The Big Picture - ‘Michael’ Wants to Start Something It Can’t Finish. Plus: ‘Mother Mary’ With David Lowery!

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Sean and Amanda are joined by our music biopic correspondent, Yasi Salek, to unpack their complicated feelings on the highly anticipated musical biopic ‘Michael.’ Before diving into the movie, they quickly cover some movie news: most importantly, the ‘Miami Vice’ reboot getting a new title and a release date (1:51). Then, they break down all of the good, the bad, and the ugly with ‘Michael’ and highlight why the re-creation of Michael Jackson’s music feels deeply special but is ultimately inside of something hollow and uninteresting (10:31). Next, they discuss David Lowery’s new gothic fantasia musical, ‘Mother Mary,’ starring Anne Hathaway, which they praise for its beautiful filmmaking and nuanced and complicated portrayal of relationships, creativity, and fame (55:14). Finally, Lowery joins the show and explains why casting Hathaway and Michaela Coel was crucial to the movie’s success, how ‘The Green Knight’ helped him realize he wanted to work on something smaller in scale, and why making the movie felt like a supernatural experience (1:10:10). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: David Lowery and Yasi Salek Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Camera Operators: Sarah Reddy, Donald LoBianco, and Ryan Todd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about Michael and Mary. Today on the show, we are digging into two new music-related releases with our pal from Bands Blaine, Yassi, Sala. Hello. The first movie is the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, which is directed by Antoine Fuqua and stars Jackson's nephew Jafar. The second is David Lowry's Gothic Fantasia Mother Mary. It's an extended two-hander about a fictional pop star played by Anne Hathaway and her costume designer,

stylist played by Michaela Cole. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Lowry. Our conversation was recorded live at Vidyats after a screening of the movie. Mother Mary is an incredibly audacious piece of work and demands to be discussed. We will do that here as well. This is David's fourth time on the show after coming by to discuss a ghost story.

The Old Man in the Gun and the Green Knight, he's one of my favorite directors to speak with, so stick around for that. Programming note. On Tuesday, I promised you that the physical media high council will return, and I was not lying. We are opening the sacred chamber and reconvening Tracy Letts, Timothy Hitmaker Simons, and Chris Ryan for a special council meeting.

And we want to hear your questions. That's right. It's the first ever high council consultation. That's Big Pick Mailbag at gmail.com. Big pick mailbag at Gmail.com. Want to hear about recent Blu-ray and 4K buys, gear used at our houses, shelf space concerns, anxiety about the news that Disney is shutting down their home entertainment division, gleeful excitement about the fourth. coming new Fight Club 4K, it's all on the table. Email us and we'll dig into your questions.

But first, we have some movie news right after this. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void. And it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise.

CBC News. Okay, Yasi, you're here to talk about news. I haven't prepared you for this at all. Have you looked at the document? It's fine. I'm freestyling today. Okay. We will break the news to you.

Yeah. And then you can react. You know, you can press the button live in real time. I want to raw dogs a pod. You're going to have to channel the spirit of Chris Ryan right now for this first piece of news because it's very important. Okay. I'm listening. Miami Vice 85.

This is a new movie. Major. That has been greenlit, starring Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler as Crockin and Tubbs directed by Joseph Kaczynski, He of F1 and Top Gun Maverick. August 6th, 2027 for Universal. You say what? Couldn't be more stoked. I, as Chris Ryan would say that this is my comfort food. I know that Christopher Ryan comes to Miami Vice when he's feeling low.

That's right. And I, as Yossi, say that it fits really in with my new book. bubbling theory that the 80s are so back. Because I really feel like so much of our childhood things are starting to come back. It's like like clockwork, we're at that point, and this is only furthering my theory. We're going to be talking about that later in this episode, I think. What do you think about Miami Vice? Well, it's also been reported that Joseph Kaczynski officially out for Top Gun Maverick 3,

except that's not official. It's just that's... You don't want to believe that. That's what the streets are saying. That's what Matt Balladie is. saying and what I'm hearing. So I mourn that slightly, but sure, I like it when Chris Ryan's happy. I like Michael B. Jordan. I like Austin Butler. I like Go Fast Boats Mojito, you know, so individually and together. So why not? Great. Yeah, we'll see. Happy birthday to me in 2027. Will we still

be podcasting then? Your birthday movie? Will you still be alive? Who could ever say? Maybe this will be the Last day. Okay, that'll be like episode 1100, so we'll still be going. I hope that's the last movie you ever see before you die. That would be pretty dismay. It'll be the Ringo movie because that's the last Beatles movie and then I'm out. Presumably, this movie is set in 1985.

Is that a good choice? What if they're both born in 85? Oh, oh, I love it. And then they're, that's aging both of them up a bit. Or why they just graduated in high school in 85, you know? They're the class of 85. I'd like to see some fantasy time period 80s Miami again. I think it could be really cool.

It could be done well. Yeah. It's just there's a whole show called Miami Vice set in the 1980s in Miami. Like, we got that. Sure. We saw that already. Oh, yeah, because it's illegal to make a movie out of a TV show that already existed. Wouldn't it be funny if it was 21 Jump Street style?

You know, that if it was just a pure meta-comedy about Miami Vice and MBJ was being asked to flex those comic muscles, that would be interesting. No? Sure. Is Awesome Butler funny? I was going to say it's awesome Miller. I don't need him to be funny. On purpose? Well, no, he was kind of funny in the caught stealing movie.

Kind of. That wasn't his fault, but that didn't land. Maybe he can be goofy funny. And if Awesome Butler is, you know, of the Brad Pitt school, Brad Pitt can be funny, but it is a specific type of comedy. It's got to be in the right scenario. I mean, he's no Don Johnson. This isn't going to be a comedy. It's going to be a guys holding guns, shooting people, and trying to get.

cocaine off of a boat kind of a movie, I think. Yeah, let's fucking go. Speaking of movies where two men are probably dealing with drugs, Paper Tiger was acquired by Neon. This is the new film from James Gray, and it is officially going to the Cannes Film Festival, which Amanda sent a very excited text message

to me about this. That's right, because I will be there at the premiere. James doesn't know that yet, nor does anyone at Neon. I'm announcing it now. Don't have a ticket, because that side isn't open yet, but I'm very excited to be attending the premiere of Paper Tiger and I don't, we both, you know, love James Gray and his films.

This was one where it was, we assumed that it would happen, and it was not in the initial festival lineup. But they worked everything out. I'm excited. Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Miles Teller. Miles Teller. We'll be talking about again. Miles Teller. Yes.

Yeah, so that'll be great. I'm very hopeful. I'm very excited about that movie. Also announced at the Cannes Film Festival a movie called Victorian Psycho, which is my nickname for you. Zachary Wigan has a new movie that I've heard great things about stars Micah Minro, Jason Isaacs, Thomas and McKenzie and Ruth Wilson

that's going to in certain regard at Cannes. A few more titles trickling in there and now, Yasi, I'll tell you, I have a lot of anxiety about not being able to see enough stuff when we go to Cannes. I'm only really going to be there for about six days. You're only one man. I'm just one person.

And I'm going to try to go to four movies a day and really do it up. But now the invites are coming in, come have a drink, come do a thing. I'm not good at that stuff. Am I going to have to start sending you calendar invites for the things I require you to attend non-movie-wise? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Because, you know, no one else is coming to take me to the prom. So it's kind of like, you know, it's my last resort. I called my brother. Whoops. So, but you denied my Cannes Film Festival Google Calendar invite a year ago. Look who's laughing now. Okay.

But will you accept the invites that I sent you? TBD. Okay. You've attended a European film festival with Amanda. Any tips? I had a wonderful time. She's a gorgeous and perfect partner in crime to go to things with as long as there's no delays or lines. Yeah.

Well, I don't do well with... Not a fan of lines. Yeah, and European administrators. I would not say. I don't like American administrators either. I haven't met an administrator that I like. The Italian government. One of the few things you have in common with Hitler, I would say.

Oh. I think that he was being in to administer. They were his. Yeah. They were his enforcers. He didn't like that. Yeah. No, we had a grand old time.

We love to have a drink. Yeah. Okay. We love to have a pasta. Okay. Yeah, it was wonderful. They have pasta and can? No, food's going to be interesting.

Everywhere. I mean, you know, they have. Yeah, they also have French food and hopefully some seafood because we're by the, have you noticed that many of our invites have been like water themed? Yeah, I have. Okay. Not really my ideal location. But can I tell you that, so the Mediterranean is,

not really like a sand forward beach environment. Oh, rocks? Yeah, rocks. I like rocks. And then, you know, or a little pier that we walk on to the, you know, the floating vessel. Yeah, constructed wood. Okay. One of my favorite things. Maybe you might need a sunscreen sponsor. Uh-huh. Something to think about.

I'll bring some. Yeah. You know what, actually, I'm getting there before you. I will honestly just, I will go buy you. I'm going to the pharmacy, the day that I land. I'm picking up my pass, and I'm going to the pharmacy, and I'm buying all of my toiletries for the week, and I'll get you some European sunscreen, which is in fact better than American sunscreen. No kidding.

I don't know. This has been very helpful. A little bit more news before we dig into Michael. Curry Barker, who's the director of this new horror movie coming out of May called Obsession, was officially hired to direct and I guess right, in addition to J.T. Mulner, a reboot of Texas Chans on Massacre. There have been several reboots of these movies over the years, one of the seminal horror films ever made.

Glenn Powell is also producing this movie, though it does not seem like he's starring. Okay. And it's interesting. Barker is yet another guy who has come from YouTube. There's this huge wave of mostly horror filmmakers who are coming from YouTube and transitioning to making studio movies. Do you care about Texas Chainsaw Masker? Not like a super horror movie girl, you know.

Okay. Why is that? I don't know. There's some I like. Like, I love to sleep away camp. Oh, sure. Yeah, that was one. It was really formative for me, Carrie.

Very transgressive movie. Quite an ending on that movie. Yeah. You know what it is? I think much like Amanda, I don't like jump scares. Okay. You find them annoying. I find them annoying.

Okay. But I couldn't... So you're out on this? Sure. I'll see it if you make me, but otherwise, probably not. I don't make anybody do anything. I just want to put that out there. I would encourage activations.

Okay. You know, do you want to be a part of what's going on here? You go, like I do is go see a movie. I liked Strange Darling, which is J.T. Molner's last film. But I prefer chainsaws in, like, a humorous context. There's a great chainsaw gag in the minions footage that we saw that really cracked me up, you know. So we'll see, but I'm open. I like horror movies now, as you know.

So maybe I'll also go see Victorian. Our new Scream Queen. Darling. No, Victorian Psycho. Victorian Psycho and Texas Jane Saunders. I'm very interested in Victorian Psycho because that's one of the best film names of overheard of my life. It's incredible, yeah. You had me a hello on that one.

Shall we talk about music movies? Yeah, it's why we're here. That's why we're here. So were you last here for the Bruce Springsteen film? Deliver me from nowhere? That's right. Do you think that that film would have been more successful, given what we're discussing today,

if it were simply called Bruce? Do you think that was the problem? No, I'm not saying that was the problem, but would it have been more successful? One thing I was positing on the drive-over because we have all just seen Michael together at the Americana, because my invitation got lost in the mail.

I was also not invited to the screening of Michael. I don't know what happened. Lionsgate, it's okay. Interesting. So we went to see it at the Dolby, one of the Dolby theaters in the Americana, and then we drove right here to record this. And I will say I left the film, Michael, got in my car for brutal traffic, and immediately turned on Thriller, the album.

And I was thinking that if if this movie were called Thriller and not Michael and were actually the Springsteen approach of let's just tell the making of one great album, arguably the greatest pop album ever recorded, then could it fix at least some of the problems that we had in Michael? But at least as a text before we got to, you know, the larger, you know, pop culture nightmare. I love, I think that's super insightful. I think that could have been a way to elide a lot of the major challenges of this movie. I don't think scope was the film's issue. It's one of them for me. It's one of them. It's not the only problem, obviously.

If they were going to bring the same tone and lens to that version, it would still, I think, probably not be that successful. I agree with you, but I think it would have lightened the load. And when I think about what my issues are with this movie, which we will probably go into detail at great level. length. It's got nothing to do with thinking about how the music was made. Thinking about how the music was made and then watching the music be performed. And so let's use that as an entry point to the conversation, which is basically like what does Michael Jackson mean to you? We're all roughly

the same age. We all come from roughly similar backgrounds. We're pop culture and music addicts. Amanda, what is your exposure to Michael Jackson? How do you think about him then, now? I mean, I just said that I think Thriller might be the greatest pop album ever recorded. And And despite everything else, you know, that has happened since the early 80s, that could still be true. And I was just absolutely rocking out in my car on the way here. And also rocking out during the moments that the songs are performed in the movie Michael. I mean, he was everywhere. And by the time we became sentient, he already existed as Michael Jackson and was the most famous person in the world.

and so I was always kind of catching up. Like, thriller has always existed in my consciousness. Billy Jean, bad, all of those. Like, and even bad, right? So we came to a bit later. We were talking about how dangerous is a very formative album for us, and that was 1991. We were all young.

Michael, the film, does not make it too dangerous in 1991. No. So, but, like, I literally remember watching the countdown to the black or white video be premiered on MTV. I remember I was visiting like my aunt's like family friends. It premiered on Fox, right?

I remember it being a huge deal. Yeah. I mean, Nicole Colkin and who played his father at the beginning of the video, I can't recall a very famous actor. Anyway. I don't remember either. I just remember that.

Was it after an episode of The Simpsons that it premiered? It could have been. I was with like strange teenage boys that somehow, but we were like because it was like family friends and we were all together, but we were like, we actually have to talk to each other to each other for long enough to sit down and watch this cultural event.

So, I mean, he's larger than life. Or he was. And then, you know, we can or cannot talk about the next 20 to 30 years. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I've, sorry, I can like barely speak because I've podcasted for five and a half hours yesterday about Madonna, but it's related what I'm going to say. It's like going back to that time, like, I don't remember a time in my life that I didn't know who those two people were, Madonna and Michael Jackson. And I think I leaned over to you during the film and I was like, I was like, it's impossible to overstate how important and famous and iconic Michael Jackson was to the, global world. It's not, nobody's like that anymore. We don't have that anymore. Like watching footage, even though I think we can all agree, maybe it's not our favorite movie of the world, I was getting emotional at some of the pieces of watching the fans cry in his presence, because that was real. And we don't have that anymore. That level of pop star, I would argue, doesn't, is not able to exist anymore. We don't live in that kind of culture. I agree with you. you know, I'm a little bit older than you,

but I also was born into a world where Michael Jackson not only existed, but was already dominating. And I was talking to my brother. My brother just turned 40, and we were talking yesterday. Welcome, Kyle. Yeah, Kyle, you're in now. And we were talking about how my mom had off the wall on vinyl, thriller and bad on cassette,

and Dangerous was a CD I got for Christmas. It was one of the first CDs I got. And that you could kind of track the arc of the way that popular music was consumed and sold through the lens of Michael. And Michael gets into this a little bit around the idea of MTV and his relationship to MTV, which we can talk about. But to say that I loved his music would be wildly understating it. I just thought he was the absolute coolest person on Earth. And doing the show actually over the years has been this series of confrontations with, Marvel characters and Star Wars

and you know you're having a lot of these moments of like looking at things you loved as a younger person and having to watch them get remade rebooted reimagined and this is a unique one because it's a real person this is not he man like this is a guy who existed who lived and so the movie has this huge burden

of recapturing what made Michael Jackson so special and I would make the case that the movie does a pretty good job of that and the performances and the way that the music is staged it's like kind of stunning how well they live up to a person who seemed like a supernatural event that happened in our lives. But then also, there's all of this other psychological and actual chaos and fallout from his life.

And the movie starts to take it on, but then never follows through for a variety of reasons. and it erodes all of that magic and all of that feeling that you were describing, a feeling so, like, moved by watching other people, actors, be moved by an actor playing Michael Jackson. So it's such a unique movie proposition in its way. And like it's kind of a huge failure, but also I did have fun at times. Also worth seeing. Well, the Jafar Jackson performance. And that's, we should say, both Michael Jackson performances, because there's also a young Michael Jackson played by Juliana

crew of Valdi. Who's amazing. Who's amazing. But Jafar Jackson, as thriller Michael, it's uncanny how close he is to what I remember in my head. That's it. And so they do an incredible job of recreating all of the images and video that we know and had access to. And it is like in the acting, it's more of a.

surface level impression, which he speaks as he spoke at that time from what I know from like very short interviews. And then just amazing physical performances. And the like the dancing and the physicality is totally excellent. But it is only recreating what we the public knew. There is nothing below the surface. There is no attempt to or certainly achievement of like revealing something about Michael Jackson. And we have access to that, by the way, the original is on YouTube. It does kind of feel like a recreation. And it's amazing that there is someone else recreating Michael Jackson performing to the level

that he is because he's not around anymore and it's still rare electrifying stuff. But that's all it is. It's just a recreation of existing tape. Yeah. I don't want to be like the wicked witch of the coming to shit on music biopics all the time as my official Big Pick correspondent role. Right. But I said this on the Bruce Springsteen one

The reason it makes me upset Is because these people deserve a better piece of art made about them They were important and monumental figures and artists And like if I were Michael Jackson I would come back from the dead and haunt these people For doing this to me Like the main framing of the film is like I'm meant to pity this person Did you not feel that way?

Well, I would like to talk about that with you guys Because there's so many things, there's so many competing forces of motivation, I think, behind the film. On the surface, it's very easy to say, one, this is an act of brand management by the estate to generate more cash flow against what we all know and love about Michael Jackson, which is his music, his performances, his history, right? We've seen a bunch of movies you've appeared on podcasts with us. There are a lot of movies like this now that are just like, Queen happened, Elton John happened, this great artist happened. As you think, Freddie Mercury did come to haunt Rami Mollock, because as you know, right after he won the Oscar, he fell right off the stage. And I think Freddie pushed him.

That may be true, but it also won him an Academy Award. But I think Freddie pushed him right after. I'm just saying, and the career after has not been giving. Yeah. In addition to that, though. The amateur. You know, it's just not what we wanted. Didn't work out.

No. Third hour of Oppenheimer. I mean, he was in Oppenheimer. Freddie Mercury up in heaven like this. Well, again, the film that achieved great success. He has a clipboard in a basement somewhere. The second thing with this movie wants to do. is it wants to at least tell you that it's going to psychologize

why Michael Jackson was the way that he was. It wants to show you the origin stories. It wants to show you his relationship to his father, his quick rise to fame, the way that he felt unbeautiful, unaccepted, misunderstood, and how that led him to so many different pathways through his life. But it also wants to shield the audience completely

from everything that we think, we know about Michael Jackson that is ugly, sad, or scary. And that includes allegations of pedophilia. It includes allegations of drug abuse. It includes allegations of bizarre series of surgeries and a strange lifestyle. There's no one, to your point about him being the most famous person, there's no one more covered, more explored in our culture than Michael Jackson. And so we all come to the table, assuming you're, I guess, above the age of 15, with a

kind of preconceived feelings about this person. So the movie also wants to kind of like beat them back or ignore them, but also show you why they happened at the same time? And also provide their answer to it. You know, there's the, there's a scene where Michael Jackson is like, is in an onstage accident and he's very badly burned. And they have the Michael character saying, I don't want drugs, no matter how much pain I am in.

And because the doctor is suggesting Demerol, which Demerl has really helped me through some tough times. But, um, listen. Shout out Demerle. If nobody got me, Demerle got me. You get birth. And then tell me whether you don't want some Demerol. But it's getting it. Parts of the movie are also trying to like get ahead of some of those things that we know.

And like Booth explain how they happened, but also maybe shift blame slightly. They're trying to be like hurt people, hurt people. Yes. For sure. Which is true. Of course. Yes. Yes.

I think it's actually okay to acknowledge that the American success tragedy of Michael Jackson is not the story of an individuated person who hurt people. There's a link in a dynamic chain of pain. I totally agree. And it's okay to understand that. But it's not okay to not clarify with nuance. That's what it is. It's not okay to flatten it into like the most basic. Right.

airplane. Also, I think, but to your point that we were saying earlier, how there was, or did we not bring this up on mic yet, sorry, if we haven't, that there was a third hour of this film. Yeah, we should talk about that. Which does change the hurt people, hurt people. To me, it gives it a little bit more, like,

reason to exist if they were leading up to doing something with it. Yeah. Forgive me for being glib about this, but the, this film ends in, I guess, 1988 or 1988. In 1989. Yeah. And after bad.

And there's a suggestion that his story will continue. That's quite literally what the last card says. It says his story will continue. And I'll tell you what I thought of after that was Wicked. And Wicked part two. Because everybody said when Wicked came out, this is the good half. And then what's coming is not going to be as good. And that's kind of Michael in a nutshell, too, where we pretty much, we saw obviously some very challenging stuff in his childhood where he's abused by his father.

Yeah. Which then leads to a lot of his feelings and actions. I mean, Joseph Jackson, Joe Jackson is the main villain, quote, unquote, of this. A little cartoonish villain. Yeah, of course. If hurt people, hurt people, it applies to everybody. That's the thing is there's no psychology of Joe Jackson. Why did he become like this?

I have the same thought, Yossi. I think that's important to talk about that because you can't lean on those ideas and only make Michael Jackson this sort of centerpiece of light without understanding everybody else around him. And the movie doesn't really make an effort to understand anybody else around. No one's characterized. No real figures, except for his. his best friend. Bubbles.

We got some of bubbles. Really emotive CGI acting. A lot of bubbles. It does turn into a Planet of the Apes movie for like eight minutes, which is a very strange. Really it made Better Man be like Fellini, to be honest. And I'm a better man truther. I know Jack Sanders is brother. I think it's a great movie, but like in comparison to this C.G.

Monkey movie, it's like Steve McQueen. Music biopic monkey movies, yes. I'll give you that. Which that is a movie you've been on this podcast for. It's like pretty good. And it's also a biopic-ish movie that you've been on this podcast for that does not feature people writing important thematic ideas in a notebook and then double underline. Which happened again in this movie after the Springsteen movie. I was like, I cannot believe this.

There are a number of moments throughout this film that commit a few walk-hard sins. And some of them are also just illogical steps in the story of Michael Jackson that if you care about his history. they'll just like pop out to you. There was a moment early on in the movie when the Jackson 5 have signed with Motown and Michael is recording alone in his studio. His brothers are watching him in the control room.

It's his brothers and his father. And Barry Gordy, played by Lorenz Tate, is sitting at the engineers, you know, at the table in front of the board. And it looks like Barry Gordy is running the session and there's no one else in the room. And he's like pushing all the buttons. It's like, did Barry Gordy run the session for the Jackson 5?

He's like, Michael, you can't move your feet while you're singing. There's no engineer present that day. No. Shout to Lorenz Tate, though, still so hot. Good for you, sir. Very handsome. I actually hurt my heart a little bit when I saw him. I was like, oh, you got Lawrence Tate Nia Long in this Michael Jackson movie.

God damn. I want to Lauren Harris. Is it Laura Harrier's part? Like, she's just, like, showed up to be hot and smoke cigs. Well, she's Suzanne the past. She's a very important person in the Michael Jackson story, the Motown story. Not according to that film. She's just a gal who says, that's natural-born talent, right?

She does look very beautiful. She is. She's very, very beautiful. She, like, every other actor in this movie. the exception of Coleman Domingo and the two actress who play Michael Jackson don't really have any depth whatsoever. But it does feel like, it does feel, I felt at times like the movie was almost taunting us with the things that we know about Michael Jackson. There are several scenes where Michael Jackson is just with children in the movie. Yeah.

And it's obviously trying to say, well, he felt a connection to and a warmth towards and a love for kids. Yeah. You know, he felt like a kid himself. The movie circles back to this many times. There are many cutaways to the book Peter Pan and his relationship to the idea Peter Pan. So many. Many too many. Too many. Also, just not even just to the book Peter Pan, but to the specific page welcoming you to Neverland.

Yes. There is, you know, there are little Easter eggs of, oh, you know, you think you know this about Michael Jackson. Well, you know, here is like a tiny little stuffed chimpanzee before Bubbles does actually show up on the scene. So it's crazy. And it, you know, the movie believes it is doing something that is helping us better understand this person. But it's impossible to watch those moments and not think about the other way that you can perceive what's on screen. And that ugly and terrible feeling given what, at least has been reported and very credible people have come forward and talked about over the years. So the whole thing is just a mess. It's just an emotional mess on screen. It totally is. Can we talk a little bit about what Yassi alluded to, which is that there was an ending that does. addressed some of the allegations that was filmed.

And so the movie was made with a different ending. And then because of legal reasons, that entire third act of the film was scrapped. They did reshoots, like a whole new ending. So I can't tell whether what the scenes that you're talking about and all the Easter eggs, which I agree, are just like kind of galling as you're watching them. and certainly completely like, juxtaposed against just like the very fun performances of Michael Jackson on stage.

You're like, you get real whiplash. It pulls you right out of the movie. So, but I can't tell whether those were put there because they're written for like a different ending. I think that's reasonable. I would assume so. Right. But so it makes me wonder about the ending and what they think they're setting up. They are legally barred from.

Yeah, I mean, reportedly. There was a lot about allegations and settlements that were made in the movie and that Michael is portrayed as having overcome these challenges in the third act of what was meant to be, I think more like a three-hour mega biopic. Okay. And the challenges of those allegations. You know, and the hit on his public reputation and so on and so forth. And him being exonerated in the public eye. And what the filmmakers did not know is that there was a clause in the settlements that, identified that those settlements and those people who participated could not be portrayed in any kind of dramatized scenario.

Brilliant legal work on their lawyers. So that's obviously a nightmarish fiasco for the studio, for the filmmakers, and they had to junk all of this stuff. So what this movie is now is effectively like a two-hour prequel for the trials of Michael Jackson. And then the second film will be so much of the ugliness. Now there's some ugliness in this first part of his life, obviously. he's got these really devastating issues of this father and he catches fire at one point.

None of the uglinesses comes from him. That's the problem. That's right. And I would imagine that most of it won't be, quote, coming from him in the second half, assuming we get a second movie. And based on how well this movie is likely to do, I would imagine a second movie is going to happen.

This movie is already not being very well received critically, but I do think by fans of Michael Jackson, of which there are still millions, and many of whom who do not care about those allegations. Right. And either do not believe or disinterested. It's an A minus cinema score. So, you know, people are...

To your point, like, the performances and the songs are incredible. Listen. The whole time I was thinking, I was like, man, could have just strung together 12 music videos and I would have come to the theater and seen it and felt emotionally exactly the same way without laughing. Yeah. Well, you said that all this stuff is still on YouTube.

You could have just run another documentary. And it wouldn't have generated as much money, but it would have been a similarly like exuberant moviegoing experience. Because there is like, there's just really exuberance, you know, watching him, you know, watching the young actor who portrays young Michael, singing Jackson 5 songs. I'm like, I turned to you whatever 20 minutes in. And I was like, these are just the best songs of all time. Wall of Wal-Bakers. Just absolutely. Also, like, shout out Michael Bush and Dennis Tompkins put some respect on their name.

They're not mentioned. They were the costume designers from Michael Jackson for 25 years and created all those iconic look. that I was so excited to see on screen because they're crazy good. Yeah. What's the implication, by the way, the glove comes from the Vitilago? Like, he started wearing the glove because he had the Vitilago. I believe so. And the movie does really make a point of that as he sits down for his first nose job.

Right. That he also speaks to a nurse about the Vitilago that he's been diagnosed with, which leads to his skin coloration changing. And that's really the only... That's another thing that's like, okay, I guess we just have to accept. Maybe there was more about that later as in the second, third hour when he gets whiter in skin tone. Right. They do have him in the moment where he asks to be put on MTV more.

And it's explained to him, was that Mike Myers? It was Mike Myers. By Mike Myers. Yes. I did not recognize. Well, it's kind of an homage to Bohemian Rhapsody where he played the same character, not the same character. but, you know, a studio chief. And it's explained that MTV just won't play black artists.

That's actually a pretty accurate. It's true. And the way it was done by him is actually pretty accurate. They have a point of having Michael Jackson say, like, I'm a proud black artist, and it's very important to me that, you know, I'd be on MTV. Anyway, so the nose job scene was interesting because that was really the only time where anything was coming from the Michael character. They have the doctor come in and say, like, are you sure you?

you want this. You're a pretty handsome guy. And he's like, no, I need symmetry. I need to be, I need to be perfect. And that is really kind of the only characterization I can think of besides he loves animals. He wants to be his own man. Yeah, he needs the entire script. One third of the script is him saying that. That's one of the things he underlines in the notebook. I think that there's, he's such a wide open field of human society. psychology, that there's so many things that you could explore, and that we assume, and we don't know, because you didn't talk about these things, but, you know, of masculinity, daddy issues, male beauty, being a black American, 100%, being a famous person, his relationship to sex and romance,

yes, all of these things are, I mean, he is the lodestar for all of these ideas in America over the last 75 years. That's one of the first examples of, like, excessive celebrity plastic surgery. Like, I can't think before that. I mean, Jocelyn Wildson didn't see the cat lady, but like someone who was that famous, that you watched go from one person to a completely different person. And it was happening in real time. It wasn't like, it was during the heyday of his success. So not kind of after the effect to try to read. The movie did a good job, I think, even though they were very subtle, is one of the only things they were very subtle about where his nose did keep changing.

And his skin keeps changing too. But I was like, nobody in your family, there's not one scene where, like, Tito is like, bro, you look kind of crazy. Well, the one thing I really liked was there's one moment in particular later in the film where Michael is being pressured to do the victory tour with the Jackson's by his father. And his father obviously does not have his best intentions at heart. But he says to him, do you really want to live in a world where no one ever doesn't say anything other than yes to you? Totally.

And that was a really sincere moment where you're like, Oh, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Yes. Joe Jackson. Yes. And, you know, he's kind of psychologically manipulating his son by saying something that he knows will resonate with him, which then eventually leads to, of course, the victory tour transpiring. Way more time spent on the victory tour in this movie than I ever would have guessed.

But it is portrayed as this kind of pivotal moment in his young adult life. You know, there's a couple of other people who get some screen time that you pointed out had maybe a bigger role than we expected. There's a man named Bill Bray. Sure. Bill Bray is the third lead of this film. He really is. He's in almost every scene just in the background like this. Yeah.

And every once in a while he gets like a concerned close-up because he's meant to communicate that there is at least someone looking out for Michael, someone who understands this special person and the impossible situation he's been put in. Yeah. And he's meant to a moat for us. That he was like the omniscient narrator somehow

because he was always kind of there. And I asked you during the moment, I was like, was a lot. Because a lot of that stuff, like, who knows what happened in those rooms? Did it come from that man? Like, did, you know, like... Yeah, I don't believe it was actually based on, like, his autobiography or anything. He passed away in 2005.

Michael spoke about Bill Bray as though he were his second father. He was his real protector. He was the person who, for, I think, probably more than 20 years, was at his side all the time. And so there is something interesting about there being one person who was proximate to all of this craziness. I like that idea. The movie is just like, it becomes like a Mr. show sketch at a certain point

where the camera keeps like zooming in on Bill Gray's reaction as a thing is going on. I'd be like, oh, there he is in the mirror. But also, it does answer one of your mid-movie questions, which is who drove him home

from the nose job. That's true, it was Bill Brax. Because he just walked from the door and I was like, you can't drive after a nose job, sir. Is it a same day procedure? Yes. You can go home afterwards?

Oh, cool. I haven't had one. I haven't had one either. I haven't had one either. It doesn't cross my mind. Yeah. No, you have a nice nose. Well, it's nice to be to say.

What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? I actually don't think anybody should get plastic surgery ever. Oh, I don't know about that. Okay, yeah, well. That's how I feel. Okay, good job.

I think we're all beautiful. That's exciting. And I don't think people should be judged on the way that they look. Okay, he says on Netflix. Well, I would prefer to not be judged if I can help it. You talk about Hollywood for a living. But I try to not do that. I actually don't, I, not to stand on my soapbox.

If someone looks good, I like to say that they look good. But if somebody doesn't look good, I, I try to not talk about that because I find it's counterproductive. Much like Michael Jackson, you're a bit of a saint, as was portrayed in this movie. That's what really got my gall, I got to say, where I was like, are we trying to canonize him? Because I think he... But we already did.

Like 100 times over. Well, with the real story of his life is enough for him to be one of the most important and mythical figures of all time. And in fact, far more interesting and compelling. if they showed another side to him. And what do you think that could have been, though? Like, if, because, you know, the Paul Schrader biopic of Michael Jackson, I, of course, would love to see.

No one's going to let that happen in the Michael Jackson estate. No one's going to let any of this happen, guys. You don't get the music. I know. If you show a blemish of him, this is total image rehabilitation. The estate allowed them to do this as a partner in it and gave them the music. And so you have to follow what the estate says. It wouldn't have been a blockbuster, but I would generally have watched a music list.

version where they grapple with his actual psyche. Like Jimmy by your side, that movie starring Andre 3000 where there were no Jimmy Hendrick songs but we watch him kind of have a relationship in 1967. I missed that one. That one, there's a reason nobody watched it. There were no Hendrik songs in it.

You can't do that. I know. It's rough. The music by I think, I just keep thinking back. I'm like, Nico 1988, which no one has seen on Earth. I haven't seen it. It's so good because they show a real person. They show every person.

part of this person who was complicated and challenging. And I know we're never going to get that. I understand. I'm not stupid. But I wish there's some... It seems like they wanted to try. Well, there's something so fascinating about the Bruce movie being such a failure, too, because the Bruce movie is a real effort to, like, show wounds, you know, to say, here's

why I'm fucked up and here's how I used art to work through it. And I'm flawed, and I made mistakes. And, you know, I left this girl behind. Kind of, but I left this composite. The composite, don't we have five goals? I agree. I was going to say the movie's got a lot of flaws. It's just, it's like an effort to do that.

And with. But still managed. And Springsteen was a part of it. And what is told is told even, you know, like how much depression can we go through and like how much weakness and when are you allowed to look sad? And when are you allowed to, you know, be handsome and Bruce? You know, when they're involved. Everything is managed, though.

I know that. Like, how do we get to a place? We're never going to get to this place, I guess, is the, point is that we're never going to do a place where the same feeling that near the end of the film when human nature is performed and all three of us are like oh my god shout out steve percaro of to to toto do you know that sorry not to bandsplan for a second but this is actually so interesting steve car of toto also inadvertently invented the drum machine by suggesting to the engineer who created the linton drum machine that like has live drum sounds that he should make that and then he

went and made it and has like one guy playing real drums on it and it's on thriller interesting I would say a lot of the people who were participants in writing the music on off-the-wall thriller and bad. You know, Rod Temperton's name is mentioned in the movie, but we don't really see him. We see Quincy Jones mostly just genuflecting before Michael's talent from inside of a booth somewhere. We don't see his contribution. How about my girl who we don't see him who doesn't exist at all? Janet Jackson is not present in this movie. It's Shannon if you're nasty.

She's like, it's nothing in this film, Babe. that I'm sorry for you or I'm happy for you, but I'm not reading all that. Didn't you assume she just asked to be not included in this narrative? I actually heard a rumor that they did initially include her and they had to cut her out. Because she saw the film and was like, fuck, out of here. Or told absolutely not to. Yeah. Through her own lawyers, which I hope more power to her.

And unusual amount of Latoya in the movie and weirdly know Janet Jackson. And we know Michael and Janet were very close. Quincy Jones is also no longer with us. So I wonder how much his estate had to say. He's a state probably pretty powerful, I guess. I think it's interesting that he was effectively not present for anything that wasn't about creativity. Yeah. Which I think probably makes sense from his estate's perspective.

I'd love to know what Miles Teller was thinking. I do too. I find this to be an odd choice for a person who is like legitimately famous. And like a really good actor. And now we've learned congratulations to Miles Teller on the sale of what's it, high drink? Long drink. Long drink. Yeah, he made a huge amount of money.

That did make it in that. to my news cycle. Yeah. Yeah. $325 million. So some years ago, Amanda and Bobby Wagner came to my garage and we did a movie star liquor taste test, not on video, just audio. And one Friday afternoon, we got super drunk on the pod.

We weren't medium drunk. We got medium drunk on the pod. I evaded jury duty on that podcast. And we tasted long drink. And you know what? I loved it. What is it? I thought it was great.

It was sort of, it was not that different than a hard seltzer. But better? It's a Finnish drink. It's a Finnish company. Okay. Is it, I want to say, like, it's not tangerine. It's not cantaloupe. It's like Nordic White Claw or something.

Yeah. Sort of. To me, it tastes like fresca, but hard fresco. Love fresco. Yeah, who does it? Very enjoyable. Anyhow. I imagine if he had sold the company before this movie went into production, he wouldn't

have done this movie. Probably not. And I'm sure he went in feeling like, I love Michael Jackson. Maybe he's a major Michael Jackson. I'd love to be a part of this. I get that. But he has like 11 lines of dialogue in the movie and mostly just, just looks confidently at Michael Jackson.

Are they allowed to read the script before they say yes to the part? I think that, I think so. Okay, well, then that's a questionable choice. I was thinking about this with every single actor in the movie because the script did change. And so what do you do when they're like, oh, well, sorry guys, can't use the third hour. Now you're going to have to reshoot this. Still any, some of that script, I would have said yes. I agree.

We haven't, okay, so this is an interesting thing. So we haven't talked about the fact that John Logan wrote this movie, who wrote Gladiator, and Antoine Fukuwa, who has directed many hugely successful movies, including Training Day, directed this movie. I think for the most part, the movie actually has, like,

surprisingly solid pacing, and you said it felt very long to you. I didn't feel like it felt very long. I think because every six minutes, they're like, do you like this song? And so it had this similar feeling of Bohemian Rhapsody where I was like, this is actively terrible,

but I don't want to leave. Well, you're just a unique brand of movie. You're waiting for the next thing. song. Everything that happens in between the songs or the montages of them recording songs. And by the way, a lot of silly things happen in those montages, but they're set to amazing music. But anything that is musicless and just dialogue and two quote unquote characters speaking to each other to advance the quote unquote plot is really dire. There are three lines in this movie that are repeated in different ways. you're either a winner or you're a loser

you've got to be perfect and I want to cut my own path you have to let him cut his own path you can't cut your own path that's the entire script I just need more for Nia Long really one of my first phase She was good

She's doing her best I mean another person With no agency or character Like she just likes to watch old movies with her son That's her whole character Still alive Michael Jackins' mother Didn't you realize that they called her mother

That was a little jarring for me Yeah big Mike Pence vibes there Yeah it's a true tricky one. I, um, what, what else do you want to say? I mean, we can talk through every single song performance if you want to. I think just one thing I want to say that, and I don't want to get ahead of going into the next film, but I do think like one through line for me is that like fame is a mental illness. I couldn't believe this more by each passing day. Fame should be in the DSM-5. It is, you cannot overcome it. Even with the modicum of fame I have, you recognize

at the AMC, which makes a lot of sense. I'm mentally ill from it. I have brain damage from the like 2% famous podcaster that I am. Yeah. It's not okay. It's not, it's definitely not healthy and whatever low grade version of it we experience.

We're suffering as well. It clearly has damaged all of us. And so I'm having a great time. Yeah, I'm sure you are. Thanks for the nerdies, everyone. Yeah, I love the free stuff. Don't stop sending the free stuff, but... I think it's not hard to feel empathy

for 8-year-old Michael Jackson. Of course. Of course. I can feel empathy for adult Michael Jackson being so psychologically twisted that he makes whatever the questionable choices were, that he does questionable things. I am willing to actually extend that level of grace because I think that that's a very true thing and it would ring true to people and especially his fans. Yeah. I know by the same token, you just, you can't equalize the whitewash. reputationaly of the, you know, accusers of the allegations and how they would be feeling

watching Michael Jackson's star once again be elevated onto 3,500 screens and people, like us, having chills watching him perform music. The whole thing is, it's impossible to just like settle it in your mind. The documentary, did you see the documentary? Leaving Neverland. Yes, an amazing film. That I thought was brilliant in how it handled it. It left you being like, oh, you know, like it wasn't like, it didn't have.

a point of view that it was shoving down your throat. It was so good at kind of doing what I wish this film had done, which I guess I can know they would never do that. But like you walked away and you'd be like, I don't know what to think, you know, like in some ways. I feel like that film is pretty definitive at times. Yeah. But here's the thing.

After I saw that movie, which I found to be extremely powerful and credible. Yeah. I thought to myself I'll never have the same relationship to Michael Jackson again. But the truth is that when I listen to these songs and when I, watch sequences in this movie, I still feel like the kid who was eight years old who loved listening to bad and who loved watching those music videos. And there's something about this unbreakable connection to culture that we make at a young age that like it can't change. No matter what we learn, like, you know, to this day people, you know, ask me about Kanye West because like I spent time with Kanye West in the 2000s and I

loved his music more than anything. And they're like, well, how do you feel now, asshole? And I'm like, I can't change how I felt at that time. I'm about him. I got asked about Woody Allen. To be definitively clear, I didn't say I don't know what to think. I don't believe the accusers. That's not what I meant. It just was more that it was like, you see, you kind of are like, oh, God, I feel bad also from Michael Jackson.

The whole thing is just a nightmare. Well, yeah. So what we're talking about, at least in terms of Michael Jackson's music and, you know, all the other complicated relationships, you know, it's the classic separating the art and the artist, which is very difficult. you do it, I don't know, and we'll continue, like, we will certainly wrestle with it on this podcast. That's a personal choice.

Yeah, but, but listen, that's just, that's something that you work on as a consumer of art, but that's not what this movie is asking us to do. This movie is about the artist, not the, and it's the artist creating the art, but this is quite literally a biopic about the artist, so it's, it's just kind of, it's glaring. It's not even the elephant in the room. It is just, it is completely omitted. And we know that actually, from the making of the film, it's, it's, it's just, it's, It's just a whole chapter of his life that is just missing.

But it's an incomplete movie. It is not even about the art, which is I think what that also got me. The whole time I was like, I want to know more than fine, then tell me more about why, what's behind these songs. Right. Why did you choose these looks? Like, what was your thinking around your presentation, around the songs you chose, around what you were trying to communicate when you wrote these lyrics? Like, I would have, there's none of that in the film either. Except that he's like, I like to have the gang members to you.

me how to dance. This is a CWW. I forgot about that until just now. That was so crazy. Remember? I mean, that's based in fact. I don't know if it actually played out the way that it plays out in the movie. So he's alone in the studio. He's alone in the studio working on the track list for Thriller.

And then he looks up to see a breaking news local segment like about the gang violence in Los Angeles. Learns about that. And then is led to hold this summit. which, you know, people killing people dying. You know, he did live a pretty... He didn't have X.com. It's true.

He was not like out in the world a lot. He was at home playing twister with bubbles as we saw. Oh, that was sad. It was actually really sad. I want to talk about one thing that I found interesting about Michael Jackson when I was younger and that I still am interested in in his music that is in direct contrast to his public persona and the way that he spoke in interviews, which is that his music,

especially from thriller on, was extremely attitudinal and aggressive. Totally. And it was very, his vocal inflections, the phrasing in the lyric writing, the energy that he communicated as a vocalist was,

could be angry, could be like, arrogant, could be very different from the very soft-voiced man who you saw, who just talked about healing the world. And my favorite Michael Jackson song, by far, is Leave Me Alone, which is, I think it's the last song on bad.

It might be one of the last songs on bad. And I was always fascinated by that video, which, you know, the bonus track. The bonus track. Featured the bones of the elephant man and the sort of like animation of moving through the circus mind of Michael Jackson, this kind of hall of mirrors that he has to endure as a famous person. It was written in response to all the wacko jacko stuff and his relationship to bubbles. and it's one of the clearest evocations we have of his psychology and the way that he was responding to becoming a famous person.

Leave Me Alone is not in the movie. No. And that whole persona, even the persona that you find in Beat It or in Billy Jean, where there's like just this rage and this swagger and all of this stuff that was endemic to his music is not in the movie, is not explored about him as a person. And maybe he only used his art to explore those things. maybe that was the only place where you found it. But as a fan of his, like, you could have the same attitude towards the world

by loving his music that you could by listening to Nirvana. He actually was like a very singular personal artist who wrote about how he was feeling about things and explored them in a musical style, in addition to also just being somebody who made 300 million people happy with the universality of his music. And there's also none of that in this movie. There's no like, where did Billy Jean come from? That's what I'm saying. Where is the...

If he got angry, which he clearly had every cause to be, why don't we never see him get angry? He only is sad and scared. He's sad and scared. He's sad. He's scared. He's scared. And then he gets on stage. And then he gets on stage and says, I'm not doing this anymore. Well, but first, I mean, his, you know, his dancing and the choreography is also equally, like, forceful. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Like in complete contrast with the person that he is off stage, which is interesting. But once again, this movie is not interested in tension because it was made with legal. handcuffs. It's, it's, I, I'm, I knew I would be a little bit flummox by this. Like, I knew the movie was likely to be not, quote unquote, not good, right? That it was, there were going to be dramatic sequences that were cringeworthy, that there was going to be performances that seemed over the top. Right. That, um, it was only going to be serving at the altar of, of Michael's hagiography. But, um, it, it's so much more challenging to me than Bohemian Rhapsody or deliver me from nowhere because of the paradox of Michael Jackson. Exactly. Because of the incredible,

wonder that he instills. And the like anguish, I think, that he represents for a lot of people. I mean, I had the chills, though, during the movie. I'm just like, even being transported back to that place is really special. So, oh, we're seeing, I guess, if you like Michael Jackson. It's a very relevant cultural artifact of modern Hollywood, for sure. You can remember what it was like when we had that level of pop star. Yeah.

That moved that many people. Is there any other thing you would have wanted to see, a song, a performance, a moment from his career that is not represented here, obviously pre-1990? Well, that's hard because, you know, that cuts off dangerous and also the Free Willy song, which, listen. Yeah, was that heal the world? No, that's, will you be there? Oh, yeah. With the choir, come on.

It's 91, but I would have wanted to see him attend the Oscars with Madonna because. Yeah. Brook Shield's not included in this film. You know, a handful of the girlfriends, the friends, the people who attended things with him are not present in this. It really is like the boy in the bubble with bubbles. Like that's how he's portrayed in the movie. I do think he was like an extremely lonely person and they didn't get that across. And those were largely like, I think, press-op people.

Yeah. But could have seen them. This episode is brought to you by Apple and AT&T. Scroll long enough and you'll hear it all. Miracle diets, fitness trends, you name it. But with iPhone and Apple Watch, you get meaningful insights from a very trusted source, your body. You can track sleep quality, cardio fitness. and more, then unpack all the information in the health app on iPhone to get a picture of your

overall health. These health insights are developed with clinical experts from start to finish. Find out more at Apple.com slash health. Apple Watch is not a medical device and should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice. Okay. Should we pivot away from Michael? Yeah.

Let's talk about Mother Mary. Fascinating movie, as you say, sort of similarly related in its portrayal of a major pop star going through a crisis with where we have some understanding of the origins of that crisis. This is the new movie from David Lowry starring Anne Hathaway, Michaela Cole, Hunter Schaefer, F.K. Twigs, a whole host of people, including my girl, Kyah Gerber. We'll get to that in a minute. The log line of the movie is Long Buried Wounds Rise to the Surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer on the eve of her comeback performance. What did you think of this, Amanda?

I like pop star movies And this very much is And I appreciated The attention to detail Of creating this pop star world Which is, you know, what the movie is about In Hathway plays a pop star named Mother Mary Who has some Gaga, some Beyonce

A lot of Madonna for sure I mean, obviously it's, you know, right there in the title And she has had a falling out with her creative director essentially played by Michaela Cole. And it has all of those people, but it's really like a two-hander about how you create something and ownership and the relationship, the creative partnership. And I thought maybe just also about relationships and breakups in general. You know, there is something archetypal about what's going on here.

But all of the pop star recreations, the performance. the songs, the dresses, the world that they create was really credible. And I thought interesting. And I thought about how much time Anne Hathaway must have spent preparing for this. Because it is, again, she is performing. She can obviously sing, but there is choreography. There is some even like non-performance choreography that she has to do that's amazing. So, you know, I like it when people go all in.

on something a little strange and also something that is in my interest set. Yeah. What did you think you're a chronicler of modern pop and rock iconography? I loved it. This movie is like very Yossi core where I'm like, I love a movie where I get to have my own inputs on what it means. I think that that is a... If you're a person who likes a movie explained in detail for you what they're saying,

this is not a movie for you. Also, if you're a person who hates women... You guys remember the Bechdel test? Yes. There's not a single man in this film. I don't think, or if there is, they're not ever, they're not a character. I don't think there's a single man. I don't think I've ever in my life.

And I'm sure there are examples, and I'm sure you know them off the top of your head. But me personally, I don't think I've ever seen a film in my life that doesn't have one single man in it. Not to put my pink pussy hat right back on for the big picture. I haven't thought about it that way, but that obviously is a big part of it. It struck me. It's also, too, because it is not a rah-rah feminism movie anyway. No, it's not about that. It is much more about, I think, what Amanda is circling,

which is, like, the nature of these creative relationships and partnerships and maybe even love relationships. Totally. And the ways in which they break and come back together. But then also, the movie is this phantasmagoric kind of ghost story in the second half. And sort of, like, what is underpinning creativity and where are ideas coming from? And what happens to people, like, can you be spent? Can you be haunted by something?

and it allows you to not go forward with your creativity. When I talked to David at the video screening, which you guys were both out, I was basically like, and I never do this. I was like, what's this movie about? Yeah. Because I did, I agree with what you're saying about there being different inputs and different ways to read into it. And what I just said is like, that's my reading of it.

Yeah. But other people might see it as something different. Like, is this a queer romance? Is this like an existential dread movie about like being at the end of your life or the end of your, you know, vitality? Like, there's a lot of different ways to read it. Well, it staged pretty cool as well. It's so.

it was just so beautiful and fun to watch, like so lush and gorgeous. And I loved like all the textures because it's about, it's partially about fashion. And like Michaela Cole is cutting fabric and they have actually good stuff. And we sit through so many movies about this, you know, world where, and just about worlds where visual representation is very important, which by the way is what cinema is. And people take shortcuts. And this felt really lived in. You mentioned. that the costume designers from Michael Jackson are sort of like not mentioned in the Michael movie. And this movie obviously is about how there's always someone or many people behind these icons that we love. That's one of my central preoccupations.

So that's another reason I think I really like the movie. Like the idea of working in the service of another person's creativity. Because even though that is her creativity, the costume designer played by Michael Cole, it is in the service of Mother Mary. Right. And what kind of person you have to be to be okay with that? Because you won't get the credit. You never really, a manager, a publicist and, you know, a choreographer. These people are all in the service of someone else's light.

And I thought that was dealt with really interesting. I thought the meta, using the red, actually it's really funny because there's a line that I just remembered where I think Anne Hathaway is like, this is too many metaphors. And I was like, that's very funny that he put that in there. But like that red piece of silk. or cloth or whatever. Like, I believe it was a puppet. It is a puppet. Oh, yeah.

David Lowry. What's up to my puppet crew? He's a puppet boy, just like me. It's got to move. It's got to move beautiful here. You'd rather a CGI bubble? No. No, I love it.

We want a puppet forever, yeah. It's a movie about pageantry. You want it to be real. But I found it like, again, a place that you can put anything. I was like, oh, this could be resentment. And it's leaving one person's body and going into it. This can be ego, you know? And it's just like there's, depending on,

on your own idea of the world like you were saying or what you're interested in, it left a lot of room for you to play with it without being like, I didn't walk away being like, that movie didn't mean anything. Yeah. Which is a risk, right? It is. And look, I think the movie has been very divisive critically. There are people who are like, this is a huge miss, which I find with all of David's movies,

they're super rewarding on second watch because you're not trying to figure out what's going on anymore and you're kind of accepting it on its own terms. I had a chance to see this movie a long time ago, and then I saw it again a second time at Vidyates, and I really enjoyed it even more the second time because I wasn't trying to like... Because the first half of the film is very talking between these two characters.

It's chamber piece. We don't really know their history. They're sort of like explicating without over-enunciating their history. And it's hard to get your bearings a little bit. You know, it's a very stormy movie at first. And then it takes this huge leap in terms of the kind of gothic ghost story elements in the second half.

So it's a lot to take in. but I very much agree with you. I mean, it's also true that I think in all of Lowry's movies, like he asks a lot of his actors, he kind of asks them to put their ass on the line with really deep, weird, dramatic stuff. Like, I thought a lot about Rooney Mara and a ghost story in this movie,

which is also a very brave and odd performance in a very sad movie. This is also a very sad movie. Casey Affleck and Aitembody Saints, Dev Patel in The Green Knight, like he asks actors to really expose themselves. And Anne Hathaway, has to be kind of ridiculous in this movie.

She's incredible. And she's amazing. She's one of the few big stars who's like up for this kind of a thing. So yeah, I really enjoyed it. And I think it's quite an accomplishment to be able to pull off that scale. Like what I imagine was not the biggest budget in the world?

Do you think about a movie like Michael relative like a small movie like this? I don't know. I thought it was interesting. Yeah, and staging. Because they do stage a lot of the work in addition to that sort of chamber piece, first half of it.

Also, I obviously love religious themes. which like you can't get around because the pop star is a religious coded pop star I mean that is our idolatry now too right is like is Taylor Swift that's our religion 100% and just being committed to those figures and worshipping at their altar

But it also is interesting to like back to what Amanda was saying it's like I don't know if he meant to do this but I feel like you know is like you also harkens back to like Madonna who is I know I'm a little bit Madonna brand right now but she was kind of arguably the first major pop star in this lineage.

Like every pop star that we have now has come from her. In her wake. Yeah. From her vagina. But she, her whole thing was all the Catholic imagery and grappling with Catholicism and God and guilt and stuff. So like having it echoed in this pop star. But then you can be like, I don't know would that fly now, you know? I don't know if you could be successful in that same way.

That was the one place I couldn't suspend disbelief. where I was like, a pop star couldn't fill a stadium with these songs about the Holy Spirit. You're right. It's not that it wouldn't fly. It's that it would not be the level of controversy and attention that Madonna got. Like, we all remember like a prayer, you know? Yeah. Who's the most successful pop star who pursues taboos?

I guess it probably used to be Lady Gaga. Right. Maybe now Lana, although her taboos are kind of different. She's not a stadium artist, though. No. You know, like in the stadium art, I mean, you know, I guess Beyonce does do some transgressive things, you know, but. But I think it's back to the Michael thing.

It's you, we don't have that anymore because the value proposition of pop stars now is I'm just like you. You know, whereas it used to be. It's not just pop stars. I am so much. Parassociality. You can never. I am a, look at me. Look at my jacket.

Look at how I can moonwalk across. I am an alien. I'm an angel. I do miss that. I like that. I like larger than life. I'm really interested in that. It inspires weeping people in the crowd.

And I guess people do probably weep at Taylor Swift. I think they definitely do, but it does feel different. It does feel... They also, you know, do friendship bracelets in between themselves and then take pictures. I didn't go. I went. I went. Yeah, and David talked about how the reputation...

It was the era's tour, I think. The era's tour. No, no, no, but it's the reputation film. The concert film. That was a huge inspiration for how they shot a lot of the pop-star sequences. It's her darkest album. Is that true? Yeah.

I'm not aware. I thought Michaela Cole was exceptional. I love her. I want to see her more all the time. I love chewing gum. I think she's just like so talented. Yeah. Check out the Christopher's, right?

We just talked about the Christopher's too. It's weird. I felt like she was just not in a movie for several years. And now she's in two movies in back-to-back weeks, which is quite fascinating. I think she's really interesting too. And she has a kind of flinty performance style that is very well suited to the repartee between the two of them. A bit like a play. Again, I love movies that the dialogue is like a play.

That's a very Yossie call. Very much. Would you like to talk about your photo with Kyah Gerber? Yeah, let's talk about it. Okay. What would you like to know? I know everything. You maybe want to address people who are like, what's going on here?

Sure. So the three of us went to Vidyets one night to watch Mother Mary and I spoke to David afterwards. Beforehand Vidyates, which is wonderful nonprofit, located in Eagle Rock. They do a photograph with the filmmaker in the video store, which is a 10. hatch to the movie theater. Yeah, it's good Instagram content. It's great Instagram content. Shout out to Vidates.

So there was going to be a photograph with David, and they said, Sean, we want you to be a part of that photograph. And that's obviously a tradition that we've been doing here on this show, where we take a photograph to the filmmaker. I was like, sure, that sounds like a good idea. And they were like, well, David's ready for you in the video store. Come on back. So I walk back to the video store, familiar space for me somewhere I go frequently.

I was just there Sunday with my daughter. And David's there, and I spotted him. And some folks who work in PR, I'm just chit-chatting with and start walking towards David. And then right to his left. Kyah Gerber. Who... Were you starstruck?

It's as as one of our... As someone on one of our group chats, probably Rob Mahoney, but I can't remember, said about the photo. It's the most, I don't know what to do

with my hands pose of all time from Sean Fennacy. Just totally taken back, right? Here's a challenge. Speechless. You never see him speechless. She's speechless. She is...

Yes. Yeah. She's an international supermodal. Is that the word? Sure, that is our word that communicates light. I think luminous is probably better. You're not all struck by the beauty of women like myself and Amanda. It's only interesting.

I think you are both beautiful. And I'm very... Save it. Thank you. But, you know. No, I mean, it goes beyond there as a hot girl. It's like she has a... Yeah, of course.

You can see that she has a unique thing, right? That's her job. She's a professional model. She has the greatest change in the universe. She's an aspiring. The bigger challenge was the surprise. You know, like, I'm very comfortable. What would you have done to prepare a beta blocker?

I would have not gone. I would have not put myself in that situation. Nevertheless, she said, hey, Kai, I'm... Hey, Sean, I'm Kaya. You're back in that space right now and you can't speak at your time. I'm all nervous. I'm feeling if I'm close to Kaya. And she was very, very kind. And then they were like, take a photo.

And I was like, Kaya's going to be in the photo. I have to be in the photo. I have to be in the photo at the same time. And then the decision had to be made. Do you touch Kaya Gerber? And I decided no. Yeah. Oh, you've been one of these floating hands? The classic floating back hands?

No, you haven't seen. The photo's really funny. You know, I didn't even notice. I screen shotted you and Kai are really big to make my phone back screen. I'm in action figure post because I'm like, I don't know what to do. I panicked, you know? And so I did that. You know what?

In your defense, that happens most of the time that a photo is taken of you. That's true. And I'm just trying to. But I don't, you know. You're an ally. That's right. But I don't want to do is violate in any way. She gave a lovely introduction with David before the film.

And chit-chatting with her was lovely. She was super cool. And, you know, I wish her all the best. And I hope we crossed paths again one day, but not in photographic form. I thought the casting of the tertiary characters was, for lack of a better word, extremely cunty. And I loved it. It was. It was FK.A. Twigs.

Hunter Schaefer. Kai Gerber. There's more. Alba Baptista is the Taylor Swift character. Sean who opens. What is her last name? Sean Clifford. Clifford, who I love from Fleabag fame, the sister from Plebag with the bad haircut.

Yes, Jessica Brown Finley. from downtown abbey like they're incredible backing really good stuff yeah you're I think you're right that there's not a single man

in this movie and I'm sorry to have been struck I literally just was like I walked out and I was like Beckdale test past bitch great job

Bechtel test found dead in a ditch after this film any other closing thoughts Michael Mother Mary okay let's go to my conversation with David Lowry Hi everyone

what you think Very easy movie to understand. Please help me in welcoming writer-director David Lowry. We like to let the credits play so that you can kind of like decompress a little bit. Yeah, yeah. This is my second time seeing it, and I wish I had more time to decompress, actually. So you mentioned you started writing this movie seven years ago. Yeah.

What was happening in your life that this came out of you? I was on the set of the Green Knight in Ireland. and there were a bunch of things. I had shot a scene with Dev Patel and Sean Harris and was like, huh, doing a scene with two actors in one room is really fun. I hadn't really done much of that. And I was kind of thinking about just where I was, like, as a filmmaker, like what I wanted to do, what I had done, what I was anticipating doing,

having a couple long nights of the soul, dark nights of the soul. and then I also just got really, really, really sick. And I felt like my body was breaking open in weird ways, not to get too graphic. And I was like, I'm just going to, rather than lay awake, I couldn't sleep. And I was like, rather than lay awake in bed and not, and just stare at the ceiling when I start writing about this.

And I wrote it as a dialogue sort of between just me having a conversation with myself, but very almost immediately, I'd been wanting to make a pop star movie for a long time. I was like, okay, this is the perfect vehicle for my pop star movie. And so I wrote the scene where Mother Mary comes and asks Michaela for a dress. And then it went off in other directions. And over the ensuing years and working on other movies, it gradually became, it's still autobiographical,

but became separate from me and became what ultimately manifested over the course. of however long it took to make this, which was a long time as well. Yeah, I want to hear about that. Your previous two films are very large in scale. Yeah. And was there a conscious decision to say I want to do something that feels more achievable,

like more modest? Yeah, I was really excited about doing something simple. But yet I'm always, I mean, when I made a ghost story, it was also like one location, we're never going to leave. And I was like, but what if you went into the past? And that was a much smaller movie than this, but still, like, we wound up having these huge,

like, Weta effects came into all these digital CG cityscapes for us. And with this one, I really wanted to, I'd really fallen in love with that scene with Dev and Sean Harris with, with, like, working really intensely with actors, which was something I've always loved doing, but my movies had up to that point been, there were other things that took priority for me. And when I made Peter Pan and Wendy, which was really big and a really challenging movie in all sorts of ways, there was one scene in that movie that was again, it was Jude Law and Evera Anderson. And I was like, we spent two days in one limited location and it was such a treat. And I just wanted to spend a few more days doing that. And didn't really think about how two days is great, but if you're doing it for 40 days, it starts to turn into something.

Weird things start to occur. You start to live the movie in a really interesting way. And then it, as my movies tend to do, like they just, I reached a point in the script where it could have stopped. It could have been the end. It could have been over. But I was like, I haven't seen this through all the way yet. I need to keep pushing.

And that's where it got a little bit more maximalist. You said you'd always wanted to make a pop star movie. Were there inspiration points? where there people who you saw at certain stages of your life, who you thought that's a movie star as well as a pop star? That's a great question. I really hadn't been to a stadium tour show up until when Lord was on tour with melodrama. And that was when I realized I love stadium shows.

Like that was, it was really, it was, it had a huge impact on me. What was it you liked about them? Just being surrounded by that many people. I'd, you know, I'd been to see like Rob Zombie in high school. Hellbilly Deluxe tour. I'd been to stadium shows before, but something about going. This is kind of a living dead girl movie actually. Yes, yes, exactly.

Yeah. Something about going to see that. that type of spectacle surrounded by that many people. And specifically that type of music was really transformative for me. Prior to that, I'd made movies that dealt with folk music or had sort of a more of an old fashioned classic Americana's sensibility to them. But as I was making those, I was secretly also discovering

that I really love pop music. And when we made Ain't the Body Saints, I can't say this. We hid a certain song in the movie as many times as we could by compressing it into the gunshotsy here in the movie. Just because I was like, you know, I've been listening to this song a lot. I really want to, it's infecting me, and I want to pay tribute so we secreted it away into the movie. And that song is called?

I'm never going to say it. How do you research a movie like this? because it is very much about a pop star and about a person who feels somewhat reflective of some of the big icons that we see. But it's also about the flip side, the sort of the support system, the creative shadow of someone like that. And I don't know a lot about that world, but it does feel realized. Like it does feel true when I watch it. So how did you come to understand how that world works? It started with watching a lot of documentaries.

And I'd say the two that were really instrumental to me, were McQueen, the Alexander McQueen documentary. And it's not touched on that much in that film, but his relationship with Lady Gaga was something I had in mind. Even Madonna and Gautier, but that pairing of a performer and a designer was really potent to me. And then just watching every music documentary, basically, and seeing, just getting the idea of what it means to go on to a

something I could never dream of doing. My hats off to anyone who is capable of that because it's a true, it's superhuman feat. And I think the first one, maybe when we were shooting the Green Night, Beyonce's Homecoming documentary came out and watching that was really, really impactful. And then the Taylor Swift Reputation documentary, which is as a cinematic spectacle, really something else.

I really loved the way that was shot. And we could barely scratch the surface of that scale with this film, but that was something we looked at a lot too. But just even watching all of those, you just get the sense. And then talking to musicians, like talking to people who do this and trying to get a sense of it, trying to understand what it's like. And not just the ardor and joy of getting to go do this night after night, but also the creative collaborations that beget something like a state.

tour. Who was cast first, Michaela Cole or Anne Hathaway? I sent it to Michaela first. And then, but we wound up meeting after I'd already met. And,

and I saw it, so Ann, it was cast first. So by the time I met with Michaela, we didn't really talk about, you know, I'd, I tried to be agnostic when I'm casting movies, but I just like to send the script and see what people think of them. And, and I honestly think there's something. incredible version of this movie where the roles are reversed. It would be just a completely different

dynamic. But I did cast Anne first. And so then when I met Michaela and we were talking about it and we weren't even talking necessarily about her playing Sam, we were just talking about the script and talking about what she found meaningful in it, which was really a big, like, I was so starstruck because I'm such a huge fan of hers and to know that she found value in something I'd written. I was like, what's going on here? But the, as we were saying, speaking as we were talking about, you know, personal experiences that she could relate to within the script and the things that, where it came from from me, I really started to hear Sam's dialogue and her voice. And almost instantly I was like, this has to happen. It has to be her.

You were saying you like the idea of working with two actors and, you know, if there's no chemistry between the two people that you cast a movie like, this can't work. And there's such a toxic chemistry between these two people. How do you make that happen in a movie without it making everybody go insane? We might have gone insane. I mean, they're in the script, so you know what you're signing up for. And I was very confident that no matter what the chemistry was, like, A, they're professional actors, and we're going to come here and we're going to perform these scenes as they're written, and we're going to explore them and extrapolate from them and expand upon them

and something will emerge from that. But also, like, I just want to see the two of them in a room together. And it could have been anything. And I would have been, we can work with this. I would have known we could work with it. But it really was, like, a really interesting process of, I mean, you hear about this with other movies,

but, like, you start living it. You really becomes, every day you're going there. And we shot not entirely in sequence, but we tried at least for the first three weeks. we were in sequence. And we were really, I think, had a plan and we knew what we were doing. We had rehearsed the first act of the movie very, very thoroughly, and we were sticking to that plan, and it was all working according to plan.

And then at a certain point, we started to feel things more deeply. And there are fewer words in the movie at a certain points. You start exploring in a different way. And at that point, it really became an almost supernatural experience making this. And I don't know if that comes through in the movie. movie, but we felt while we were making it, we were like, what are we conjuring here? This is so, it felt sometimes incredibly beautiful, sometimes incredibly painful, sometimes it felt evil.

Like we were, we were summoning something terrible. And we were like, oh, no, what's, what's going to happen at the end of the day? Tell me a moment when you were conjuring something evil? There was, there was a moment after Anne has told her story and they're sitting there. and she asks, no, after Mother Mary's told her story, and she asks Sam if she believes her. And Sam clearly doesn't, but knows she needs to address this

and is going to invite her up and remasure her. And I remember Anne saying, I'm afraid to speak the words right now because there's something inside of me that might come out when I open my mouth and it might hurt all of us. and maybe that was a metaphor. This is a movie full of metaphors.

Maybe it was literal. And Michaela knelt down at her side. I didn't quite know what to say. I was like, this has never happened to me. And then Michaela knelt down at her side and just took her hand and said, I love you and I trust you. And you can say the words. And that was one of those moments.

It was just like in that moment. It sounds almost like something I wrote. But it also like describing. it doesn't really capture like how intense that moment was. And I remember the crew was all gathering around being like watching us as we're all just working through this moment. They're like, what is happening? And then the other thing, when they're in that circle,

it was, you know, there's the scene where they do this breathing exercise and they just breathe. And it's one of my favorite things in movies is just to watch people breathe and fall into that pattern. And we would do that before every single take and really get ourselves in. to that space and it really felt like we were entering some weird zone for and we that scene was scheduled for I think two days and we probably shot it for seven days which is an insane thing to say

out loud because we just kept I really wanted this to be a film where if anyone felt that something was wrong or that we were going down a wrong path we would stop and course correct and and that sequence we were we were always refining it trying to find for them the performance like where they were, where the characters were. For me, that's one of the most visually, there's a lot going on visually in that sequence and finding the right visual language for it. And we, you know,

we're constantly exploring within the parameters of this tiny little circle on the floor. I remember vividly talking about completely re-editing the green night during COVID and just changing the tempo and even maybe some of the meaning of that movie by having free time on your hands and changing. It seems like this movie.

movie similarly had a kind of ongoing redefinition? I would, if it wasn't opening next week, I would still probably be, like, doing stuff. But the, like, with the Green Night, it wasn't that I recut, like, I didn't change what the movie was. I just gave myself time to take some time away from it and then was able to tease out that meaning more effectively. And that really didn't involve changing the tempo. That was the big thing, just changing the pace of it.

and with this movie I watched it like December 31st of last year or of the 2024 and was like this is the best thing I'll ever do

I'm done not going to touch it and then showed it to some people and realized okay maybe I'm not done you know and and that happened repeatedly like where I'd just like I'd be like okay I've crushed it

and then I'd watch it with an audience and be like like, oh, it's not, it's not, they're not getting what I want them to get out of it. And then a lot of it was me just consistently, because I edited it as well, it was just like, what else can I do? And that's the same thing I do with the writing. Like, this movie could have ended at various points. Like, the, Michaela's monologue was at one point the ending of the movie where she talks about that final performance.

And I was like, no, there's more to find, there's more to extract. There's more to dig out of this. And with the editing process, it was the same thing where I was always like, I don't know what it is, but there's more, I'm not through with this yet. There's more I can get out of it. And because of delays with strikes and other things, we had the luxury of continuously just digging back in and pushing. It's something that makes filmmaking such a unique art form to me,

which is that unlike a painter or even a songwriter, you can kind of show a work in progress and take notes and feedback. and change it based on things that people say to you. And I feel like you have to really evacuate your own ego to let that happen. Like, is that something that you would do on every movie where you really want to hear what people think of what you've done so far? I wish that I could just be like, I made the movie I want and I'm done. And maybe I should try that. I don't know.

But I would still go through that process on my own. I love hearing what people think of it. And I love showing into people because I believe that's, you know, the movie's a living thing. and it really needs to engage with the organism that is the audience. But I want, so much of it is self-imposed, where I just like, I hear what people say, then I have to not look at it for a while

because I don't want to just answer those notes. I want to hear those notes, let those notes sort of like simmer and on a very low boil and then take what I need from them. But it really is informative for me to just, like, am I achieving what I set out to do? And sometimes I have like, you know,

kind of an idea of what I set out to do. Was a movie like this, like 10 years from now, I'll still be trying to figure out what I was trying to do. Like, I know what I was trying to do, but I'm going to learn more about it as I discuss it now, as it makes its way out into the world. Yeah, I know better, but there is a part of me that wants to just look you in the eyes and say,

what does this movie mean? I'm not going to say it because I want everyone to just go see the movie again. Okay. But Michaela literally says what the movie's about in the first 20 minutes. Like, she, like, lays it very, like, clearly on the table, and that's what the movie's about. Yeah, I also was thinking about, you know, this is the second time I've seen it now

and thinking about who are you between the two of them and you indicated that you're both of them, that it's a conversation between yourself. But I'm wondering if maybe you had relationships creatively where you were Sam or you were Mother Mary and kind of how that informs some of the dynamic that you created between the two characters.

I haven't had specifically those relationships, but I have seen the way, because I work with the same people over and over again, and you see the way in which relationships can ebb and flow from one project to the next, and the way in which those collaborations can be really, really intense in a way that can sometimes almost seem dangerous. And that's a beautiful thing.

I really love that. I've thankfully never had one that has gone this way, but I could project and imagine what would happen. It definitely was also, though, like there was a, seen in the movie at one point where they explicitly referenced Disney movies. And I was like, I love making Disney movies. That's one of my favorite things. And I also love making movies like a ghost story or like this. And it's like every now and then, most of the time those two sides me live in perfect harmony. But every now and then I'm just like, what the heck is going on? And when I

started writing this, I was having one of those moments. The biggest potential pitfall for a movie like this is just getting the music wrong. Like, if you get the music wrong, also the movie will not work. And I find the songs in the movie be very credible. And they're like living in a weird, liminal range between a bunch of different active and past pop stars. So how do you know that you're getting the right songs? How do you cast the right people to write those songs to make this a legible world? Charlie was the first person I met. And I had been a fan of her music and was and her documentary and like, but I didn't, you know,

had not been thinking about her specifically while writing this, but the thing that I knew was that, like, the music I listened to while writing this movie was one thing. That was the tone of the movie. But the character of Mother Mary needed to be something very different. And talking to Charlie was like, oh, like, you could bring that to this film. And you're brilliant, you're amazing. Please,

please bring that to this film. And then collaborating with Jack and her to create the songs was a real learning experience for me. I've never been lucky enough to sit. I've known a lot of musicians, but to just sit and watch these, these, it was like alchemy,

like watching the conjurate out of thin air. It was incredible. And I have to give an immense amount of credit then to Annie who had to perform them. We had written a couple of the songs early on, and I shared them with her. And she liked them, but she was like,

I don't know how to make these mine. And I was like, well, of course, these have to be yours. You have to go out on stage and sing them as if you wrote them. They have to feel like they're coming from you. And that process, I think, was what really took them to the next level. Because the songs were great. They were always great. The rough demos were incredible.

But the thing that really made them hum in that ineffable way was what Annie brought to it. And she just, we know she can sing. She's an incredible singer. but to sing in this way was really, it was a new muscle for her to learn. And so she would go into the studio over and over and over again and just re-record these songs

and was just constantly trying to get them a little better in a way that I couldn't even hear sometimes. I would be like, it sounds great. I love it. Top 10 hit, here we come. And she's like, no, we're not. We don't quite have it.

And sometimes it was changing lyrics. Sometimes it was like things that would work better for her. But more often it was just a feeling and a vibe. And she just kept pushing at it. And I owe so much to all of them, but also to her for not letting it rest. There's also something in her performance that really jumps out, which is both when she's on stage performing and also when she's just in the kind of chamber setting. She's a very explicit posture and personal choreography, the way that her hands move, the way that her body moves.

And I'm curious how much of that is written in the script, how much when she's making hand gestures to communicate with her lack of language in that sequence, Michaela, is that all there? Is that something you guys are figuring out when you're working on the scene? Some of it, like the hand gestures was all there. That was something in the script that, long story, but due to my love of Anna Corinna, it's like a vague, I stole it from,

and I didn't even steal it. It's like, anyway, love Anna Corinna. I love the movie, too, but the book novel. The novel? Apparently. Okay. The, but she came, to set with so much of that already worked out. And that was truly what one of those, I remember when

we made, Ain't the Body Saints, Rooney didn't want to, like, let me hear her accent until day one. And I was nervous because, like, it's a thing. And then she did it. I was like, oh, this is perfect. Why was I scared? You're an incredible actor. You're going to nail this. And with Annie, she had done so much work into the physicality, not just of the performance stuff, which was a whole other thing, but just the way that she carries herself, the way that she holds things within, the way she uses her hands, and the few times where she would let the pop star flare pop through,

like when she snaps her fingers. Like every now and then that would pop through, in a very calibrated sense, but everything else was so, she'd worked through, like, I think, every gesture in advance, and it was so incredible to see. Because, again, we'd rehearsed it, but it wasn't until we got to set

that I really saw how much thought she had, given to the physicality. We put so much emphasis on the dancing. Like that was, she had a pop star boot camp. Our choreographer was working with her three months before we started shooting. And then for a year afterwards, because we shot most of the concert sequences much later. And it was incredible to see her, not only her commitment, but the way in which that commitment paid off and what she found that she was able to do.

And so we were always focused on that. We were focused on the dance, focused on the expressiveness that she could, you know, sum it up. But then all of the stuff that was less expressive was what was a beautiful surprise to me on set. How did you execute the concert sequences and make them seem as though they were happening in a stadium environment? What we, I don't, I'm sure there's a million ways to do this. And what we kind of figure it out for us was that we just had to put on a stadium concert show, a tour. Like, not your, just one, five nights, five nights of Mother Mary. And we did it in Bonn, Germany, where we could get a stadium for a week, or two or three weeks.

And we, I mean, hired people who do this for a living. And I was like, this is a whole art form unto itself that I would, I have no idea how, like, I can talk about how to light a set. how to light a stadium is insane. And thankfully, Rina Yang, who was one of the cinematographers in this film, she had a lot of experience with that. So she kind of held my hand through all that. But just putting that on, we, you know, Danny, our choreographer was really instrumental in helping us make it feel real.

Our production designer, Francesca, did tons of research into how to do this. But we were really just like, this is not a movie anymore. We're just putting on a concert and filming it. and we would just play the same song, you know, 30 times every night. But it was like that was, and we had, you know, 500 people, which in a stadium is nothing. That's, you know, the front row. But it was enough for Annie to be able to communicate with the crowd and to feel like she was performing to someone and to engage with them. And I will, my hats off to all of our incredible background talent in Germany because they gave it their all every single night.

I'm hoping you can talk a little bit about the fantastic. asthmagoric aspects of the story. Was it always an essential part of the story, or did this start as something that was more stripped down between two people and then evolve into something that became more ghostly and spiritual? I would say that it always started with a sense, like it was from the very beginning,

had this Gothic quality to it, whether it's, you know, I was definitely thinking about Rebecca when she pulls up to the house, you know, and literal thunder and lightning. Yeah, yeah. And then as I tend to do, I just like remove the tethers of reality and start to explore the themes in a more phantasmagoric way. And I tried to hold back for as long as I could because I didn't want to just like instantly plunge head first into that. But at a certain point, you know, early on the writing, I knew was going to go in that direction.

And I didn't know how far what form was going to take. but I'm really into phenomenology, and I really wanted this movie to feel like a phenomenological, phenomenological exchange between these characters. And I wanted the ghost, which we tried to not even refer to too often as a ghost, to be just energy and emotion exchange between two people that takes form, that takes not human form,

it takes some sort of form. And I like the idea of someone who, you know, sees something that they know is not literally real, but it feels real. And that's what phenomenology is. You have to assess it on the base of the emotional truth that the subject is experiencing.

And so these are two people who are experiencing the same phenomenon that they know is probably not real, and yet it's real to them. And they have to reconcile that. And, and yeah, and so there's a ghost. The reference that I gave

when we were trying to figure out what it would look like was the T-1000 at the end of Terminator 2 when it falls in the lava. Because I love the idea of something that can't figure out what it needs to be. Like it doesn't know what it needs to be. And that I kept showing that sequence where it's like, look, he's turning into all the different forms. And so we tried to find our own version of that. And I've made a movie with a fabric ghost before. And it wasn't intentionally setting out to do that.

But it just made sense for this film. Yeah. And this is like an elegant elevation of a ghost story in a way. Yes. You used puppets? We got some puppets. You know, you're a puppet guy. I love puppets.

Yeah. Talk about it. How'd you figure it out? So we had, I knew it, I knew it was going to start with this weird sort of mass of bloody tissue. The whole tooth thing happened to me, but not the part with the ghost crawling out of my gums. I did have a wisdom tooth crack open. And that was a rod puppet. like two or three rod puppets. I built it out of clay,

or made some clay mackets, and then my friend Annell, who did the ghost from a ghost story, she made these little rod puppets with bellows that would make it breathe for when Sam first season on the floor. And then I knew it needed to transform. And we went through so many iterations of what it would transform into, all involving fabric, but some of them were costumes, some of them were more like sculptures. And then I was looking, I was trying to just figure out a way to make this unique and truly like something that I had never seen before. And I was just looking at YouTube and saw this artist named Daniel Verzl who does these sculptures with wind and fabric. They're just incredibly beautiful.

They feel like they're choreographed, but they're not. It's just fabric moving. He has this custom air table that he uses. And so we reached out to him and asked him if he could collaborate with us and creating. And he does it like at scale, like these huge things. And we did a couple of those. We did some that were smaller. We used all sorts of different fabric.

We had fabric that was covered in gore, just all these different forms. And then photographed all of that. And then composited that into the other footage that we'd already shot. And it was really incredible to just sit there for five. We did to spend five days with a VFX unit just filming fabric in the breeze. And it was really hypnotic. Can you tell me what quantum entanglement is?

It's, I mean, we can go really deep on this. It's when two particles share properties across time and space. So you could have like a, a, let's just say an atom. It's usually it'll be smaller. An atom that is blue, let's say, and blue in a very specific way. And another atom on the other side of the universe has exactly that same color blue. And they're virtually identical. and yet they have no sense of connection in a spatial way.

And it's a phenomenon that was theorized and then eventually proven, and it is one of the best metaphors for a relationship you could possibly hope to find. And did you stumble upon it while writing this? Like, why did it become a hallmark for it? I had known about it for a while because I love quantum physics. I was working on, at one point, I was working on the Joe Dante movie Explores.

I was working on a TV show adaptation of that and completely destroyed my brain trying to research every aspect of quantum physics. And that show never happened, but it did give me a deep love for something I cannot wrap my head around.

Like, I cannot explain it. I don't understand. I'm terrible at math, but I love it. And so it worked its way in here very, very quickly. I love how unpredictable your movies are. I literally could never imagine what you're going to do next. But I do like asking you, do you know what?

I think if you started writing something, have you already made something? I'm going to knock on wood because we just were in prep right now. So ideally, this one will happen. This one is, God, I'm going to just shoot. myself on the foot. I'm like, this is a small film. I'm just going to make a small film. Mother Barry, too. Yeah, exactly. It's a very small film. But yeah, we'll be, we're underway on that right now. Okay. David, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last

great thing they've seen? You are a truce in a file. Yes. The last great thing I saw was the Alamo Draft House showed Melancholia about two weeks ago. And I hadn't seen it in about 10 years. And it is, it's long been my favorite Von Trier movie, but it's better now than it. I was like, how have I been sleeping on this movie for 10 years? This is utterly incredible. I know you covered it last year. We did, yeah.

25 or 25. And I was so happy to just see it on the big screen. And then I also want to give a, that's an old movie, a new movie that I saw last year, but also have repeatedly watched this year as a testament of Anne Lee, which I just can't get enough of. Absolutely. breathtaking movie. I can't stop listening to the soundtrack. It is a movie that is quickly rising as one of my all-time favorites. They would make an incredible double feature with Mother Mary, too. I mean, they're a match made in heaven. I had not even thought about it, but I'd love to go see that

double feature. Everybody give it up for David Lowry. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to David Lowry. Thanks to our friends at Vitiates. Thanks to Yossi Salick. Hey, you're going to come back for a truly great movie next time? I would hope so. I mean, I love this. tradition of you sending me off to the theater to see sort of difficult to stomach. Yeah, Paw Patrol 2 next for you? What do you want to do? What's on your radar?

Madonna's career? I've not been... Is Madonna going to be in a film any time soon? No, she... Her biopic Thank God. Will not happen, but it will be portrayed as if it were real in the studio season two. Because God is good, because we don't need anyone destroying her legacy like that. Okay. Take it up with Julia Garner. I'll take a look at the coming releases. Okay.

Thanks to our... producer Jack Sanders for his production work on this episode and that live event. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support. Next week, we are drafting again. We've actually already recorded it. It's the Star Wars movie draft. It was totally normal. And I had a perfect draft.

Yes, Amanda did very well. I yelled at Amanda. She yelled at me. Everybody else was chill. We'll see you then.