The Big Picture - Dumpuary Is Dead. These Movies Killed It. Plus: The Best Movies at Sundance and the Catherine O’Hara Hall of Fame.

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

Sean and Amanda open today’s action-packed show by discussing the incredible box office success of Markiplier’s self-financed ‘Iron Lung,’ and they talk through how it could possibly impact the future of moviegoing and studio strategy (2:32). Then, they react to breaking news in real time, with Nancy Meyers’s new film starring Penélope Cruz, Kieran Culkin, and Jude Law being dated for December 2027 (17:22). Next, they honor the legendary actor Catherine O’Hara following her passing and briefly build her Hall of Fame (21:58). Following that, Sean shares his 10 favorite movies from the Sundance Film Festival and highlights ‘Josephine’ as emotionally devastating and a major standout (27:16). Later, they discuss two recent releases in ‘People We Meet on Vacation,’ which they found to be quite disappointing (43:12), and the Charli xcx mockumentary ‘The Moment,’ which they both thoroughly enjoyed (1:07:16). Finally, Sean is joined by legendary production designer Jack Fisk to discuss all things ‘Marty Supreme,’ his incredibly detail-oriented creative process behind building a new world, and what he learned from working with filmmakers like Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Paul Thomas Anderson (1:21:57). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Jack Fisk Producer: Jack Sanders A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.® Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the big picture and conversation show about the death of dump you are and we have a crazy loaded show today. We're buzzing through a number of topics including Charlie XX's new movie

The Moment, the Netflix rom-com people we meet on vacation, the YouTuber Markiplier's feature film debut surprise hit Iron Lung. I'll share my favorite movies out of Sundance. Yeah. We had a terrible loss in the world of film and we also have a special guest on the show.

So later in this episode, I will be speaking to one of the most legendary and undersung movie artists of the past half century, the production designer and filmmaker Jack Fisk. He's on the show. His career began in the early 1970s on small independent features like Messiah of Evil and Terminal Island and a fateful union with a young filmmaker named Terrence Malik on a movie called Badlands. Fisk collaborated with Malik six more times in his career, one of the most fruitful partnerships in American movie history.

Over the decades, Jack Fisk has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson. Stanley Donan, Brian De Palma, Alejandro Gonzalez, Inorritu, Martin Scorsese, and his childhood friend David Lynch with whom he made The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive. He also directed three movies of his own. He's also married to Sissy SpaceX. He has a very cool and exciting life.

He is Academy Award nominated this year for his work on the 1950s New York period piece, Marty Supreme. He helped build that world that that movie that we love transpires in. He had an astonishing career. He is still motivated and working at 80 years old and is a great chat, So I hope you will stick around for that discussion.

And we will get into the show right after this. This episode of The Big Picture is presented by State Farm. You know those friends who show up for whatever you're into, the ones who'll debate which superhero universe is better or binge true crime documentaries with you at three in the morning? Those friends are gold. State Farm is like that, helping you figure out the coverage that actually fits. Car, home, life, whatever you need, they've got your back.

And if you want a hand, a local agent is just a tap away on their award-winning app. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Okay. Good monologue. Thank you. I just wanted to put a little context around that legend. You told me that I couldn't interject because it throws you off. So I couldn't be like, Jack Fisk, pretty cool.

But that is when I saw it on this spreadsheet, I was like, ooh, Jack Fisk. It was pretty cool. It was a good conversation. I hope people enjoy it. I had some nerves about February and what we were going to do with the show. You get anxious when there is a blank spot. Yeah. But you know what?

That is when creativity thrives. Well, it does make me feel something that I think is resonating in the box office right now, which is that no matter what happens, no matter how much doom saying there is, no matter how much anxiety I feel. Yeah. Movies are good, man. Like, we're good. They're going to keep happening no matter what happens to the structure of the industry. What has happened over this weekend is kind of fascinating for us to take apart quickly before we get into the rest of the news. So we did talk about Send Help last week, and it was the number one movie in America, which is not shocking, right?

a movie star movie, a kind of horror movie in January. They tend to do pretty well. Cross-generational because you have Rachel McAdams and then Dylan O'Brien, you know, for olds and the old millennials and the young millennials. Yeah, exactly. At least the millennials are being served. And that's a good thing because the alphas and the Zs were also being served at the movie theater. Yeah.

So the number two movie in America, which I did go out and see last night because I felt like I just needed to know what all the fuss was about, is this movie Iron Lung, which is written and directed by Marrador. Fischbach, aka MarketPlyar, the YouTuber that I mentioned to you last week. And this has been a three years in the making project. It's adapted from a video game that MarketPlyer, I believe, once played through on YouTube. Okay. And the movie made $18 million. Yeah. It was booked into 4,100 screens around the world this weekend.

Completely independently financed, completely independently distributed. did. This is one of the most amazing stories in theatrical exhibition of the last 10 years. And I think it says a lot. So it's smart. The movie theaters finally did something smart, which was realized that YouTube is coming for them. So if they can't, they can't compete in that space. They got to bring the celebrities and the content to their home. Yeah. And so apparently this is born of people literally calling their movie. theater. After Fishback encouraged them to do so to say, book this movie in my movie theater.

And they obliged and they returned the favor by going to see the movie. I was at a Sunday night screening at 8 p.m. And it was like 75% full. So a couple things about this. One, I didn't think the movie was very strong. You know, it is an independent movie. It's not his first film per se because he's done a lot of these experiences on YouTube before where he would do like a date with Marky Plyer. And then it's this kind of like you are the person on the date.

So it is kind of this subjective first person point of view. Or he did one and called a heist with Markiplier where he like rob a bank with him. And they have like multiple endings. It's kind of an interesting act of creativity. This is more of a traditional movie. It's an isolated movie that takes place all in a submarine. It is post-apocalyptic. And Markiplier's basically been, his character has been arrested.

And he has to go into this sea of blood and see what is inside of this sea. see if there was anything living in there in hopes of saving humanity. So it's kind of like science fiction, cosmic horror. Hold on. So he's been arrested and then is this his punishment or is this like a mercy remake? It is, well, it does have some things in common with mercy. Okay. So he's imprisoned and he has to explore a sea of blood in order to free himself?

More or less. He's promised freedom if he is able to discover and help kind of identify. identify what may be at the issue. Like what could create potential safety for humanity long term? He is in conversation with a woman throughout his journey. Great. Okay.

And he is trapped in one place. The movie has really good sound design. Is it a real woman? It is a real woman. Okay. It is a real woman. And the movie has really good sound design. It looks pretty good.

It does take place on a mini submarine. So there's like a lot of repeated shots and only so much you can do visually with a movie like that. Yeah. It is strangely quiet. And I also haven't played game so I don't know the fealty to the game, but it seems like people who like the game

really like the movie. Set aside the quality of the movie for a minute because that's not the most important thing. Like, it's not Dos Boat or Event Horizon, even though it's trying to be like a movie like that. It's a movie that is being served to people who specifically want this, especially young people. And it feels to me like generationally very important. I kind of lost my mind with the Minecraft thing last year.

Yeah. But it's not so dissimilar where it's not just source material, but it's speaking directly to an audience. And so Fishback has like 39 million followers on YouTube, subscribers. And he's just telling them every time he posts a video for like years like Iron Lung is coming.

Go see Iron Lung. Did you like the game Iron Lung? I made a movie of Iron Lung. And it's, you know, I worked with the guy who created the game. Like this is something that I made for you for myself as well. And they showed up. People went. Like this is kind of fascinating. It's kind of the highest

level version of something that we've seen over the last like five or ten years with like the Terrifier movies or the Eros Tour or Five Nights at Freddy's. You know like- Well, sure, but all of those had like major studios or conglomerations. And yes, I count Taylor Swift as a conglomeration involved. Terrifier a little bit less so. It was it was an independent film that had like proper distribution. Right. This is, you're right.

This is a new, a completely new horizon where this is just like a guy who self-financed a movie, a $3 million movie. And built up his own distribution on YouTube and then brought it to another arm of distribution, movie theaters all by himself. Yes. And it, you know, it does what you said. Like it kind of shows that the studio system is not necessary to create success. I don't know how repeatable this is for other people. But this kind of like notoriety amongst YouTube personalities or any kind of content creator, that's achievable. Like there are a lot of filmmakers in the last five or ten years who have come from YouTube. You know, like the Philippo brothers who. made talk to her and bring her back. Last year we saw Shelby Oaks from Chris Stuckman. Like that's something that's going to keep happening. The backrooms is coming out this year by Kate Parsons. Like those kinds of things, but those guys are more or less plugging themselves into movie studios.

The market plier thing is like, he built the ship and he took the journey. And also got a lot of people who normally get his content for free to pay a lot of money. It's a really good point. Like if you think about all of the, you're playing no. for YouTube. You have to sit through annoying ads. And then 15, 18, it's not even like a cheap $6 a month subscription. No. So it's impressive. It's really fascinating. I think it's a good sign just for young people being engaging in movie going. And it does make me feel like the same way that

studios leveraged our native interest in stories like Batman, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Disney animation, where it was sort of like when one of these comes along, we know a lot of people will show up. I think studios kind of need to start thinking about things this way, not just adapting video games, but thinking about where the audiences are and what they want. And it's hard to tap into, but there's clearly an audience that wants to go to the movies. That's the thing that I find so encouraging about this. Yeah. I mean, I do wonder if studios see this and are a bit nervous because, you know, they have tried this in many different ways, both in terms of capitalizing on video games and YouTube creators plugging them into the system.

and it's like pretty mixed results, you know, for every like five night at Freddy's. You have a five nights at Freddy's too. So, and this proves that the machine isn't totally necessary for that like conversion of money. You know, like I don't want to get like to, I haven't seen the movie. You didn't like think the movie was very good. I didn't. So it's cool for like the culture of movies and movie going and people. and people investing in this as like a medium.

And if I were studios who are primarily worried with getting money from audiences, I might be a little bit itchy about this. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if there are 100 Mark Fishbacks in the world, you know, but there are probably at least 10 more. And people will pay $18 once or like $15, I'm sorry, that was L.A. inflated ticket prices.

But will they pay it like 40 times? And this moviegoing experience did not have. have the same feeling as something like Minecraft where you had people kind of hootin and holler and pointing at the screen that references. Occasionally, I would hear like a tittering amongst the crowd of identifying something that they recognize from the game or recognized from Fishback, maybe from watching his videos for so long. That's just a longstanding relationship. And I think it, because of the primacy of movies on this show and the way that we cover them, you know, we make it seem like it is the most important thing in the world because it is to us. But for him, this is just like

one more spoke in the wheel. I was going to ask you, do you think that Fishback makes more money from this wide release or from his YouTube channel. I mean, I assume it's from all the associated businesses related to his YouTube channel, but, I mean, he owns this movie. So he just made basically in the neighborhood of like a $10 million profit in three days. Pretty good business. That is good. You know, and now he's been working hard on it for a really long time.

I read that they used 80,000 gallons of fake blood because the submarine is in a giant blood sea, you know, that like they've spent years editing the film and trying to apply post-production to kind of improve its production quality. So, like, he worked hard on it, and it took a long time, but it's a great business for him. And it'll be interesting to see if somebody like him, who's just like a middle-aged guy at this point, wants to transition more towards doing this or just kind of likes his core business that he has spent. I mean, and that's kind of what I was asking in terms of the financials. Like, is this, you know, his new main thing or just something that you can do when you have this other, like, core following and, core output. Yeah, I mean, he could just adapt another game. I mean, he's done let's play with,

like, I think, like, hundreds of games. I think he's done this for many, many years, and he does other things on his channel, but there's probably a lot of opportunities. So I found this to be a fascinating story. I wish the movie was a little better, especially because it's a genre that I really like. Yeah. But for a first timer, it could have been worse, for sure. I mean, we always want movies to be good and better than they are. Yeah, you know. But keep making them and make them Good is something I feel strongly about, which is why I also saw Melania 100 times this weekend. Melania number three at the box office. I didn't see it.

Did you see it? No. Okay. I hope I don't have to. It seems like we're not going to have to. Right. Unless there's like a late-breaking, like whatever, not fishing, but a bot scheme to try to. This episode comes out after the voting closes.

Okay, good. So for those of you listening at home who don't know what we're talking about, we're doing a listener's choice episode at the end of this week. and I came up with some interesting options. And one of the options was that we would go see Melania and talk about it on the show so that you don't have to. And I got to say, I was very impressed and pleased by the audience's reaction to us even having to go see the movie,

which was like it is now, I think, in third place in the vote. And most people were vociferously like, do not give this, do not give them money? Yeah, most people were in the comments being like, do not do this if you have to do it, sneak in. I noted that our friends were like very pro us having to go see whatia, which is, yeah, which is like not friendship. I see you, Alex Ross Perry and Yassi Salick. Yeah, I appreciated that everyone said, no, we don't want this in our airspace.

I don't want it in my airspace either. I don't want to see it either. So if we don't have to go see it, that's wonderful. It did make $7 million, which as was reported over the weekend is a lot for a documentary, the most for a documentary in years. I would argue this is not really a documentary, not aesthetically per se, but because it basically has like a star. It has IP at the center of it. It also has a $35 million marketing budget in addition to its $40 million budget.

So not a huge success at the box office. Let's not overstate how well it did. And frankly, I'll probably never know how it appeals aesthetically. Are you excited about what might win the listener's choice? Yes, which is a 2008 movie swap. I haven't Googled. It's The Strangers. The Strangers, yes. I look forward to seeing that. I did after we put the pull-up.

With what? Oh, with Mamma Mia. And you'll finally watch Mama Mia and I'll watch Mama Mia again because I haven't seen it in a couple years and that's fun. After we recorded and after we put the pull-up, I did think to myself, we should have also thrown in Princess Diaries 2, like Salt aspect to the rewatch based on the follow-ups because I know that Jack Sanders has not seen either still. That is correct. I got to tell you, I went home and watched salt last week. It went well?

It plays. And then I was on the salt two message boards for a while. Whoa. Because there was, I mean. Salt 2? Well, it doesn't exist. But there was. Does it end in like a shocking cliffhanger?

No, not in a cliffhanger, but it ends in like we are setting up salt too. Okay. Salt will return in Salt 2. Essentially, yes. What's her name? Like Phyllis Salt? Jim Salt? I was about to say Varuka Salt, which is not correct.

But it's something. Evelyn Salt. Evelyn, that's right. There was a V. Okay. And her name is Evelyn Wa Salt, right? And then she, there was a script in like 2012 that Angelina Jolie turned down. I see.

Did Aaron Sorkin write? Yeah, you did. I don't know. I would watch Salt too. Okay. That's not up for a vote. Right. And then I do, I feel that everyone on this, else on this podcast should.

Do I have to see Salt again? I mean, I've seen it. I saw it in theaters in 2008. Well, maybe we can assign Jack, the White. watching of salt. Sure. That sounds good. I'll watch anything. Okay. And then we can save Princess Diaries too for the Anne Hathaway Hall of Fame

pre-Devil Wars Prada. Oh, that's a great idea. We're already planning the Meryl Streep Hall of Fame. Are we also doing Ann Hathaway? I mean, we can, trust me, you don't have to talk me into doing an Ann Hathaway episode. I would be happy to do that. Well, should we save the Ann Hathaway episode for later in the year since she's got like six? That's probably a good idea. Okay. So we'll do Meryl.

Flowervale Street episode will be Ann Hathaway Hall Fee. Okay. And Mother Mary, but is at the same time. That's also April. Oh, okay. So they'll be coming in close succession. Yeah, a lot of Hathaway on the podcast here. I haven't seen The Devil Wars Prodett II trailer yet.

Okay. Maybe we'll watch it later and record it. Okay. A laugh action from me. Well, that's fine. No one really cares what you think. That's pretty much true. On this one, no one cares.

What about like all the bros? You know, all the bros who are like, I need Sean to weigh in on is DWP2 scintillating cinema? No. Okay. Okay, we have breaking news on the pot. We finished the entire episode. We're coming back into the studio.

Yeah. Because while we were recording, we're time traveling to discuss this incredible news. On an episode in which we are talking about people we meet on vacation and the future of the rom-com, Nancy Myers' long-rumored next film is happening. It has been greenlit at Warner Brothers. It is dated for Christmas, 2027. Yes. It has a cast.

It is a go. So the cast is Penelope Cruz, Kieran Culkin, Jude Law, Emma Mackey, and Owen Wilson. Your thoughts. This is the year of protecting my heart. And I will not believe this until the trucks show up and they start filming. Okay? I've been dicked around on this movie in particular. I don't know if it's the same movie that she was working on several years ago that was in production.

or it was like rumored to be with Netflix, but they couldn't agree on budget. Scarlett Johansson was attached at some point. Scarlet Johansson and Michael Fassbender, I believe, was originally slated. And that did not happen for a variety of reasons. Nancy Myers gave a talk a few weeks ago here in L.A., I believe she was introducing Father of the Bride.

And anniversary screening, yes. And mentioned that she was making a movie with Kieran Culkin, that it started filming this spring. I say now what I said then, which is I will wait until they start production because I don't want to get my hopes up. Dating it is good, right? Very good. But they did date it for 2027 of like the end of next year. Sure. 23 months away. Great things take time. That's soon. The other thing I'm learning is that I'm, we're reading this in Indie Wire and I'm looking

at a photo of Hansi Myers and I think she's wearing high sport pants, which is exciting to me. So, I don't know what that means. Anyway, people who know will know. So I, listen, I say yes. I say okay. I say let's not put the cart before the horse. This will be, it has been more than 11 years since she made the intern. Yeah. That's her last feature film, which was a huge sensation of a successful movie starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro. Yeah. Though not as much of a box office sensation as all the films that came before.

No. Because Nancy Myers has multiple movies that it made over $100 million domestically. Right. But didn't the intern make more than $100 million worldwide? I feel as though it did. Maybe worldwide. But not, like, there is a drop-off box office, which is more reflective of the state of the box office in 2015. Okay.

But, yeah. The intern made $194 million worldwide. Yeah. That's amazing. Listen, she can make great movies. Okay. You think this will be good, great, special, your favorite movie of all time? I don't even know what's about.

Penelope Cruz positive. Karen Culkin was also famously in her father of the bride. Yes. Which I should say it's been confirmed to us by multiple sources that the full-day movie marathon that Paul Thomas Anderson curated for Esty Himes wedding did screen the Steve Martin father of the bride. Directed by Charles Shire and Co-Reyer and Edty Myers. I'm just saying that that's a follow-up. I know. Fuck her, right.

Fuck Spencer Tracy. I think PTA has good taste. I have no idea. I hope they give her enough of a budget. Yeah, me too. That's, let's, you know, good things cost money. Do you think this is actually a backdoor Minecraft sequel? Yeah, definitely.

Okay. Warner Brothers, I got to say, they keep agreeing to make all the movies that I'm interested in seeing. Yeah. And they may be for sale. But the studio, can we just not, can this company just not get sold? And can Pam Abbey and Mike DeLuca just stay running the movie studio and just keep doing what they're doing? like, why does this have to change? Well, if they can do this while in limbo,

then can they just be in limbo forever? It is a good sign. You're right about that. It is a really good sign that this movie can happen whilst in limbo. Well, again, you're going to spend $150 million on a Nancy Myers movie. I mean, this is what I'm concerned about now. Like, the end of 2027 is far away. So if things get real messed up and, like, the new owners don't want to pay for this,

like, you know. So if the studio gets sold to a pause production, I will pay for the rest of the movie. That is my solemn promise. I will fund Nancy Myers is maybe her Swan Song, maybe not, we don't even really know maybe she's got 10 more in her.

That would be wonderful. Godspeed, okay, this has been our time travel update. Horrible news on Friday. Catherine O'Hara passed away, 71 years old. An actress who I guess, I'm trying to think if we have had reason

to talk about her aside from Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, much in the last 10 years. You know, we were both for fans of the studio. She was seen there. She obviously has had kind of a fascinating second half of her career because she had the great success of Schitt's Creek.

Right. But kind of in that unusual category of everyone loves her and everyone acknowledges her comedic and dramatic genius and just like an overwhelming outpouring. You know, what was your reaction seeing the news? I mean, incredibly sad. But thinking about her film career and how sneakily. foundational. She is to not just the movies that you and I grew up on, but obviously Beetlejuice and Home Alone. When you think about just like the, she is Kevin, you know, I mean, he's the hands on the side, but her yelling Kevin. Yeah. Yeah. She has some pretty singular,

like individual movie moments across. Like a Deo at the table and Beetlejuice. Like things that are just kind of burnt, you know, her and Fred Willard performing and waiting for Guffman in the classroom. Well, and please don't forget, God loves a Terrier, which is my, honestly, my reaction when I saw this was number one, this is very sad and number two, God loves a terrier, which is the hardest. This is from Best in Show and the hardest that I've ever laughed in a film ever. The only time I'll accept people singing.

Yeah, I mean, she also sang beautifully at the Academy Awards when the song from A Mighty Wind was nominated with Eugene Levy. She's Sally, the voice of Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. She, you know, also had like a really interesting career as a dramatic actor and something that you would not expect necessarily given her background as a sketch performer on SCTV. And she's, if you go back, Paul F. Tompkins on Blue Sky, the comedian, has an incredible thread of some of her best sketches from SCTV. And she was an absolute genius. She was kind of like somewhere between a mimic and an inventor where she would kind of use a template of a famous person and then create a new character around that template.

So I can give you some of those sketches that I think are great. But in the second half of her career, a bunch of hauteur's got interested in her and started using her in films. She's in Heartburn by Mike Nichols. She was in Dick Tracy by Warren Beatty. She was in The Paper by Ron Howard. She was in Wyatt Earp by Lawrence Kasden.

She was in Where the Wild Things Are. She had a voice performance for Spike Jones. Like she was kind of everyone was interested in what Catherine O'Hauer could bring to the table, which is this really unique combination of daffy, odd, sincere, really funny, really intelligent. Cutting when she needs to be. Could be sharp, could be sad, could be devastated.

Just really a one of one. Like I could not think of who I could even compare her career to or her skills as an actor to. Multiple franchises. And then like a side career in one of the great comedy schools in the Christopher Guest films. and then like a reinvention as a TV star. Yeah, on multiple shows over time. Just an amazing career. I mean, you know, like her Hall of Fame is kind of weird to do

because if you look at, you could probably just do 10 movies. And some of them would be the biggest movies of all time. You already mentioned Beetlejuice and Home Alone, which are absolutely foundational for both of us. We forgot Kevin. And she's also not funny in that movie. No. You know, and there's an amazing scene that is discussed.

in the recent John Candy documentary. If people haven't seen that, I encourage you to check it out. And she's interviewed in that film. But there's that amazing scene when they're stuck in the airport. And she's stuck with John Candy and his musician troupe.

And they have this, like, touching moment. And that's two people who have been friends since they were kids when they first started together in Canada. And she has these, like, long-running relationships with all of these key figures in comedy. So, Beatlejuice, Home Alone.

I mean, after hour, she's only in 10 minutes, but she's absolutely hilarious. And the thing that she does, too Griffin done in that movie where he's trying to remember a phone number and she keeps seeing like 7, 9, 4, 6, 2, 4, 3, 6.

Trying to throw him off is amazing. There's a small movie that Steve Martin wrote called A Simple Twist of Fate about a single father with a little girl that she plays sort of like the best friend

slash surrogate mother character that's a really good performance as a movie that's a little bit forgotten. I thought I would shout out. She's very funny. Speaking of the John Candy documentary, which is stars,

Colin Hanks, no, it's directed by Colin Hanks, but he's one of the stars of Orange County, and she's very funny in that movie as well. And then go down the list of all the Christopher Guest movies. Yeah. Right. Mighty Win for your consideration, Best In Show, and Waiting for Guffman, right? Yes, I would demand that Best in Show be on the list. That's definitely in there.

So, yeah, I mean, an incredible career. Really sad. Very sad. And I don't, you know, it seems like a surprise. You know, people didn't, it didn't seem like a good. who she was sick or that anything was wrong. So it's devastating. Okay. Let's talk about Sundance quickly. Okay. Go for it. We were not in Park City. We did not go to Park City. It was the last Park City. I actually saw some people over the weekend who were there for the last Park City. You know,

the reports are pretty similar around the board, which was that it was neither the best slate nor the happiest vibe because this was the last year of Park City. So it was a little dower. A lot of people remembering their experiences over the decades going. We just went the one time, you and I. Yeah. And we have a little bit. We have a lot of. We have a lot of. We have a lot of. We had fun when we went. Yeah. No, I went again last year. Oh, you did.

That's right. You were there very brief. Twice. That's right. So I saw the closure of Main Street, you know, when Chase Sapphire just took everything over. Which, you know, is the vibe. And this year, it seems like there were not a ton of great movies.

I saw one great movie. Okay. And I watched it on Thursday night. And I watched it together because I did virtual Sundance. And the next day, it won the grand jury prize. and also the audience award for a drama. And that movie is called Josephine. It stars Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan,

and in an amazing debut, Mason Reeves, a young actress, eight years old. It's about a little girl who goes for a walk early one morning with her father to go play soccer. They are separated very briefly on this walk, and she witnesses a sexual assault. And it is about everything that happens to this. little girl in the aftermath of witnessing this horrifying event about learning how the world works,

learning how our parents react to this news, learning how the justice system operates, learning about a little kid's psychology. The movie is very purposefully manipulative, but honestly shattering. The phrase they kept rattling in my head while I was watching it, and it's not about the actual premise of the movie, but maybe more about how I think about life. is that this is hard to accept. It's a movie. It's made up. Yeah.

The filmmaker, Beth Aarajo, does an amazing job of putting you in the perspective of the little girl. And it also puts you in the perspective of two parents who don't know what they're doing and make a lot of mistakes and disagree in front of her about what to do about this situation.

And I honestly felt like I just got beat up by Mike Tyson at the end of the movie. I found it very, very hard. Great, can't wait. Yeah, it's devastating. Obviously, it won both awards, so it was immediately identified as like the Sundance movie. I think we'll be talking about it throughout the year.

It will certainly be an awards conversation. Yeah. But then the other thought I had was, the first thought I had was, oh, great. I will see this and I don't think it'll be pleasant, even if it will be revelatory. And then the second was this seems like movie adolescence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's the flip side, right? It's a young girl instead of a young boy. Right. But similar themes. And I felt like there was more, both of those films deploy filmmaking tools. You know, in adolescence, the oneers and the idea of kind of never breaking from the perspective of the small room that you're in with these characters. In this movie, the young girl continues to see like a vision of the man who assaults the woman. Okay.

All around her in her life. and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't work as well. Everything else about the movie feels very constructed but real. And that's the one thing that's sort of like

almost phantasmagoric the way he kind of like haunts her. And so those are two like they're not tricks per se but they're techniques that I think have some similarities between them. It's just I'm probably going to have to watch this movie again.

I don't look forward to it. There's one scene in particular that I just kind of lost it completely and I think it's because I tend to think of myself as like a tough movie watcher. Yeah, but increasingly you're not. Really not at all with kid stuff. I do wonder whether this is going to have a little bit of the Hamnet phenomenon this year and the, and now I'm finding as people become aware of it, if I had legs, I'd kick you.

Mm-hmm. Where I've spoken with a lot of people who are like, no, thanks, I don't want to watch that. No, like I just, and you and I will for our work, but it is interesting. Hamnet has had both like a very rapid. And a lot of people who are like, okay, but this seems really upsetting. Do I have to do it? Yeah. You know, Beth De Arojo also had a film in 2022 called Soft and Quiet, which was about a group of young female white supremacists who kind of come together for like a meeting group.

Okay. And then some crazy events that happened after that. The movie has a, that movie has a kind of similarly harrowing tension that this movie does. But that movie at times kind of felt a bit ridiculous to me. Not that it couldn't happen What transpires in the movie But it just felt like it was trying to be a horror movie This new movie Josephine like uses the tools of a horror movie

But creates something that feels very real And it'll be interesting I mean I mentioned that Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award thing Because this doesn't happen very often And when it does it usually means You're probably headed to the Academy Awards I mean the movies that have had this recently include Coda Which won of course

And then Minari and Whiplash and Precious, they all won those awards and then went on to Best Picture nominees. Birth of a Nation, the Nate Parker movie, which basically got kind of like scandal deleted, also won both awards.

And Fruitvale Station did too, which did not get nominated for Best Picture, but obviously set a path for a very powerful filmmaker. So, yeah, this movie's a big deal. And I didn't really feel... Does it have a release date yet? It doesn't even have a distributor. It has not even been acquired.

Oh, interesting. I mean, it's a very difficult sell commercial. Even though anybody who watches it, you know, I don't, I feel stupid playing this card. But if you are apparent, it will, it's going to hit very, very hard. Yeah. But, you know, it's just, it's a very obvious. There's a whole, you can see the next 14 months of the movie playing out in your head for a lot of reasons. It's going to Berlin.

Going to Berlin. Oh, interesting. Okay. So maybe it'll just do the festival run through the year. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. To be totally candid with you, nothing came even close to this movie for me.

Great. At Sundance, I watched a lot of films over the last four days, and some were good, some were not so good. I already mentioned Carousel last week on the show, the Chris Pine, Jenny Slate film, which I think has really good performances and is thoughtful. And it's like a nice movie about being 43 and being like, fuck, what happened to my life? Yeah. Did I do things right? Here we are. I have a kid.

I don't know where I'm going. I see older people and I see how they're going to die soon. And then I got to make sure that my life goes okay. It's a relatable concept. Best Doc I saw is probably nuisance bear. It's about a polar bear. It's about a series of polar bears in Manitoba. It's effectively just a nature documentary that interweaves this sort of the Inuit perspective on how the bears live in the community.

Very classical kind of Sundance stuff. This movie is produced by 824. I assume they're going to release it, though they don't really put out docs anymore. It would be a big head in my home. Yes, although there's some kind of traumatic stuff where they're trying to trap and relocate the bears. Oh, no. That's tough. Go into these little tunnels and they close the gates on them.

My older son has not, he's not logged under the point where he can empathize with the human characters on the screen. But we watched Benji, the 1974 Benji recently. And when Benji was alone, not even in peril, just alone. Knox was like absolutely not. Like, he needs to find a friend really fast. So you're correct that maybe the Bears, the Bears in peril would not be good for him. Yeah, I mean, there's not anything deeply violent against the bears, but the whole time, you're like, can you just leave these guys alone? You just wanted Benji to have a friend, you know?

I understand, I understand. And Benji's a pretty confident guy. Is he? I haven't seen Benji in some time. I think things, he's magnetic. You know, the other dogs want to hang out with Benji. Oh, really? Yeah.

Oh, he's got. And the kids. He has that swag, Benji. He does. Okay. Okay. Union County quickly is another film that I thought was solid. but has a great performance by Will Poulter in the middle of it.

It's about a young guy in Ohio who is in recovery and is in a county mandated drug program. And it does feel also like a traditional Sundance film, like a very, you know, shot at location, serious, somber film about a, you know, man's journey through his struggles. However, the thing I like about it is is that it uses a lot of real people from this drug program in this county and shows literally the process that people have to go through. to kind of get clear. That was very effective. Really good journalism movie this year. I got to put Brian Curtis on to this movie. I always tip him off to the journalism documentaries,

but it's called Seized. Did you read the story about the Marion County record, which was the newspaper that was raided in Kansas a few years back? It made some national news. No, I was just following the shark attacks, you know. I don't read that news. I don't read that news. I only read news about journalism.

Assault on the First Amendment. I tried to block them out. I can't anymore. Yeah. But I do my best. Yeah. Well, they're happening more and more frequently. So the movie starts out as this kind of like the power of journalism and the power

of this elder newspaper man who's kind of running this newspaper. And he brings in a Gen Z kid who's graduated from J school and really wants to, you know, learn his craft. And he can't get a job at the New York Times, but he can get a job at the Marion County record. But then the movie kind of halfway through pivots to basically just like small town gossip. And like, which is and it's kind of, it's pretty entertaining and kind of zipping. be. And it seems like it's going to be this kind of stuffy, important film about, you know, how we're all, our rights are under threat. But that's not actually what it is. Which they are.

They're totally under threat. Let's be clear. And in this town, they clearly were. But I like that movie because it had a nice balance of these strong ideas. Yeah, all news is local news, ultimately. Very much. Very much the theme of the movie. Quickly, hot chan, shake your booty. Yeah. Is probably the most crowd-pleasing movie that I saw. It stars Rinko Kikuchi as a woman who is really in a ballroom dancing and she loses her partner and then she finds a new partner. Okay. And she falls in love.

This movie is heavily, literally and figuratively indebted to dirty dancing. I would recommend it to you. Great. I'm excited. I would love to see it. Paralyzed by Hope is the Maria Banford documentary. Fairly standard. I really like Maria Banford's comedy.

I liked learning about her. I liked learning that she lives in Altadena. I liked learning about where all the voices that she does in her comedy come from, which is almost entirely real people, especially her mother. Was it filmed? before or after the Altadina fires. Both. Oh, interesting.

Both. And they were affected. Yeah. So that's captured in the film as well near the end. Really, I thought like for, there are a lot of movies like this now about comedians and their, their struggles. But I thought this was a particularly good one. Night Nurse, probably the most fucked up movie that I saw. Great.

It's about a young woman who gets a job as a night nurse in a care facility, retirement community. And she begins a. a bizarre psychosexual co-dependency affair with one of the elder men living in the facility. Okay. And they make a lot of prank calls together

and they have orgies and they get into a lot of trouble. And Semri Paxoi and Bruce McKenzie are the nurse and the guy in the facility. Fascinating performances. A genuinely odd vibe to this movie. It's not scary. It's not sexy.

It is... I mean, upsetting? The premise sounds strange. It is very strange. Georgia Bernstein wrote and directed it. Not seen anything like it. Everybody's got their own kink, I guess. They do.

Two more quick ones. The Incomer, which is a Scottish movie that stars Donald Gleason about a guy who comes to remove two kooky siblings from a very small Scottish island that they're no longer allowed to live on. I did not know that the actress Gail Rankin was Scottish. If you see her face, you'll know exactly who I'm talking about. She shows up in a lot of horror movies and TV shows. But she is in fact Scottish. You know her?

Yeah. She's a really good actor. And she's in this movie. This is written directed by Lewis Paxton. I thought it was fun. It was like a quirky comedy. Okay. And then the last movie that I watched last night was Bedford Park,

which has already been picked up by Sony Pictures classics. Flawed but very good, I thought. Written and directed by a woman named Stephanie Anon. It stars Moon Choi and Sans Sucksu. It is about two Korean Americans who, kind of find each other by accident and they both have a lot of demons and are very fucked up and then kind of fall in love but kind of don't and are kind of using each other but also they learn things about each other in this kind of tenuous union that they have.

Movies like a little too long but really, really good performances by two actors that I was not familiar with and I think this will probably end up coming out later this year and maybe get some attention. I'm curious to see if people dig it or not. But yeah, so that was Bedford Park. 10 movies. What about the documentary you texted me and Chris about in the middle afternoon. Oh, yeah. Well, the most fun I had

was the best summer. Yeah. Which is the new movie from Tamara Davis, who Real Ones Know, directed CB4 and Billy Madison and was married to Mike D from Beastie Boys for the long time. They're no longer together, but they were together in 1995-96

when Beastie Boys pavement, bikini kill, Sonic U, food fighters, basically like all the coolest bands in the world all went on a tour together in Australia. And she just took a whole movie and they all just hung out

and she filmed performances of these bands when they were like 27 and just asked them what their favorite color was and what kind of food they liked to eat. And it's probably the best movie I've ever seen. It has no narrative shape whatsoever. It has no tension. There's not an arc.

Sometimes we just want to see the things that we love. Nope. That was just like that. is ad rock hanging out and being cool. I mean, this was also my review of the Sophia Mark, Sophia Coppola Mark Jacobs documentary.

She's just like, oh, it's those people. This is my stuff, you know, just all my stuff together hanging out, you know, just Kim Gordon, just sitting on a couch,

just being fun. So yeah, I would recommend that to anybody who is, who knows what any of those pronouns are. Do you know who those people are? Jack? Yes, or no.

Yes, definitely. Okay. Thank you, Jack. Thanks for making us feel seen. You know, I don't even know if that movie's going to get released. I don't even know what you do

with a movie like that. Okay. It's just home movies, lightly edited together, but then there's also like performance of Sonic you's doing Bull and the Heather in 1996. You know, it's like you,

it's what you want. Okay. That's, that, that, this concludes the portion of me just talking at you. Thank you for rolling with it. Yeah.

That was, that was a long time of you just talking at me. I watched so many movies. I wish I saw more good ones. I really, can I ask you, sir, you're blocking off Cal time

over the weekend. Yeah. And then Eileen and Alice are out in the world? No, it was mostly Thursday and Friday. Oh, okay. I was pretty much with Alice all day yesterday. So I didn't watch much. Look at you.

You, dad of the year. Oh, no, we had a good time. We watched the Three Musketeers, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy yesterday. Oh, cute. That was fun at the playground for like roughly 12 hours. No. But yeah, during the day, Thursday and Friday, I watched a lot of stuff. Saturday I saw you.

We also saw a movie together. We did. We saw K-pop demon hunters at Vidyits with our families. That movie plays. It was really great in the movie theater. We'll talk about that maybe a little bit later on on this show. But let's talk about people we meet on vacation. Okay.

The new film is on Netflix, a Netflix original. Yeah. It's directed by Brett Haley, who's made a handful of Y-A-ish dramas in the last few years. Right. And an important data point to discuss this film. This is based on. the title of a novel of the same name by Emily Henry, who's not a writer I was familiar with,

though it sounds like you are. Yes, a phenomenon. Not quite in the Colleen Hoover level of him, but like sells books. I believe that her most popular book is called Beatrice read. Smart. Yes. And they're all another one.

The book that I have read is book lovers, people we meet on vacation. There is something about the titling and packaging of the Emily Henry books that is very savvy and has led to major sales. Okay. So I guess you could say this is a very anticipated movie. It stars Emily Bader, who I'd not seen before. Yeah. Tom Blythe, who we did see in the previous Hunger Games film.

We did. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. He played Commander Snow. Oh, right. Young Snow. Yeah, young Donald Sutherland in that film. It also starts Sarah Catherine Hook, Jamila Jamil, Molly Shannon, Alan Ruck. It is not what it sounds like. And I know that you were wrong-footed by this movie. It features two young people, Poppy and Alex, Poppy wants to explore the world.

Alex prefers to stay at home with a good book, but somehow they are the best of friends. The way in which they are the best of friends is interesting. They live far apart. But for a decade, they make this deal that they'll spend one week of vacation together over this period of time. So the film kind of bounces back and forth

from the present day, which is the lead up to a wedding of a person in their lives. and then bounces back to these various vacations that they have taken or not taken together over time. What did you think of people we meet on vacation? Well, you mentioned my expectations and how I was wrong-footed by this.

And I will say that people we meet on vacation is sort of my Dune Part 1, which for those of you not following along, Sean did not know that the film Dune was going to be split up until the movie ended. There was like five minutes left And I was like, oh, no. And, like, so you either missed the part one that was shown on the title card and or they added it after you saw it.

And so I really thought this was going to be about a movie about people meeting on vacation and then going on vacation together. Yes. And, you know, they can make it work on vacation, but not in real life. But were you looking for, like, polyamory here? Like, what was it that you wanted out of this situation? Well, I wanted a good rom-com for one. and with the stakes and structure that makes sense to me. I wanted travel.

I wanted outside locations. I wanted a production budget higher and closer to what the word vacation means to me on film. And this is more, as you said, in the YA film budget and filming room. I feel like it gets like 40% there. We need to go outside. We need movies to go outside. There's a big... That's the only...

We're getting bogged down. Let's stay on the surface to start. And I... So I was taken aback and disappointed by the premise or what the movie turned out to be about. Because you hate love. And then I was taken out of the film by a very... Not even direct homage, but failed...

recreation of a when Harry met Sally scene. Yeah. And so the film just never lived up to what I expected to be. It was always lesser than not as well written, not as, you know, well filmed, not as well-budgeted. I liked the performances. Emily Bader was a revelation to me. Listen, Paula Abdul forever, and I would like to talk about that. Enjoyed that, yeah.

But yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about this because I think my reaction is kind of unfair. No, you're the category expert. Well, yeah, well, but so this is the thing is that we need to be clear about what category this is. And this is not like a classic romantic comedy. This is an adaptation of a bestselling book. This is closer to Nicholas Sparks and all the YAA movies than it is to Nora Ephron and Richard Curtis and Nancy Myers and all the people that I esteem. And, you know, because it has that scene where they're,

they actually, the two main characters meet their set up to drive home from college together, which is insane. I mean, that is like quite literally what happens in when Harry Metz Alley. It is the same thing. So you're thinking about it and like grown up rom-com territory. But this is a movie adaptation of a beloved book. It is doing fan service. It is trying to stick very carefully to the source material.

It's more Nicholas Parks. That's okay. Yeah. I mean, you know, that has sometimes worked and that has sometimes not worked. I think when we talk about it, we need to know that that is, like, we need to understand what we're talking about. And that's the goal. Yeah. So I kind of wanted to forgive this.

This is going to be strained. Yeah. In comic book storytelling, a lot of times what happens is you get a writer or illustrator who comes in to do a new run on a comic. And what they want to do is they want to pay homage to the past, but they want to reinvent the characters. They want it to feel familiar but different, right? Brian Michael Bendis, who's probably the single writer most responsible for what the comic book movies are like now. Like most of what the MCU and Spider-Man are doing is kind of pulling from like he created Miles Morales, for example. Like he is one of the godfathers of 21st century comic book storytelling.

He would give you something that you know and then he would shift it a little bit. And I was, when this movie first started, I was like, oh, this is going to use when Harry Met Sally as a launch pad to give us a new version. of this kind of a story. Now, there's a danger there, obviously, because it raises your expectations. You're like, if you're going to recreate this or remind me of this, you've got to be, what you're doing has to be really good.

Yeah, it really has to be good. And this just isn't. Right. And the challenge to me is like, the movie's not funny at all. Like, not even really a little bit. And I think Emily Bader is very charming. But she reminds...

And very pretty. Beautiful. Yeah. She reminds me a lot of... And the movie does achieve that. where I'm watching, I'm just like, oh, that's, she's really pretty, you know? Yeah, yeah, totally. Which is an intentional part of this type of movie.

I was captivated by her. I had never seen her before. I, as soon as the movie was over, I immediately logged in a letterbox and was like season tickets for this person. I'm super interested in whatever they do because she also has, not she's not so beautiful, she has a real charisma. And she's trying really hard in this movie. She's kind of giving it her all. Tom Blythe, I thought was like a zero. Like just incredibly dull and not interesting and you don't really understand their connection.

but I think I don't know if the movie cares about being funny. You know, like it's not, so it's odd to set you up for something. Because Billy Crystal obviously is a joke machine when Harry Met Sally. He basically invents the show Seinfeld in that movie. The One Harry Met Sally thing is such a failure because it's such a bad idea because you can't live up to when Harry met Sally. But it's also not trying to be that kind of movie. It's not. It is trying to be an adaptation of this book, which is.

It's a Y-A into A. Yeah, and like, you know, I've read a different Emily Henry novel, but they are like pretty unspecific and they're not super writerly in the way that all of the romantic comedies that like we love or that I love and that I are discussed as kind of like the great examples of the genre are. The other thing about all of the really great romantic comedies is that they're original. Or if they are, if they're, they're iterative. They're iterating on a structure that is contrived in either previous, like, romantic comedies in film or their adaptations. You've got mail as a remake of the shop around the corner.

Or they're, like, inspired by Shakespeare and Jane Austen. You know, like, people who got structured down and some basic setups. The classics, yeah. But they're not tethered to remaking, like, every single specific detail of the source material. Like I read some article about like the big change that the movie version of people we meet on vacation makes from the book that Emily Henry feels really good about. And it's that the Tom Blythe's character's ex-girlfriend becomes a flight attendant instead of something else. And so they have a moment at like the airport. And I was just, it was so, it was such a boring, insignificant change.

but being presented as something so important to the original text and what does this teach us about what we are learning. That I was like, this is silly. So that's actually why I brought up the comic book comparison because when you have this kind of lore baked around source material, then people get kind of like they get more invested, but they also get finicky and it creates a kind of like a stand culture around things that is really complicated.

I don't know if this movie has gotten quite that far, but the reason we're talking about on the show three weeks after it was released on Netflix is it's really popular. Yeah. Like a lot of, I would venture to guess it is the most watched movie of 2026 so far. Probably. Fair to say, right? Just given, I mean, maybe you would say like Avatar Fire and Ash or something or Zootopia 2. But aside from that, I would, millions of people have probably watched this movie on Netflix right now. And it's not really much of anything ultimately. Like, it is not awful. It's very watchable. It isn't funny. It isn't really revelatory. I found the kind of. middle part to be the most interesting where they're trying to figure out like the nature of their relationship and so you bounce back to year four and then to year six and you're going on these various vacations with them but the present day drama where it was sort of like where the most

obvious they're getting back together set up in the history of movies and I know that that's what these movies are meant to deliver on so you want it satisfied but no the art of it is in creating the tension and the and the impediments to them being together like being believable And you are not supposed to sit there watching the screen being like, just fucking figure it out, guys, the whole time. You need to be invested in the, oh, they can't really, like, this is complicated. And are we going to resolve this? And I wanted to know how they figured it out, but I was impatient the whole time. Like, this is so obvious.

Just figure it out, guys. I also just felt like it wasn't dramatic enough to be, or melodramatic enough to be appropriate YA, but not funny enough to be rom-com. So then it's just stuck in this middle of like, this. This is just a movie about like pretty 29-year-olds. Yeah. You know, we can do better. And it's the, the world that it builds is not particularly believable or, again, specific or. We haven't mentioned that she's a travel writer.

Right. She's a travel writer for a website. Yep. That gives her just unlimited budgets to travel the world and write about whatever. Did you ever consider travel writer as a vocation? Well, by the time I got there, it was dead. This is the thing. So it doesn't exist now.

But did you consider it? Well, no, I don't think so. Do you like to travel? I do. Like, now I'm available to be a hotel influencer for anyone who wants to, you know. Great. But again, that's what it looks like. There's no one.

And Jamila Jamila is her boss. And then so she funds all of the vacations. I don't know what he does. Nothing interesting. He owns a home in Ohio. Yeah, a small town home. He's rebuilding that home, renovating that home. And then they.

He's tall? They go, yeah. It's professionally tall. They go places, but they don't really. The only place they actually go is New Orleans. And they are on Bourbon Street. That's like your one exterior shot. I feel you're part of the movie.

And everything else is in sets meant to recreate Airbnbs or hotel rooms. And they're not even done particularly well. Yeah. In my opinion. The casting below the line leaves something to be desired, in my opinion. when Lucian Lavis count, who shows up as one of her paramours, he is famously from Emily and Paris. I don't know if you know about that. I'm up to date on Emily and Paris.

Haven't seen it. But so it feels like some real, and he's a very, very attractive individual. And it's not like a big part. But when it's just, you know, like Netflix intercasting, I was like, oh, this guy was available for two scenes standing outside an Airbnb that sort of looks like it's in Tuscanee. Did you happen to recognize who Tom Blythe's girlfriend, fiancé, was? I didn't, but then I googled it afterwards, was like, oh, and it has since forgotten. The actress's name is Sarah Catherine Hook, and she was the young woman on the most recent season of the White Lotus who was getting interested in joining the Buddhist Temple. Oh, sure.

But she had blonde hair in this movie, so you might not have recognized her. She's from the wealthy North Carolina family. Okay. Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, look, every generation gets their milk-toast romantic drama for young people, right? And you mentioned Nicholas Sparks. He's come up a lot because of Colleen Hoover. We're in a real era of this, which is between the Colleen Hoover and the Emily Henry's and just like the romance, not like romance genre, heated rivalry being another of these books that are very, very popular, kind of in like non-traditional publishing formats.

And then being adapted. What do you mean when you say that? Well, I think, like, heated rivalry started as fanfic, I believe, or is somehow related to fanfic. Colleen Hoover was publishing independently before she, you know, all of these people. I think Emily Henry is the most traditional model that I know of. And this goes back to Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray and all those books that sort of like were born of the internet writing, you know, that kind of took on a life of their own. So, you know, and this is a thing that has. happens where there are best-selling novelists who aren't necessarily being reviewed in the

literary pages of the New York Times, but sell a lot of books, and then they make movie versions of them that are not, you know, as high budget as other films and don't star A-list actors always. Or, you know, the Nicholas Sparks, you have some notebooks and you have some, you know, one wish or whatever. What was the, what was the Wikipedia entry that we read? live on a podcast. I don't remember. I don't remember.

Maybe we'll watch that. No, no, no, I've seen dear. Well, maybe it was Dear John. That's Amanda Seifred. We have to do a Sparks episode. Yeah. We have to. But this is a thing that's happening.

Might be the least listen to episode we ever do. But I have to do it. That's fine. But I do think that people we meet on vacation is part of that genre. It's like the book to movie adaptation as opposed to like a renaissance of romantic comedies. Yeah.

This genre of film will first. ever be known now as Sparks Notes. No, good. There you go. We'll stick to that. So the one thing I do want to mention, though, is that I do think that this is a streaming movie, and I don't mean that pejoratively. I think that this actually makes sense to be a streaming movie because of its budget number,

because of the star power that it has, which is not very high, but could be high. It is a springboard for somebody like Emily Bader where you can be like, oh, I remember her from blank. Now, the thing she's going to do next, which I lean, my wife, and, immediately clocked is she's playing Mia Ham, the soccer player in the 99ers, which is a now forthcoming Netflix movie that I think is coming out next year, maybe later this year. Mia Hamm to my wife is Michael Jordan times 10. Yeah.

She is the, you know, she's not only widely considered, you know, maybe not as much now, but certainly when we were in our teens and 20s, the greatest female soccer player of all time. But there's a, there's a very, there's an amazing photo. Right, a very famous photo of her ripping off her shirt. No, that's Brandy Chastain. Oh, that is? Different player. Which one is the Miham?

Meham. Which is where she's like sliding then with the knee, that's not her? That's all, I believe that's Brandy Chastain. Mia Ham photo. Meeham is sort of like, she got started a little bit before that generation of players. But no, the photo I was referring to is of my wife and Mianham when Eileen was like 10 years old and she met Mianham on the set of a commercial because she was like. That's the one that I'm thinking of where she's on her name. Oh, yes, you're right.

You're right. You're right. You're right. That is right. Yeah. Yes, but isn't Brandy Chastain also sliding on her knees in the photo where she rips her shirt off? Brandy Chastain. Let's see.

Something soccer players tend to do pretty often. It is true. You're right. It is Brandy Chastain. They both have that pose. Anyhow, Emily Bader is playing Mia Hamm, which is... That's great. You know, when they made the movie air, they didn't show us the guy playing Michael Jordan.

So you really got to live up. Now, Emily Bader does look like Miaham. She looks a lot like Miaham, honestly. You know who Miaham married? I don't. No more Garcia Parra? You know, does that name ring about it? Yes, sure.

Baseball player? Red Sox? Yeah, Red Sox. Yeah, I remember that era. When we were talking about this, I lean was like, I need to know what sports their children play. They should be the greatest athletes of all time. I didn't really get an answer on that. Okay.

You know, this movie's not great. It's really not. I really think if we spent a little more money. Like, here's the thing is that I know that this is a streaming movie and... There's more to it than that. Well, but there's... there is more to it than that and you need a good script obviously

and an original idea and as long as you're tied down in fan service in this way to fan service that something that is successful because it's broad

that you know that's going to be difficult to reverse engineer it but I do I really do think we just need to spend more money I think that we're missing like a major part

of what makes these movies like the clothes the locations the like the the sense place. You know, if you can watch, if you can get vacation content and people being, you know, beautiful content, like for free on Instagram that looks better than this, then at some point it just doesn't really compete. Do you think that they're at risk of killing the Golden Goose with these

movies now? Because we have reminders of him coming next month. Yeah. Then Verity over the summer. They're going to keep coming out these adaptations. You know, because this is a rare pathway to getting women to go to the movie theater and, you know, to engage with these streaming services. Like, this could burn out pretty quick. I have high hopes for Verity. Okay. Because that is a slightly more elevated version, all of it, you know, Ann Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, our beloved, Michael Showalter directing it.

So it's people try, elevated trash. And elevated trash can can be exciting. Agree. And that's also movie theater. There are a lot of movies like this that get put on streaming services all the time that you and I just don't cover. It's true. So I don't think we're at risk of, you know, over indexing yet. The original, wait, let's talk about Paul Abdul really quickly.

Yeah. So is it forever your girl? Is that the song? So, you know, when you and I were young, Paul Abdul was a massive pop star. I think for the generation right below us or the half generation below us, she obviously was one of the first judges on American Idol and kind of reestablished. herself as a famous person. You know, Emily Bader is she even 30 years old? Like, I don't know how old is she, and how old is her character supposed to be?

When does the film take place? I'm trying to figure out why she's so into Paul Abdul. I mean, some classics live forever, you know? I guess that's true, but to have a whole choreograph dance routine? Jack Sanders, where are you on Paul Abdul? I know who she is and couldn't tell you a single song she wrote. Okay. I mean, that is, you have something to look forward to is how I'll put it.

So Emily Bader was born in 1996 and forever your girl was released in 1988. So, you know, it's like, I don't, listen, I don't want to put Paula Abdul and Madonna in the same sentence. You better not. And I am not putting them in the same sentence. I have respect for them individually. But Madonna is an example of someone whose pop stardom and influence and music. can be handed down across generations. So a good song is forever, is all I'm saying.

Would you say? Also, Paula Abdul made a video with an animated cat. So listen, it was Gene Kelly and then it was Paula Abdul. First of all, his name is MC Scat Cat. Listen, you don't lecture me about Paula Abdul. I'm just giving you information. I'm not lecturing you. The song is called opposites attract.

If you don't think that I had a modern dance, I guess this was probably more a jazz. I had a, as we know, I studied dance. And I had one teacher who really kept us up to date on the classics. So like a lot of work to Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul. Sure. And opposites attract formative. I don't remember the choreography, but that would be my song in the rom-com. So interesting you mentioned that. First of all, I have a sister, my sister Kara, who is literally your age and was in all the same dance classes as you, not literally, but. figuratively, was obsessed with Paula Abdul. The Paula Abdul song

that really jumps into my mind that I recall quite vividly as a kid is called Rush Rush. Do you remember Rush Rush? No. Okay, Rush Rush was like kind of her ballad. And it had a very memorable video that I believe was inspired by Rebel Without a Cause and starred

none other than Keanu Reeves. And listen. Here's the thing about Paula She can't sing. She can't sing at all. It's okay. She was one of the biggest pop stars in America for like three and a half years. She was an amazing dancer.

She was a Lakers cheerleader. I think that's how she got her start. She's Britney's before Brittany, but it also. She kind of lacked Britney's like charisma dynamism. You know, there's, you know. But she's doing okay now. So there's also, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

But her fame was kind of fascinating because it was right when, you know, we were like six, seven, eight, nine years old. And so she was on MTV constantly. But there was this like tacit understanding, even then to 10-year-old me that I was like this isn't good but it's working. You know, it's like you're kind of developing critical faculties.

It was pop-dom. Yeah. Rearing its ugly head in 1991. Okay, enough Paul Abdul. Speaking of pop stars. It's been going very hard in my house. The Paula? Yeah, Paul Abdul, Duran Duran. You love music. The K-pop Demon Hunter's soundtrack

and BZE's Carmen. So we really you know. Interesting. Off to use in films as well. But the intersection of music and film, we'll talk about momentarily with the moment. Yeah.

Now, first of all, the impetus for this whole episode was like, January is good? Like really good, maybe even? I think just Bone Temple and Send Help, you could say, this has been a very, very good January. If those two movies are not in my top 25 of the year,

I'll be surprised. Then you've got like basically streaming stuff that is either good. I thought the, we both thought the rip was pretty good. Yeah. I didn't think people we met on vacation was very good per se, But a lot of people are engaging with it.

Notable. We had this iron lung moment that just happened. And we had Sundance and now we have the moment. So the moment is only in limited release. It's only in four theaters in America. So if you do not want to hear about the new Charlie X, X, X, X, X movie, just fast forward, like 15 minutes. You can get into my conversation with Jack Fisk.

It'll be good. We did see the moment. And I'll set it up before we get into our feelings about it. So this is directed by Aidan Samiri. It's written by Zemirian Bertie Brandes, but it's based on an idea by Charlie XX. It's a mockumentary. It is a fake documentary about a very specific few weeks

in Charlie XX's life as Brat is taking off and she is preparing to mount her world tour supporting the album. And it stars Charlie, Rosanna Arquette, Cape Relant, Jamie Demetru, Haley Benton Gates, Alexander Scarsguard. What did you think of the moment? Yeah, I absolutely loved this. This is also perhaps the most Amanda movie ever made when you get down, when it is Charlie XEX. It's about celebrity.

And it's very smart, very funny, very knowing, uses Alexander Scarsguard perfectly. Is a two-hour sub-tweet of Taylor Swift and ends, spoiler alert with a, I'll just say with a tribute to cruel intentions that I didn't see coming. I felt seen. I felt supported. I felt understood. And it, I just, it's very cool. I like that this is what Charlie decided to do with the entire experience. There is, you know, it's based on, I think, an idea and even like a document that she was keeping during, during Brat Summer, which I, you know, watched from afar because I was far too pregnant to participate.

But the only thing that is not so Amanda about this movie is that just everyone's on. cocaine. Right, exactly. You don't, I guess you do see some of it. Yeah, you do. But yeah, you do see it. Yes. I actually genuinely appreciated that the movie does not skirt the fact that everybody's just doing coke all the time. And they do are, like, at one point they're talking about the tour and whether it's like family friendly and everyone's like, she's literally singing about cocaine.

Yeah. But, you know, if people we meet on vacation is very broad and on specific, this is like deeply like written, observed, all the details are so funny. It is, like, it feels very of the person and the person commenting on this very weird experience in like a creative, knowing way. I really dug it. Yeah, so I'm kind of fascinated by this. We had joked last year quite a bit or even the year before that as Brad was really taking off that we were like, we also represent Charlie. Like we were there in 2012 when she was first starting out. You know, she is millennial.

She's not Gen Z. Yeah. But I do think that this movie requires some. I just remember the line of being like, yeah, it was really, this song was very famous in a movie about kids who get cancer. That is true. She did fault in our stars. She did. Was that boom clap?

Yeah, boom clap. Now soundtracks, say the fast food Chinese that's in airports, boom clap, fire chicken. Express? Yeah, Pan Express commercial. Yeah. Nice. Good for her. Good for Charlie.

Pay and Express. I'll eat it. I think that it's very helpful and borderline necessary to have an awareness of not just Charlie XX's music and her character, but also to understand the kind of world that she operates in for this movie to really work for you. And like it opened in four theaters and it did incredible gangbusters per screen average because the super fans threw themselves at this movie and they probably loved it. I found it very amusing. I think it's like way more accomplished than I was expecting. I thought it was going to be like a weird,

messy, like kind of junkie pop star movie. And it's not that. It's way closer in kind of like style to the Steve Coogan-Robride movie, The Trip or like in the loop. I know that Charlie has been saying like Spinal Tap is really kind of like the bedrock of this movie, but I didn't really feel Spinal Tap.

Spinal Tap is like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. This movie is like kind of like dead air satire. You know? Like it's just kind of like, Almost like curbier enthusiasm at times. There is a lot of like the like Jim from the office reaction shots of everyone just and most of them by Cape Relant. Yes, yes. A lot of people like turning to camera and being like, can you fucking believe this?

But the reason I say that you need to know the world is it took me a while for it to dawn on me like what a savage takedown of Taylor Swift this movie really is because I don't know as much about her. And like you turned to me at one point and you were like, this is the song that's about Taylor Swift. Yes. And the more you start to watch the movie And the movie washes over you, which is effectively a portrait of a person who has been at this thing that they're doing for a very long time and has been successful enough,

but is reaching a kind of a new stage of critical pop star success where you go from here with a competent, successful career, to here where you can sell out a stadium. And that is obviously a shocking and overwhelming moment for any artist's life when they get this extraordinary amount of fame and wealth. and then what do you do with it?

And like that is when compromise really comes in hard where they start saying like you need to have your own credit card. You need to be making, you know, songs that are specifically for different sects of the world. You need to be, you know, like you need to turn your tour into an all ages affair and go away from what isn't in the spirit of what your music is about. And the whole way through, I was like, this is very much about like the path that Taylor Swift took versus the path that Charlie XXX is not likely to take just given. what she's interested in, what kind of art she makes.

And that's a very funny choice. Yeah. It's so literalized. You sent me an article about the director of the Erez tour. Sam Wrench. Once you have seen a picture of this person, you understand that Alexander Scars Guard character, who's so funny and is the tour director who's brought in with that,

Or, no, he's documenting the film. Yes. He's the concert film director. Yes. And Bailey Ben Gates plays the tour director, the creative director of the tour. Right. But so the film director has different ideas about what the film and what the tour should be and who they're trying to reach and, you know, has relationships with the labels and with other people. And he's so dumb and creepy and funny.

And even, you know, the process of giving notes, the process of communication, the wardrobe. Yes. Is genuinely, it's very, very mean, very funny. And clearly, like, a one-to-one, I mean, it's not. We don't know what his personality is. And we don't know what his directing style is. But they are, just the visuals are meant to make you think of this other person. Yeah.

And then it's clearly that the director is, you know, amalgamating, like every single corporate, you know, feedback. meeting that you've ever been in your entire life. He's weaponizing like woke verbiage in an effort to seem like an ally in conversations with female artists when in fact he just wants to bulldoze them and make the most commercially viable thing possible. The Sam Wrench details are interesting because like if you look at his CV he's just made a lot of concert films with other artists and they all have this kind of similarly antiseptic, safe, you know, impasseh, like faux empowering vision of the artist that is at the center of the stories. And that's the kind of language too.

that the Scars Guard character is using or he's like, we need to make you like this. And she's kind of naturally resistant to it because being kind of as punk as you can be while still a pop star, which is part of Charlie's aesthetic, right? She's like very sex positive, sex forward, drug positive, drug forward. You know, I smoke cigarettes and I'm a dirtbag

and I go to clubs and I party. Like that's my whole thing. And that is inherently not for seven-year-old girls. Or it is appealing to seven-year-old girls and they want to get interested in it, but it's like illicit. It's the R-rated movie of pop stardom. And that is obviously in conflict with big, massive corporations wanting to partner with you to make your thing even bigger.

And it is, to me, it's just like a really fertile territory for mocking the system that we have for what creative people get involved in. There's also a fair amount of self-hatred in it, which I thought was very interesting. I mean, she does portray the effect that it has on personal and, like, professional, personal relationships. the Haley Ben Gates character that you mentioned, who is the creative manager and slowly they have a partnership and you watch the Charlie character kind of turn on that. There's a great cameo from Mel Ottenberg, the interview editor-in-chief as her tour stylist.

And Mel Ottenberg has famously been the tour stylist for Rihanna, among other people. He's awesome and he's great in this movie, but his character has to keep delaying his honeymoon to work with Charlie. Yeah, and that character is both expecting him, the Charlie character was expecting him to do it. And also feels a little guilty, but like not guilty enough to say, don't do this. So it's very knowing not just about the system around the pop culture, like the pop stardom, but also how success and fame and growth or, you know, overnight explosions affect what the person itself is doing.

and the relationship between the celebrity, like the forward-facing person and the person who's been working for however long and has relationships and a life and just wants to get a facial, but is too ugly inside. That's just incredibly funny. There's a facialist who is left facialist to the stars

and just all of the, you know, Maha nonsense that surrounds all of these people, is like spouted right at Charlie and then she's like not good enough for it. I laughed a lot. It's really funny. There's also a very funny moment where she's in a car with a driver who's taking her to an event and he asks her what she does and she says, oh, I'm a pop singer and he asks her to describe her music and she kind of like awkwardly describes what she thinks she does. She's just like put to words what her style and genre is and then he starts looking her up and talking about other pop music that he likes and it's this great little snapshot of even if you feel like you're the biggest

in the universe and you're having a brat moment. Nobody knows who you are. You know what I mean? Like even the highest level of celebrity is still micro. Movies like pretty well observed when it comes to that stuff. I've seen some pretty mixed reviews of this movie and I'm surprised. Like relative to what something like this can accomplish, it's a pretty high-end version of it, I thought.

And pretty clever. And they're also to the point about people we meet on vacation not being very funny, like this movie is pretty funny. And it helps more if you do know who Mel Ottenberg is. That's true. And if you're like, if you think all of the Rachel Senate stuff is, is funny, like, the cameos, Alexander Scarsgaard being like the most famous person, arguably in this is still fairly niche. Yes, it is. And, yeah, I guess there is a larger question of, is most of America like the driver who just has no idea who Charlie XX is?

You know, it's possible. Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's funny. We're talking immediately after the Grammys last night. and you know was Charlie like the 28th most famous person there

you know she's not she's or the or the 17th like I don't really know what the hierarchy of power is but part of the you know the movie isn't just about Taylor Swift too I think it's I think it's also a little bit about just like the pop girlie's moment of the last 10 years too and her as this kind of like rejoinder like she's in but she's not in with that crew of people

and she represents like a contrast to that style of fame and success anyway pretty fun movie I loved it. Really good movie about celebrity. And, like, again, I think that it is, it's not, it is a mockumentary, obviously, but it is also autobiographical. And when you think about all the other movies about celebrity, they are third person. You know, like they are observing whether it's like Sunset Boulevard or King of Comedy or.

So I think it's cool. Yeah, it's subjective. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and insightful in a way that I haven't really seen before. Also, Kylie Jenner. Who knew? legitimately good.

Like actually really funny. And I was trying to explain to people like the movie kind of hinges on her performance. Yeah, a bit. Like pretty, I mean, it's a turning point of the film. Yeah. And I'm like, if she's bad, it's not. If she's bad, then I guess it like pivots in a different way. Yeah.

But no, she was genuinely very good. Any other closing thoughts? Uh, I, if you like Charlie X, X, X, X, you should go see this. Is Dump you already dead? Mm, I don't know. because we are still trying to figure out what to do on Thursday that has nothing to do with the release category. What's up with February? That's my new question for you.

So do we think people are just clearing out for the Super Bowl this weekend? What sense does that make? It doesn't. It's like most people are going to go see movies Thursday, Friday, Saturday. So they're just not going to release new movies on February 6th? Is it like a marketing thing? Is it a we want our attention? We want all of the movie attention to be like on the trailers that we're spending a lot of money to launch.

I winged about this a lot last year. I was like, why are there all these open weekends? If you put more movies in theaters, people will go to the movies. The Iron Lung thing to me, I'm like, just put the fucking movie in the movie theater and people will go see it. I don't know. It's a very odd one. You know, the 13th is obviously a robust weekend because we have Weathering Heights. We have Crime 101.

There's one other big release that I think I've seen that I can remember. Pillion. Pillion goat, Goat, the Steph Curry animated goat basketball movie. Like, there's a bunch of movies on the 13th. Could Goat not have been released on February 6th? Would that not have worked? Do you think so? I think Pillion is actually limited.

It is. And it starts so, you know, I guess some of it is just nobody wants to go wide. I guess so. What a month for Scars Guard. Listen, it's every month is a month for Scars Guard in my house. Dynamite S&L performance. Oh, I didn't see. He was on this weekend.

Oh, yes. I saw that he had his dad out there too, right? Oh, it was amazing. I got to watch that. Yeah. Okay, well, we'll keep our fingers crossed on the 2008 movie swap. That seems like our best outcome for Friday's episode. Let's now go to my conversation with Jack Fisk.

Really an honor to be joined by Jack Fisk. I'm here to talk to him about Marty Supreme and an incredible career and body of work. I wanted to start by asking you at this stage of your career in life, how do you decide to work on a film? Because I imagine you get called frequently. You know, I look for films that scare me a little bit. Like there's maybe too much to do or too grand

because it'll keep me awake and get me excited. And it seems like you put the same amount of energy into a film if it's little or more. But it's better if that more goes into sets rather than to figure out what to do with your time. Interesting. So when did Josh Safdi call you about this? Josh, he called me about three years before the film started. And he was enthusiastic about it. I was in Oklahoma working with Martin Scorsesey on the film.

And he goes, I'm going to make this film about a ping pong player. And I'd suddenly go, oh. You know, it didn't seem so challenging. But he talked about it and got me excited. And then I went up and looked who Josh Softie was. And then I saw Uncut Gems. And it was really his passion, enthusiasm. But he called me three years later and said,

OK, I got the money. I got Timothy Shalameh. Let's go. And he really reminded me of the directors I was working with in the 70s. You know, it's that enthusiasm, excitement, and complete control, because he was also a producer on the film. He'd written a script with Ronnie. So it wasn't material he was trying to adopt.

It was theft he knew from his inner core. Did he tell you what he wanted the world to look like? What does a call like that when you talk to a filmmaker? Are they telling you, here's what I see, or what can you bring to it? What's in the material discussion? Well, Josh was born in the 80s. I was born in the 40s. I lived in New York on the Lower East Side in the 60s when I was going to school there.

And so I had some ideas. had somebody is we started looking at pictures together from street photographers of the time. He found a beautiful documentary film of Orchard Street from 1954. Okay. And a combination of that and talking about it and wanting to make it very real. So my, it works out that I love to do documentaries. You know, it's like when I was doing The New World, I really wanted to make a documentary about Pocahontas. but sometimes you're not allowed to do that because she was nine years old, naked.

Right. The truth of it is not quite adaptable, yes. They won't let you do. There's a lot of stuff that's real. But Josh was open to everything. Okay. And Darius Conjee, our cinematographer, he approached it. And we really, Adam Willis, the decorator and I tried to recreate the 1950s, New York,

so that it was more like a documentary than a theatrical film. Since I've grown up in the business, a lot of times when I look at period films, I go, well, this looks like a period film. You know, everybody's got the right clothes at the right time, and it's perfectly designed, but real life is not that perfect. So in order to do a documentary, we looked sort of in between the lines on photographs and stuff

and found out really how grouty it was. I mean, I lived in New York in the 60s, and on the Lower East Side, and it was so dirty because they burned coal. So coal dust was coming down all the time on the buildings, on the ground. Everything had a layer of black on it. And the people that were just teeming, and there was, you know, there was not a lot of other excitement to do except be on the streets with your friends. So people playing stickball on the streets. They were, you know, they were shopping, they were bundled up. It's freezing cold.

And the block that I lived on was Ukrainian. So it was like all these seemingly Russian-type people, great restaurants, you know, for $1.25, you have a big plate of whatever they eat, beef and potatoes and borshed and stuff. And I couldn't even finish a $1.25 plate back then. Subway was $15. So you could go anywhere on Manhattan, $0.15. And you could transfer and go to Brooklyn and wherever.

And I remember at the time thinking, this is a bargain living in New York. So poor people could live in New York very successfully. And there was an excitement about it. It's changed now. In the 70s, they kind of started to clean it up. Now the buildings are washed. I don't think they heat with coal anymore. No.

And it's expensive. And it's expensive. And people are more refined. And the little shops that were, you can get stuff for bargains are now expensive. in the, you know, a handbag, $250 or something. You know, it's like crazy. And that was my shock when I first went to New York on this film, because I remembered it from the 60s.

And we went down to Orchard Street with the location. People had found a location there that I thought might work. We went down to look at it. And all along the Lower East Side was graffiti on all the buildings that didn't exist in the 50s. They put like garage doors that rolled down. so they could steal them up at night so nobody would steal anything. The signs had all been modernized. And at that time, because of COVID, they had built restaurants out onto the street.

And they still existed. So the streets were blocked with restaurants or additions like rooms about the size of a train car. So I said, oh, it was even more work than I thought. So I was really getting scared. And that got me more excited about the film. That's so interesting. I lived on Orchard Street in 2005. And at that exact moment, it was really being built up quite a bit.

I lived across the street from an empty lot. And by the time I returned to it a year after I'd moved away, there was a hotel there. And I feel like that neighborhood, even in the 21st century, has transformed so much. And it seems like, so how do you do specifically what you do when you encounter a restaurant on Orchard Street and you say, well, we need to make this look like a pet shop or like a shoe store in 1953? where do you start? How do you actually disassemble and rebuild that space? You know, it's all different, but you start analyzing period photographs in film, and you see what the core of it was. On Orchard Street, and the next blockup was the Tenement House Museum, and they have a tenement house there preserved from 1938, I believe. And it was so helpful seeing that because it was a step older than the one I lived in in the 60s.

but in the 50s they didn't have steel fire doors. They didn't have all these safety regulations and fluorescent lighting in the hallways and stuff that make them so different. The windows on all the buildings had been changed. They've been now their double-paned, you know, aluminum windows, and they were wood and, you know, hard to get up. But everything was, to me, was more interesting

because I love the human texture of the element. and it had gotten kind of cold. But we went to that museum. I took the whole art department there, and we spent a day, and it was so much fun. And we realized sort of the work that was ahead of us. We had to build the apartments because the buildings have been changed so much. The exteriors, and looking at them, I remember what the original buildings were all the same. I think the lots were 50 feet, and so it was 25 feet and 25 feet, you know, and then take out for the corridor in between the apartments.

And there would be like eight to 12 apartments in a building. On the first floor was usually a store. So I knew we, what I got this idea of building modular system because you can't rent a street and sort of take it over for more than a day. It would cost you a fortune. So we built a modular system of the front walk. It would take into the hallway into the mailboxes and stuff in the staircase. And then on the side there would be stores. We built the frames of the store.

So we had one story of a real building. And we were able to like, we did many of these, but we were able to walk them in and set them on the sidewalk. We didn't have to touch the building. Adam Willis, our decorator, decorated the windows, so they looked right for the period. We had old glass whenever we could. We got extras, you know, beautifully dressed by Miyako. and our scenic department and our graphics department recreated signs in Yiddish and English from the period. And we painted and aged those.

And we were able to use them to hide things that we couldn't take down or couldn't cover. And slowly, we started getting all these layers and elements that transformed that block. Now, people would say, well, why did you shoot down there? You could have shot on a street that wasn't as busy and stuff. But there's a certain essence in that street that I loved. It emanates from the ground up. The streets, the right width. The buildings are the right height.

And there's a history there that it would have been harder to replicate. I can make the buildings look right, but I can't make the spirit right. And it affected everybody on the film and it affected the people shooting there. Just knowing, hey, we're right in the area where the story took place. this is real and it looked like this you know so it was a it was an excitement next to the shoe store where we shot was a brand new hotel no one had even moved in yet but it was you know it certainly didn't look like the lower east side that i knew and that's when we developed that modular system because they wouldn't let us touch the building uh they would let us shoot there you know

they'd take it over for a day they would even though they weren't open they were losing a lot of They said. So we were able to build facades of the whole street overnight and dress them and shoot in the afternoon. And it gave Josh a lot of freedom. We'd look at location and I say, oh, we can make this blocker, right? He said, yeah, but I want to see down there too. So then we would hang signs from the balconies and stuff. And when he got to shoot, he shot it like a documentary.

You know, it was tight lens. He wasn't worried about showing off the set. and which is I love in a way. Sometimes when you make a film, the cinematographer, director I want to shoot every centimeter of that set. And you know, somehow you feel it that, okay, that's all they got. Right, right. But with Josh, he was shooting with long lenses and rushing through.

And you always knew there was more. If the camera bounced up a little bit, you would see more or down or backwards or forwards. So is that a conflicting feeling for you, though, because you've built. this entire world and you know you're moving through it so quickly and not seeing all of it? It is and it isn't. And afterthought, you know, at first you go, oh, they didn't see that sign. We spent two weeks building the sign for Norkans. It's not even in the film.

But, you know, the first time I saw the film, I felt that conflict. But then I started hearing people's responses and going, whoa, it was like I was dropped into the 1950s. And I realized that it was working. And ultimately, that's what you want to do, or at least I want to do, is make a documentary feel where you felt like you were in New York and you weren't in a replica of New York, which is completely different, looks different, and feels different. I see it in so many, well, I think designers are becoming more sophisticated

and more natural every year. But I remember when I was growing up, when I would see a period film, You know, the costumes were sort of overdone, and everybody was throw a car from that year. And it was just, it was not what I wanted to do. Well, one of the things that I was thinking about with regard to Marty is, in a lot of period films, it feels like the costumes and even the furniture in people's homes are fresh out of the box that they're unlived in. And you mentioned that, you know, in New York at that time, the coal, the sort of, the city was sort of covered in soot in a way. and that there was like a kind of dinginess to New York that you capture. And then you mentioned that you age things.

So like this might seem like a pedantic question, but how do you make something that you've just made look old when you're building a film that's set in the 1950s? It's kind of like a pair of Levi's that you buy today. It has holes in it. It's faded. They're faded. We do the same thing.

I mean, we might put fabric on the walls, but we stress it and tear it and rip it and paint it and rub it and, you know, drag it through the dirt and put it back on, like, people used to do with their Levi's, to make them look old before China started doing it for us. We age everything. And paint, we have a system, a technique called roping where they mix the paint with, I believe, plaster or something. It looks like it looks like you do one layer, and it looks like you've got ten layers of paint. And then you can chip it through and let the colors come back.

What I would do normally when I go to locations is I'll start investigating behind light switches and molding or anything I can sort of cabinet or take it away and see what's under it. And I find out the period of wallpaper, the colors that they used back then. These tenement houses a lot of times they would paint things bright color because it was so dingy. So that's what introduced like the lime green in Timothy's room. You know, it's just a chance to add some kind of light and joy to your, you know, environment where you're living in a building with 12 other people and are sharing a bathroom down the hall with everybody on that floor. It's fun.

You know, my wife's an actress, so I think about what you have to do as an actor to put yourself into a role. And I think as a designer, or at least the way my approach to have things more natural, is I try to get into the life of the people, whatever time. it is. I read a lot of journals, if I can find them, or stories that written by people at the time that have a sort of honest description. Look at paintings that were done at the time. And if it's new enough, if it's after 1860, I can look at photographs a lot of times. Now, it used to be people dressed up for photographs or brought all the furniture out of their house to have the photograph

taken so they could show all they had. But by the 50s, it was so natural. You know, people were being photographed unawares, you know, by street photographers. and cameras were ubiquitous there everywhere and and uh and you start investigating those like you're a detective so you know i know you mentioned that josh had had discovered this documentary but you're famed in your work for you know inspiration from a painter like hopper was there were there any artists who you looked at from this period of time for marty supreme or was it entirely this documentary approach no there were artists some of them unknown because they're unimportant. I got a

note from a fellow production designers that I was at the Met and saw a George Bellows photograph in the ring and I know you used that for inspiration. I said well I didn't but then the next week an article came out in the American

cinematographer and where Darius Conjia, a cinematographer said and I looked at the film of George Bellows. Oh interesting. The production insider is right. But I was telling you the truth because I don't, you know, there gets to a point in research. You know, whatever time they give you, if it could be two weeks or two months, depending on your lead time, you try and bombard yourself with images and you don't even know what they are.

I mean, I would just spend all day looking stuff. I'd pin stuff up that I liked. But then you have to leave it because you're not recreating photographs. if you're not recreating paintings, you're dealing with the story and what the director wants. So then you have to work out of your gut. And that's exciting when you make that transfer. And you make decisions, and sometimes you don't even know why you make them, but you make them. And then later they resonate.

You find out. And I mentioned you once before that I try to avoid designing stuff. I mean, Manuel Lebeski, my favorite cinematographer, I've ever worked with would say, if we do our job right, nobody else see it. And that's true. You know, that's the same way I like to work is that I don't want it to look like, oh, that's beautifully designed. You know, I want it to be like, whoa, 1952. Yes, we're in the place and the time. Yeah. So. Well, you know, you mentioned Darius and you and Darius have both had really seasoned careers.

Josh is a younger filmmaker, too. And I think this is your first time working with Darius as well. is it? Yes. What is that relationship like? Because filmmaking is such a practical art and there must be things that you're confronted with that you feel like can't be accomplished or that Darius is confronted with that Josh's imagination wants to happen. How do you, is it like a trilogy of ideas that are collaborating? How does it, how does that relationship work? Well, we would all visit locations together when we're shooting locations or look at models of sets. Josh, Josh is very exciting to. director. I mean, he's passionate. He also wrote, you know, with Ronnie, wrote the script. So that's my favorite type of person to work with. And we were like kids planning, and you don't

think about age. I mean, he says, well, you're the youngest person I know. He tells me, he says, I told somebody the other day you were eight. And I say, well, you got to add a zero to that. But Josh is also very young and excited. And I don't ever remember thinking of age. Yeah, it may be going up a six-floor walk-up or something. But it's that excitement. And Darius went to all his locations. I mean, I was so, Darius was afraid that maybe, you know, when Josh was saying, I want to see down three blocks.

And Darius is saying, I don't think we need to see that far. And we probably didn't. But I never want to say no to a director. And Darius wanted to protect me. He didn't want me to have to dress three blocks, you know, or they had him dress three blocks. But I would go, no, Darius, no problem. And I found out that there was one time we were shooting a scene with the Harlem Globe Trotters. And we built a basketball goal.

And I'd done it from research pictures of the Harlem Globe Trotters. And we had these, it was really like scaffolding with knuckles and stuff on it. And I noticed that Darius was always trying to avoid it in shots. And I said that Darius seems to have for him. Well, why are you avoiding that? You go, well, it's not right for the period. So I had to come out and show him pictures of a Harlem Golda Trider's booklet from the time. I said, look, it's right here.

You just relax. So I found Darius, who's one of the loveliest people I know, wanting to protect me all the time and wanting to make my job easier. I don't want my job easier. I want more challenges. And I never, only time I ever said no to Josh, was when he asked me to paint Marty's Room White or off white. Because he was reflecting to a Kubrick film.

And I said, I can't do that. It's not right for the period. You'd have to get somebody else there. Interesting. And I don't think I've ever said no to director before. But Josh jokes about it. I mean, I'm not telling tales out of school because we laugh about it. Otherwise, I'm going to give them whatever.

Whatever world we need to tell the story he wants to tell. And, you know, that's what we do. We build worlds. But we don't build them. We don't just make them up and build them. It has to do with the script. It has to do with the film the director wants to make. And it has to do with, you know, what we're given.

You know, sometimes it's budget. Sometimes it's location. Sometimes it's the amount of time. That's our biggest fight is time and budget, you know. And this was a big, it was a big scope film in that, We were shooting in New York City, which is not easy, you know, to get across town or uptown or to build stuff. You know, if you go to Home Depot there, they sell pieces, they sell wood, but it's four feet long. Well, I can't build a house of that.

Well, we can't fit anymore in Manhattan. So tell me a little bit about the bowling alley because I know this seemed like an unusual set piece for the movie. The bowling alley, well, we were looking around for bowling alley. The automatic pinsetters didn't take effect until 1954. Okay. So that's two years after our film. So any bowling alley at that time would have been had people back there setting. And it was kind of part of the experience.

We found a bowling alley and three hours from New York City that was the closest possible on the East Coast that, I mean, we checked out everything. A lot of them were moldy and, you know, rotten and we'd be repairing ceilings and all. This was still in use in a small town. I've forgotten the name of it now, but it was the guy that owned it, and inherited it from his parents. And the only people playing there were kids from the high school in this small town. It seemed like maybe a thousand people or less. And he was game for us to come in and kind of make it look like it used to.

He even had pictures, black and white pictures from the, you know, when his parents built it in 49 or when they opened it. So we went in and stripped out a lot of the stuff that had been added, and we went back and simple, you know, put things in that were right for the period. And we repainted it, so it was fresher paint. And Josh wanted ping pong tables in there because he needed them for the story, but there was never a space provided for ping pong tables. I said, well, I think we can put one right here.

And he goes, I need six. I said, you need six ping pong tables. So we end up extending the floor of the lobby toward the bowling alley, you know, about six feet so we could get six ping pong tables in there. And I remember a few weeks ago I was sitting in Josh. I only saw one ping pong table. No, no, they're six. I saw them. I don't remember seeing six in the shot either.

But then when I looked at it, you see little fits in corners. You see people doing stuff down the way. And it was more important that it was Josh's world. It was more important for the film. And like we put in the linoleum floor. And I remember the people from, you know, the producer, go, do you really need to put a linoleum floor? You know, it was like into outdoor carpeting or something.

And Josh said, yeah, you'll feel it. And he was right. And then I actually saw some of it when I watched the film the third time, you know. Yeah. When I stopped worrying about all my stuff, I'd start enjoying the film I could see. So it's subtle. It's some of subliminal. But it's important.

and it makes a difference. And what we did, because we were going three hours to the thing, we built the gas station, you know, close by, so we could shoot one day at the bowling alley, one day at the gas station, and go back to New York and be done with it. And that was fun building the gas station. And it was the guy who had the property liked it so much,

he wanted us to leave everything. Really? Yeah. That's a kind of monument to that moment. That seldom happens. He was in the film business at one time. I think he may have worked for Netflix or somebody, but I don't know. But he, yeah, he enjoyed the whole process.

And I had such a great team of scenic artists, the painters that aged everything. I mean, we had the best graphics artists, the best painters. The painters refer to themselves as legends. But they lived up to it, you know, and they worked hard. and Alex Kortalski was our head scenic and he's just lovable. You know, when I first started working on the film, I told the supervising art, I said,

okay, I want to, you know, I want to meet Alex, you know, and so he said to Alex, well, bring your portfolio. Now, Alex is a famous, he works with Nathan Crawley and all the, everybody in New York. He was so insulted. and Doug who'd see the supervisor and arched writer

said well he was really insulted I said I want to meet him anyway because I want to look into his eyes I don't care about the portfolio and he came and we met at a table about the size of this one and he says would you like to see my portfolio I said I don't need to see your portfolio

I just wanted to see you and he was a little suspicious you know and and And then slowly during the conversation, he would be like, well, look at this. What we did, you know, I said, I don't need to see that. And, and. Well, what were you checking for?

Like, what did you, just, you wanted to see if you could connect with him? Yeah, you know in that book, Blink, where he talks about, like, in a tenth of a second, you'll size somebody up. And you know what they're like. I knew he had done all these great films. So I didn't really need to see a portfolio. I didn't even want to see a portfolio. I wanted to meet him. But when I met him, he's an old Russian, you know, and he's just, you know,

he was confident. I knew he was talented. And I remember at the end of the, at the end of the meeting, I stood up and I gave him a big bear hug. And he was like, whoa, I never had a productive designer to give me a bear hug at a job audition. And we hired him instantly, you know, and I never regret it.

We became best friends. I mean, the first time I saw Marty, I said, come with me to see it. And, you know, and he's really become a dear friend. But I knew it, you know, within a blink of the eye. Yeah. So when you walked into our office today, you were looking around and curious about the structure and what it looked like. And when I met you, you'd been kind of examining this space.

And it seems like you have an unbelievable sensitivity to environments. Like personally, I walk into a building and I don't think about it. I don't look at the lights. I don't look at. I just, I'm kind of moving about my day. But, you know, in real life, Jack Fisk was in here kind of examining this space that we come to every day. Like, where does that come from for you as a person? I come, I think, well, I've always been interested in architecture.

I've always been interested in spaces. I used to, when I was 11 years old, inspired by our gang comedies, little rascals, I used to build forts. So I think about spaces. When I was a kid, I'd move my room around every, you know, week or so. I'd change to put the bed here. You know, after a while you have to switch rooms because you've done everything you can. But I love spaces. And then I think I was, what if I get a film, you know, two months for now, it says, build a Spotify office.

I wonder what they look like. Yeah. And sometimes when they don't look like what you expect, it's even more exciting. Because you're, you know, I think when people see stuff that is not exactly what they think it's going to be. They say, oh, that must be real. You know, it's not what my mind put together. It must be real. That's like a confirmation of a reality.

I learned a lot from Terrence Malick. And, you know, he loved putting his films back in time a little bit because you suspend that scrutiny you have a present day. And it also would like to make them universal. So it's not a specific country, time, place. And it works well for period films because you're doing a range. Like, if you go in somebody's backyard, you might see a swing set from when they were a kid that's now 14 years old, you know, or a grill that they bought two years ago that didn't work. But it looks new, but it's defunct.

You know, something that old Christmas tree that they threw out three months ago that they meant to take to the dump. They just hadn't done it yet. And, you know, our life is filled. I mean, we're all like hoarders. And that's different than the old days when no one had anything. You know, closets would hold two dresses and a pair of shoes, and people wear the same clothes, you know, five days a week or six days a week and then dress up on Sunday.

They take a bath on Saturday. I read books about the cleanliness of people. I read about clothing and what people had and how much they did themselves. I mean, you never see women darning socks anymore. You just call Amazon and get another three pair delivered. Our lives have changed so drastically. And I always think that in a film, it's my one chance to sort of write history. And I'm continually frustrated because you can't always do that.

You know, it was like I was talking about Pocahontas. We can't make her nine years old. You know, we can't do this. But it's like the last time. And I'm, you know, I don't mind sets being torn up when we're finished, but I hate it when I have to compromise in the visual. telling of the story because it's also a script is written. It's just words, telling a story, but it's words, but they don't, a whole other element is physically what's around those people.

And it helps the actors, it informs the actors about their character. And I just saw Hamlet. And I was so moved when that wonderful actress, Buckley, Evilly? Jesse Buckley, yeah. She had her hands in the garden and her fingernails were cracked. and dark and stuff. And, you know, it's when I see teeth and hands and actors in the dirt and their clothing is worn, it just, I'm transported. I love the magic of building a set

and then setting in it and trying to go back however many years it is and see if it feels right or what it feels like. I was working on a film, The Revenant, and I was building this fort, but they were having financial problems. And I was afraid they were going to shut it down. And I remember thinking, I talked to the movie God. And I said, I just want to see it finished.

And so we worked like crazy to get finished before the film shut down. The film never shut down. Alejandro was a genius and passionate artist and was able to get the money we needed. but I'm building these things so that I can enjoy going back in time. It's like time travel for production designer. Well, it's funny, I was going to ask you specifically when you look back, one, you have this incredible body of work, and many of the filmmakers that you've worked with,

their best films are on films that you worked on, or among their best films. And they're all about America. And it does seem like maybe inadvertently you achieved your goal of kind of rebuilding America over, centuries in all of these films. I mean, this is, this is basically your first big New York film, right? Extended New York piece. You hadn't done something like this. And, you know, you've done Texas, you've done California, you've done Oklahoma. You know, you've moved through this whole

country rebuilding it over decades of time. Like, how does that feel? You know, America is something that I've always been curious about. I moved around a lot as a child. I started out in Illinois, then went to Michigan, then to Virginia, then to Pakistan, then back to Illinois, then back to Virginia, then Philadelphia, then L.A., and now I'm back in Virginia. But it's a country that, you know, I've driven across. It's a country I've lived in. It's the country I've read about,

and it's the country where I've been offered jobs. So the last thing is probably the main reason that most of my stuff is about America. I feel comfortable here. You know, I love it. I worry about it. And I remember the book, I read two books in, I can't remember the authors right now. One is lies my teacher told me.

Oh, I know. Well. And the other one is the America by Alejandro recommended it to me. And I read it. People's History of the United States? Yeah, people's history of the United States. Just a wonderful book. I read those books, and, you know, like Roderlielsen was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan in the White House.

And you start reading all these books about reality. And you think of what's happening in America today. It's like, seems so unusual and foreign, but we've actually had these struggles before. It's repeating. It's repeating. And people can take so much, but we've also had a civil war in this country, which is just horrendous. I live in Virginia, in amongst the battlegrounds. I mean, Robert Lee camped with his on our farm and, you know, stood on a hill where our farm manager lives, you know, looking at his troops in the valley, right opposite Miss Smith's General Store.

I mean, it's all just so close and familiar. I had a friend come over with his little metal detector and he was finding bullets and buttons and all this stuff. So we live in this history, and it was such a horrible thing, Americans fighting against Americans, brothers, against brothers. And it's, you know, it's been enough years, and there's been enough false history that it's like, it seemed like a fairy tale. But the reality is people were being killed and dying, you know,

in their homeland. You know, I just, I think we all have to keep, where and we need to know history. And that's one thing about history excites me because if you understand it, you're less likely to repeat it. But we forget it and we're on purpose

we're taught to forget stuff. And it's I think it's really frightening. But I see things moving to a stage. Right now when Iran, they're revolting because they have no money. And when America gets to the point where they have no money that they have children that need food,

They have, you know, children need health care. They have an elderly person needs, you know, care. And they can't get that. They don't have any option, you know. It's a revolt or die. And if enough people get in that position at the same time, you're going to have a revolution. And I've never thought about that.

But now I start to see people getting upset in mass. And now it's a much smaller scale. in Iran. But there's so much power in the world for all the different militaries. And people, their only power is mass, you know, that there's enough of them getting excited at the same time. And I find it, you know, we could be on the precipice of something horrendous that we have never imagined and can't conceive sitting in this nice room, drinking, you know,

coffee and talking. but it creates attention and it's going to be attention a lot of people and suddenly when you can't take care of your children somebody's got to give Yeah, all bets are off

You know, you're renowned for these long-term collaborations with your friend David Lynch, Terence Malick, but the last three films have been first time works with Martin Scorsese, Lila Nugabauer,

and now Josh And now you mentioned to me that you're working on something with Ang Lee. One, I'm curious about this desire to kind of forge new partnerships at this stage of your career. And also, I'd love to just hear a little bit about what you're working on now. Okay. You know, I met Terry Malick in 1972, or 71, 72, we started Badlands. And my wife was reminded me last night that he told her, he was telling her about me, that I'd come in to meet him on his film,

and I'd already done all this research, and he hired me instantly because he was starting his first feature. And Terry and I just became best friends. I mean, I was seeing an artist making a film. I wasn't seeing, you know, I'd been working with Roger Corman and Gene Corman, although, you know, there were some good filmmakers.

They weren't really artists like Terry is. Terry is a philosopher artist. He had written this. screenplay and now he was down so he knew the story from his inner core it meant something to him and i responded to that and that's when i decided that i wanted to do film forever i mean bad lands changed my life and i also meant he introduced me to cissy space who i married and we've been together for 55 years but uh he was a he was a great teacher i learned so much from working with terry and we're almost the same age.

So it's like it was crazy, but he's a genius. And he treats everybody like they're just as smart as he is. But nobody is. And Terry, my work with Terry gave an entree to people like Alejandro. You know, I met Chivo. Manuel Lubezzi came in at the time of the New World. And then we became good friends. And then he introduced me to Alejandro.

and I got a call from Paul Thomas Anderson, you know, out of the blue, but because of Terry, you know, he'd seen my work with Terry. And Paul also was, I instantly went with. We did a couple of films together, but. Two brilliant movies. Your work on those movies is amazing. I love those movies. I love Paul. And he's one of an exciting American filmmakers. You know, I work with Brian DePaul. on two films. But then there was a point in there where I wanted to direct. So I said, well, I got to stop taking production design jobs or no one would think I really want to drag. I didn't, it ends up that I didn't really want to direct, but my wife was encouraging me.

Can I just tell you, I just saw a violets are blue for the first time and thought it was beautiful. I've not seen it before. And it's such an interesting movie. And really unlike, movies are not like that anymore. It struck me, the tone and the style of that movie. totally non-judgmental about those characters. I think that's a very good film that people should check out. Yeah. Also, if you ever see a raggedy man. I've seen it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was my first film directing. But I decided after I've done a bit about, I did some films in television, I said, I really want to build worlds. I really want to be a production designer. I don't want to be a director because in directing, you have to deal with studios.

They'll say, well, we don't like that cast, you know. And my first thing. friend David Lynch, we went to high school together. We moved to California together. We were so close that we would kind of purposely take opposite jobs so we wouldn't, you know, didn't want to get too crazy. But he called me on Straight Story. I think Straight Story came first and said, his editor at the time had written the script and they were, you know, in love and she wanted to make it a family affair. So he cast Sissy and I came and did that. And we had so much fun. Made very little money, but he said, oh, we'll come and do this commercial in Paris. I made more money on the commercial in Paris in three days than I did

on the whole film, straight story. Great film, though. Yeah. And then he called me about Mulham Drive. And I was excited, you know, I'd be working with David. And it was being done as a TV show. but ABC saw it and I think David describes that the guy was brushing his teeth the morning watching on the television you know and didn't want it and said no we don't want it and it just broke it because you put

so much energy into a film and it means so much and he was doing this TV series so it was an ongoing thing we built the sets to be reconstructed for when the you know they started to see it and they just said no one guy no and that was it and

Canal Plus, the French, I've always loved David. David, do you have any scripts you want to do? We want to make a film with you. He said, well, I just finished my own drive, and it was so disappointing and stuff. And they said, well, what about making that into a film? So he took two weeks, maybe a month. He started writing, and he came up with an idea

how to take the footage from this TV series and make it into a feature, but we'd have to shoot another couple weeks. So those sets that we built to reconstruct, We reconstruct it on a different stage. Canal Plus bought it from ABC. At least that's my understanding. I don't get in that part of it.

And made a feature film. And it was such a great movie. And even today, it's always like voted like best film of the 2000s stuff. And I realized films don't have to make money to be great. You know, a lot of great films never made a nickel. And a lot of films that were blockbusters you never see after 10 years or five years. When you're working on one, though, Do you know that it's going to be great?

Do you have that? You've been on a lot of really great films that are really canonized. I mean, 10, 15 of the films that you've worked on are considered the greatest American films ever made. Do you know that when you're there? You know, I didn't know not to know it. You know, I like film because it was being recorded, knowing that you could see it later. I liked it that I didn't have to carry the sets around with me. We could just destroy him and then be free.

It's like when I first started as a sculptor painter, I was. You know, we changed apartments or houses, like lugging everything, and suddenly on film, there was a great freedom. Plus, you weren't in the studio all day by yourself. You were here with a group of people making a show. It was like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Let's put on a show. And that working with other people that were artisans was exciting. But lately, Martin has so many projects he's doing.

A lot of them are in New York in different places. I started working last year with Ang Lee. Now, I was always curious about Ang Lee, and he's made so many wonderful movies about people, and then he recently's gotten distracted with 3D high film rates and all that stuff. Technology, yeah. Yeah, and he came to me with a story. I think it's called Gold Mountain.

I don't remember the name of the book, but it's a wonderful book about a Chinese family that was put together in the New World. And I started studying about the Chinese and got so excited. I mean, they probably are responsible that we got to the, you know, Babel trains to go across country 15 years ahead of time because they worked so hard and did so much. And they were not appreciated for that effort later. They, you know, they were killed.

They were run out of town. You know, they spoke of, you know, horribly. And we're making a film about a family that the father grew up in the United States. He's Chinese, but he grew up and raised by Native Americans. The mother is straight over from China. And then they have two children that are Chinese that don't want to be Chinese. They want to be American. You know, so it's kind of a thing you see today in the world is people that are split within a family.

And I just, I love, I love studying about them. And also for the sets, I love showing how meager their life was, how little they had, and how they functioned. And it's got me really excited about the film. And it's not the kind of film that people want to put money into to make. So we've struggled. We started shooting, or we didn't start, we were building sets and we had to shut down. Now California has given some money to the film. And we're hoping to start up.

this spring. Which is so rare these days to get that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. California finally has started supporting the industry that put them on the map. Mm-hmm. You know, it's strange that, you know, we had the best filmmakers in the world here.

But suddenly they were having to move to Atlanta or Canada to make films. When I was in Canada shooting Days of Heaven, there was no film industry. I mean, they made a few documentaries, you know, like PBS-type films, but there was no prop shops. There was no crew. I brought six carpenters up from L.A. You know, to help me build the set. We brought set dressing up in the U-Haul truck. We had to tell the Canadian authorities that my friend was moving here.

And we put a 200-dial or bombed on the furniture saying we wouldn't sell it in Canada because he didn't want us to be selling antiques in Canada. and it was that kind of excitement of working on a film in a foreign land, you know, in the middle of nowhere, literally, in trying to get it done. And we only had four weeks of prep once we picked that location. So everything about it was impossible. And that's what excited me, I think, scared me and excited me. And we pulled it off. You know, I would have done it differently if I had had money.

But. But what you made. what you got. It could not be better. All we had was two by fours in plywood to build the house. I mean, everything was built out of plywood.

And, you know, we set up on telephone poles. It was, but we didn't have any choice. If Terry was going to make his film, we had to do it, and we had to do it in four weeks, because they were going to harvest the wheat in six weeks. And he needed to shoot the house with a wheat field in front of it.

He said, I need to do. two weeks before they cut the wheat. And then when he cut the wheat, we had them cut it in rows of 50-foot sections so we could do this fire, which I just love. It's the best fire ever seen in movies. And it looks really dangerous, but I don't think it was dangerous. We had it kind of figured out. And I remember going home to the hotel and Lethbridge every night smelling like diesel

fuel because we couldn't get the wheat straw, the wheat to burn. So we had to pump diesel fuel on it. You could never do that today. You'd be arrested and sent to another country. But we did a lot of things in those days. On the Korman films, we used to, if we needed black smoke, we just set a tire on fire. In Paul Thomas Anderson film, there will be blood.

We would big pans and put diesel fuel in it and light it on fire because it would burn black. But now they do it all with CGI and, you know, It's all changing. But I'm glad I got to get into the beginning of the... I hope you didn't get at the end. That's my concern is that we won't have that kind of physical production anymore because that is something that is really a part of your legacy

is having built worlds that people remember, that they don't forget, even if those sets are deconstructed. Yeah, it's kind of like vinyl records, I think. You know, I hope you're right. I'm so glad that I got in when I did. Because in the 1970s, after Easy Rider, the studios, didn't know what people wanted because they would have never made easy writer. It was done independently.

You know, everybody was like a shareholder in the film. They got their money later. And it just took the country, you know, suddenly. And that gave an entree to all the young filmmakers were suddenly getting a chance. And Roger Corrman and his brother Gene had a studio where they were making films for, you know, $70,000 and, you know, they were never expensive, but it gave a lot of people a chance. I mean, Ron Howard did his first film there. Yeah.

Grand Theft Auto, right? Yeah, yeah. He directed that. And, you know, everybody was given a chance. And I was fortunate because I wanted to be in the art department. Nobody else did. So I had some job security. Jack, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers,

what's the last great thing they've seen. Have you seen any movies recently that you've enjoyed? Oh, let me think. I, a lot of them are documentaries. That's, that's fine if there's a doc you like. You know, as a, I would like to say one film, I think it was called moonlighting. And it was about, you know, black actors in a world. And I loved it because I would never have been, I would never, there's no way I could be in that world.

Moonlight, you mean the film. Moonlight, yeah. Yeah. I think it won an academy one. It did, yes. And that film, I remember when I watched it, I was just so thankful that I was able to see this world that I would never see. And I always hoped that on films that, you know, that I'll be introduced to something that seems more real and that it's unattainable, you know, in my position in life to be, you know, the scene. Another film I like for his imagination was Anna Crenina.

Sarah Greenwood designed it. That's the Joe Wright film. Yeah, Joe Wright, who's genius. And those sets are extraordinary in that movie. And they had no money. And that's why they were like that. They had no money. And so they had to pack everything into one theater.

And they had trains and horse races. And my mind sort of exploded when I saw that. And I've become friends with Joe Wright. And Sarah Greenwood is just one of our great designers. There is an amazing exhibit of her work at the Academy. Academy music right now, including of that film. I hope to see it. Yeah.

Yeah, but I've seen that film a couple of times, and it's blew my mind. And Joe Wright is such a kind of... He grew up in a puppet theater in London, and, you know, I've had a couple of chances to work with him. It just hasn't worked out, you know, because of conflicts and stuff. But I think he's sort of a... He's one of our great filmmakers. It's not fully appreciated for his talents.

Yeah, I agree. I don't understand it. Yeah, I feel like he's one film away from... being recognized in that way. Yeah. That happens. Look at Paul Thomas Anderson has been working for recognition

that he's now getting for one battle for another, but his other films were all excellent and often better than the films they were in competition with if you believe in competition. I don't really. I wish that our award system was,

let's have five films that we really enjoyed this year. And award them all. You know, they would be different. But unless you're making it, the same film with the same budget, there's no way to judge better or worse. You know, it's, I kind of dream that the Academy Awards would have no television that you would show up at a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and toast, and then they would present somebody the prize.

It did used to be that way. And no, it did. And I just think it would be a great way to keep it more within the industry. There's too much money on the line now, Jack. That's the problem. I know. I mean, you can start an award show and suddenly pay yourself a salary.

It's very true. Yeah. Well, this was a great honor and thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you to Jack Fisk. Thank you to Jack Sanders for his production work on this episode later this week. You picked it, so we'll do it.

It's our first listeners' choice episode. We think it's going to be the 2008 movie swap. If it isn't, if it is Demon Slayer and Gabby's dollhouse, what are you going to do? I'll watch the films Will you watch all of the episodes of Demon Slayer that preceded that film? No, I won't.

I will come to it. You know, this is a film podcast. So I will watch the cinematic output. Quick question about the movie Candy Taste Test. Now, you suggested we put that on YouTube if it doesn't win. It's not going to win, I don't think. It could even be like episodic, you know? It could be short form.

Oh. That's what I was thinking, is that we would. try different things. I honestly thought that we should just start do a recurring bit, which is every time one of us goes to the movie theater, we buy the weirdest or grossest thing that's there and bring it to the other person. And if it has to age three days, so be it. I thought that that I could not love that more. And then it'll just keep going. Yeah, that sounds incredibly good. That does make me feel, and I know we're at the end of this episode. Yeah. But that does make me, I had a, I had sour airheads bites last night. Okay. At iron.

lung. Yeah. Never had him before. Okay. But I was like, I'm fucking, I'm winging it. And I felt like violently ill afterwards. Yeah. And not to cast aspersions on the fine folks who make airheads.

I've been eating them since I was six years old. Was it a variety pack of flavors? It was, but it was so dark and I couldn't see what I was popping my off. And I'd be like, is that like lime? Is that grape? I couldn't figure. Anyway, I'm bringing this up to say that I no longer have the iron constitution of a man of 26 who could just eat anything. and feel fine.

Yes. And I'll, like, wake up the next day and be like, what did I eat? I mean, I do think that that is a little bit specific to housing a whole thing of airhead chewables or whatever. But, but yes, that is part of the undertaking. Okay. Well, it's a great idea. Okay. I will see you later this week.

Hopefully not eating candy.