talking heads, um, at a base level there, I have an admiration for them for stepping forward and talking to us. Yeah. Just talking about courage. It was interesting that Sheila was our only talking head who asked us not to send her questions ahead of time. She said that she'll sit down on that chair and we could ask her anything she wanted and she would answer as honestly as she could. But as far as David Knapp, I hope someday he does come out. I think he's got a lot of information, a lot of probably really interesting insight into what happened.

And I think it could be really valuable in putting together some of the pieces of this story. He's a huge fan of the Ringer podcast. So once this, I think, it's going to be the linchpin, guys. I was really fascinated by Prem Niran. Is that his name?

And I found myself on his Facebook page yesterday because I was just trying to go as far. You're not alone. But I found it so interesting the way that some people are still as deeply committed

to the ideas and communicating in an incredibly sincere way about something that seen through one prism seems nuts and through another just seems like a person are still as deeply committed to the ideas and communicating in an incredibly sincere way about something that seen through one prism seems nuts and through another just seems like a person reconciling their own faith? I feel that way. I mean, just, you know, personally, you know, I've seen this thing quite a few times. And we did a screening in New York where we just screened episodes one and two. And when you end after episode two, and you don't continue, I personally have this feeling of these young, extremely well-educated, idealistic people tried to come together and build a city that was so advanced in terms of green energy, in terms of smart farming. And maybe the principles weren't exactly the principles

that I think could sustain itself of true love and true communism with money and things like that. But at the core of it, it's what I'm looking for. It's what I've been looking for my whole life. It's why I work in this house with tons of filmmakers together so that we can share our stories and share things together. And I get really, really sad that it didn't work out for them. But at the same time, then I get inspired and think, shit, maybe there's another round of this, another version of this that can happen. Because I remain inspired by the principles and the idealism of the Rajneeshis who came to Oregon and said,

let's just buy up some land in the middle of nowhere and do our own thing. It's everything I've done in my business as an independent filmmaker. I came to Hollywood and was like, oh, I'll be a Hollywood filmmaker after I made a Sundance movie. And I was like, nope. I don't want to do that. I want to do my own thing on the east side of town in my own house. And I just

identify pretty strongly with their principles. I pray that you're not deported at any point it's coming guys i think that's interesting because don't eat those pretzels a lot of people you know when they watch it's like oh you don't really go into real depth about osho's philosophy or ideals and what we found when we were meeting these people is it was almost less about the ideals as it was just a sense of community and a sense of family and what they all felt. And that's what really like hit home for me. Cause I think all of us on some level are searching for connection and to be accepted and to be around people that make you feel good about yourself. And it was, it was really interesting to

see that that was almost more of a stronger pull for all these people than even the exact principles of enlightenment or meditation. Those were tools, but it was really the sense of community that I found interesting. I seem like you guys were fairly sparing with some of the more sort of incendiary aspects of the story, especially the concept of sex inside the community, which is, you know, I think a little, just a little bit hard for a general conservative American, not politically conservative, but just lifestyle conservative to understand what did you, were you reluctant to go too far into the specific aspects of what they do there?

So it was kind of like twofold on, on one hand, you know, a couple of our interview subjects just didn't really want to go into too much detail about that, which is understandable. They're on camera. The second component was in India, it was much more salacious. It was a real part of the ashram of the commune there. When they actually moved to Oregon, when we talked to them, they said they were so busy building the city all the time they were working 14 16 hour days that the whole kind of like open sex component really kind of took a back seat they're only having sex five six times yeah they kind of took a back seat and what you realize is it was more about like open marriage it was less about like some freaky bizarre sex cult as opposed to we don't know

how much we believe in monogamy um where we open each other up lovingly to those who we have connections with. And I think for a lot of people, once you hear them talk about it, you go, oh, it's not that crazy. And to be clear, it wasn't like it was some sort of forced principles. To live here, you have to be in an open marriage. Everybody just did whatever they wanted. Some people were open, some people weren't. Because I'm kind of with you on that, where it's like I'm an extremely liberal person, but I'm married and have kids.

So when it comes to that stuff, I'm actually kind of conservative and prudish. So yeah, I think that it's very important distinction to think about. The commune in Puna in the late 60s and early 70s was very much of that time, very much super liberal. But then it almost got a little more like 80s PG-13 corporate work ethic. Yeah, for sure. Like Porky's 2 is like more PG-13. No, that's exactly what I was thinking of. You were thinking of Porky's 2 when you watched it? No, not precisely.

But specifically that like post-60s idealism rendering into like a Reagan America where it's just like just do it yourself just build your house you can do it sheila when she says like there's there is time for meditation it's fine but right now we're gonna put that to the side and watching them work 16 hours a day you know it's like that's a kind of a cool version of like this sort of religious phenomenon it was it is fascinating um As a massive Bill Callahan fan, I would be remiss if I did not ask about the music in the series.

It's named after a Bill Callahan lyric. And I guess also someone says at one point, Wild Country. Correct. Had you guys land on Bill's music and also the other songs in the series? Sure. So when we were researching this,

one of my friends, Neil, is the percussionist for Bill Callahan and has recorded on albums and toured with him. And he actually wrote a book. I don't know if he released it yet, but the whole first chapter was on the song Drover, which is where the Wild Wild Country lyric was taken from. And I'd always loved Bill's music, but never really listened to those lyrics. And when Neil was kind of breaking down the lyrics and the percussion of that song, we were right in the middle of researching the story. And I read that lyric and it just stood out.

And I just thought, what a perfect name for kind of just embody this entire story for me, at least. We were just listening to a ton of Bill Callahan. And there was something about that setting, his voice, his style of music, the lyrics, and just visualizing how this setting was going to look. I think that as documentary filmmakers, it's like there's so much about the story and the characters. But the setting of not just Antelope, but Eastern Oregon in general and Wasco County, it's like we wanted to make that characters in and of themselves. Yeah, I think just the lyric is, you know, one thing about this Wobbuffet country is it takes a strong mind, but it breaks a strong mind. And I just felt so apt to Osho and Sheila, who moved

to this country very strong willed and were ultimately kind of broken by our American institutions and cultures and way of life. And so it was just really exciting to be able to include the song and thrilled that Bill allowed us to use his music. Yeah, it really kind of drove the sonic palette of the score a little bit too because you know they're

the third way brother is brocker way who does all the music for this which i think is uh kind of an unsung hero of this documentary series and um you listen to that sonic palette and those sort of very raw very dry no, sparse, close recordings that I think make Bill special. Brocker kind of incorporated a lot of that stuff into it, and so it kind of flows right out. It's really special. I like to end every episode of this show by asking

what's the last great thing that you guys have seen, so maybe each one of you can let me know the last great thing you've seen. I think of the last great thing that I have seen. I guess this means we're snobs because we can't think of it. So we just went to Copenhagen to see PH Docs to talk about it. And I watched, I didn't see it, but I watched Call Me By Your Name, which really kind of blew me away. The scene between the father and the son just completely wrecked me

and kind of ruined the rest of my flight in a good way because I was just very emotional. I was actually talking to Mark about this in New York I'm like 20 years late to this show but I've been watching the Larry Sanders show on HBO yeah and it's been like an amazing dive into Gary Shandling I like weirdly knew about him a little bit and I know Judd Apatow's doing this documentary on Gary I cannot wait yeah to see that it's called the Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling and I've just become like it was even after because I saw him on Comedians in Cars getting coffee and I

knew a little bit about him and then I really and then I did like the Larry Sanders dive and I'm still working my way through that series but it's just like it's some amazing comedy in television and they really managed to capture like celebrity and like narcissism but like show respect respect for people who create cool shit. I don't know.

I have a lot of opinions about that show, but I've been weirdly taking a good dive into Gary Shanley lately. Mine was a revisit, but I was lucky enough to get Strep Throat recently, which is actually nice when you're a dad and a husband to get this. Because you can get rid of it with antibiotics after two days, but you get two days of sequestered time. So I did the whole before trilogy in a row, which I've never done before. I went before sunrise, before sunset, before midnight. That's great. And I'm a huge Richard Linklater fan. He's one of my biggest inspirations.

But it really reconfirmed to me. Every now and then you think about your career. You're like, what am I meant to do? Should I have taken that Marvel movie when they brought it to me? Every now and then you think about your career. You're like, what am I meant to do? Should I have taken that Marvel movie when they brought it to me? Did I screw up? And I was like,

no, this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. Watching two people walk around, talk about stuff, create chemistry, these personal stories, and it just kind of

reaffirmed of like, I think I'm in the right spot. You created more chemistry with the Way Brothers here too. Guys, thanks so much for doing this. What about you? Oh, shit. I don't usually answer

that question. Probably your show, which I just finished yesterday. And scene. Thanks again so much for listening to The Big Picture. If you want to read more about Wild Wild Country, please check out TheRinger.com. Alison Herman has an interesting review of the show. And check out this feed later this week.

I'll have another episode of The Big Picture for you to listen to. See you then. We have exciting news for all you Ringer heads out there. The Ringer has new merchandise with a shiny new storefront that you can check out right now. We have hats, hoodies, and even an exclusive Shea Serrano disrespectful dunk t-shirt. Your friends will be low-key jealous when they see you strutting down the street with an official Ringer zip-up hoodie. Previously available only to Ringer staffers, we are letting you, our loyal listeners, get first dibs on the goods. Go to theringer.com slash shop to pre-order your merch now. These are limited run items and will not last so long,

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