The Big Picture - ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse’ vs. ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ Plus: Avi Belkin on ‘Mike Wallace Is Here’ | The Big Picture

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Sean and Amanda finally cave and watch each others’ beloved films after months and months of refusing (1:00). Then, director Avi Belkin joins the show to talk about his motivation for diving into a subject like Mike Wallace (1:13:23). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Avi Belkin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelley, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. Up on our site, The Ringer is breaking down the 40 best singles and albums from 1999, covering Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, Mariah Carey, and tons more. And to accompany that piece, we filmed our staffers discussing what they agreed and disagreed with from the article and debated what should have won. You can read the piece on theringer.com and watch the video at youtube.com slash TheRinger. I'm Sean Fennessey. And I'm Amanda Dobbin. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about our very particular interests in very particular kinds of movies.

Amanda, listeners don't yet know it, but I am on vacation. Even though you hear my voice, I'm not here. And I am recording an episode with you that is, I think, time independent. It exists outside the scope of the normal movie-going industry that we are always talking about here. Yes. It's a culmination of our podcast interest. That's right. This has been a sort of a bit, a theme that has been building.

So it is, it's timeless. And also, you know, of this podcast moment in a very exciting way. Yes, we're going down a rabbit hole of our own digging. And the point of this podcast is to talk about two movies, one that you've chosen and one that I've chosen, that represent, I think, ultimately the difference in our true taste. Now, I think you and I are both open-minded, perhaps me more than you, about all movies. Already rolled your eyes. I'm picking the fight. I'm already picking the fight.

But there are things that are very core to us that get us excited and they get us enthused and those core things tend to be things that we don't specifically agree on and so we picked two movies which movie did you pick i picked sense and sensibility the 1995 version of sense and sensibility directed by ang lee uh written by emma thompson which is a classic and which you had never seen despite being a person who sees basically every movie under the sun, all of my favorite movies you've ever seen. And this is one of them. I think this is the only Ang Lee movie I hadn't seen.

Right. Yeah. We'll get into Sense and Sensibility in full. And then the other movie, of course, which I think was the inspiration for this original challenge, is Spider-Man colon Into the Spider-Verse. Yes. Which was a 2018 animated film that came out last December. On this show, Micah Peters and I had a conversation about that show in part because

I knew that you were not terribly interested in this movie and were not going to see it. And there's probably a couple reasons for that. One, it's a superhero movie. You see a lot of superhero movies. You're not totally against that conceit. But two, it's animated. And you would describe it as a cartoon. Well, I'm excited to talk about that. Okay. I've entered this exercise, as I hope you have, by the way. Let's just set out the expectations. I have an open heart and it was really, I watched this because I know that it's a movie that you really love and also many listeners of this podcast really love.

And it was really successful in the box office and also very critically celebrated. And so I wanted to understand that. And I really tried to engage with this movie and also the whole cartoon controversy that has hung over this podcast for so many months now and to think about how I respond to these types of movies and visuals and why. And it's been really interesting for me. We don't have to get super theoretical off the top, but I'm trying. This is a spirit of interest and engagement. I think we come to both of these movies with good faith. With an expectation that we want to understand why certain things appeal to us and why they don't and why certain things appeal to mass audiences. Because one thing that I think is key about both of these movies is that they were both big hits

and that they were both Oscar winners. And there's something very interesting about that, that even though we have a difference of opinion about the things that are core to us, these things tend to have a lot of things in common. There's a kind of credibility, authenticity, vulnerability. There's something going on in the stew of two movies that could not seem more apart, yet somehow probably philosophically binds the show that we've been doing for the last year or so. Would you agree? Yes, I would. I would also say, and this is possibly like too sunny and optimistic a look on it. I think they're both the best of their genre or they really excel. And there is an extent to which these are just two really well-made movies.

And they're watchable and people respond to them. And we spend so much time talking about all of the failures and the things that don't go well in the moviemaking industry. And often how things that we really love and think are of quality don't connect with audiences but sometimes you just get good movies in some respects we're here to celebrate yeah and others i think we'll interrogate okay you have very generously charitably agreed to open this conversation with an exploration of spider-man into the spider-verse we obviously have to begin by getting a general review of the movie. What did you think of this 2018 animated feature?

I was pretty charmed by it. Okay, I knew you would be. I really was. You know, I have been pretty charmed by all the Spider-Man movies. I think Spider-Man is the most accessible of the major comic book characters, at least that have been adapted to movies thus far. I mean, it's just a teenager, you know, and this movie makes explicit some pretty obvious themes in the story of Spider-Man of just like being a teenager is hard and then you

don't know what's going on with you and you just want to be in the world, but also you have to find your higher purpose in life. So that has always been understandable and relatable and lends itself to the type of storytelling that makes the most sense in the comic. Again, I don't want to be condescending at all, but to the sense that comic books are about accessing your inner child, there's something about using spider-man as that vehicle that has always aligned to me yeah i think most spider-man movies and especially the most recent batch that sony and marvel have been making are very focused on that adolescent transition that you're describing and they have really just as much in common i think with the john hughes movie as they do with iron man and it's a key part of telling the story where I think this movie

strays purposefully from that formula is it tends to very specifically yada yada origin. And it shows us the origin of the Miles Morales character,

but there are obviously a million other spider people in this, spider objects in this. And while we do get Miles' adolescence, we also get a pretty complex arrangement of story this is not it's not your standard tom holland goes into high school one day and he encounters zendaya and then they have awkward chemistry and then they fall in love and

then he saves the day this is it's It's literally a mold. They're shifting universes. Yes. And bringing different characters from it. And I was specifically curious about how you felt about that. Because that is the thing that is, on the one hand, the most like adult teenage boy. But on the other hand, I think really creatively and just weirdly executed in this movie. Yes. I think that the meta-ness of that storytelling and the commentary, and even as

they're doing it, they're winking at it so that there's a signal to the audience that you don't have to actually pay attention to the nuts and bolts of this. We know it's kind of a mechanism, which is what I did. I think especially the first time I watched it, I did watch this two times, everyone. I did my homework. I was like, I basically don't know what's happening, but I didn't really care because I found all of the other characters. You know, I was happy to see them. I mean, I love it. Like, Nick Cage is in this movie. That's hilarious. John Mulaney's in this movie. And the way that they do it is knowing and funny. And I like those voiceoversovers the thing where they reset every

time and they're doing the comic book things and it's you know it's chris pine then jake johnson then nick cage it's i was i thought it was funny and so i didn't really care about the nuts and bolts of the multiverse experience i don't think you have to which is part of the charm yeah i think this one of the things that I think is so exciting about this movie is that it has completely removed us from the contraption that Marvel built around all of their movies, where it's like, if you don't catch this one thing, you won't understand this thing. This stands alone. It is a separate verse, for lack of a better word. And so you can enjoy it in a very kind of pure straight ahead way without getting all bound

up by all of the linguistic mumbo jumbo or trying to understand the science or even like the origins of any of the characters like that stuff actually doesn't matter if you let yourself be inside of it i remember specifically seeing it for the first time with micah and he and i just didn't know a lot about it and i remember even last year early in the year thinking it was a very strange choice for sony to put this movie in theaters because i thought it was going to undermine everything that they had accomplished with the tom holland movies and it seemed a little bit like you know there's this whole little substrata of of animated movie releases that are about superheroes and they're they're like there's like a series of justice league movies there's a series of like

iron man movies there are avengers animated movies those movies are not quote-unquote canon they don't have anything to do with what the mcu is doing they're just like they're kind of for like nine-year-olds they're not for 14-year-olds and i thought this was going to be one of those and so when i went in i was like a little dubious even though people i knew had said this was going to be really good i was like i don't know this feels completely inessential and I think Mike and I were both had our minds expanded we were laughing a lot and we were excited and it was like there's a lot of good action in this movie too what kind of expectation did you bring to it other than Sean told me I have to watch this it's a great question it's not just you a lot of people I mean I do think a lot of people who

listen to this podcast have been like Amanda you, you'll love it. It's great. And I think that that was both right and a fundamental misunderstanding of me. But no, I did love it. I understood what there was to love in it. And I think my expectations, by the time I saw it, I was aware of, you know, the meta-ness of it. Also, just that Phil Lord is part of this movie you you have a certain expectation of tone the producers are important even though those guys didn't direct this movie i think miller and lord being the yes you know lord doing the story and writing the

screenplay along with rodney rothman and then chris miller producing you're gonna get more 21 jump street than you are thor dark world exactly Which I love 21 Jump Street, the reboot, not the original. Yes. I haven't seen the original. We're a little young for the original. Yeah, exactly. I also was aware of just of the stacked cast at this particular point. And so that was very exciting.

It was kind of like my own Easter egg kind of being like, oh, and there's Brian Terry Henry. And oh, you know, there's Mahershala. And that was exciting. I want to talk more about the voice casting, voice acting. I thought it was phenomenal in this movie. So I expected, and I think I knew a little bit about kind of what this movie does for Spider-Man in terms of just the larger idea of like anyone can be Spider-Man and opening it up. And a lot of people seeing themselves in, in this movie and that the movie opening up that

possibility to a lot of people. And as you were talking about the story, I was thinking that I think the greatest achievement of this story is how it uses all of that, that mumbo jumbo and such the multiverse stuff is happening that this idea of, oh, there are so many Spider-Mans and anyone can be Spider-Man just kind of slips under the radar. And I did really think to myself, a live action version of this movie would be too treacly and movie of the week. And you couldn't convey this lovely message in this way with real life with real life humans it would just feel so forced i think that's there's two things that this movie could not accomplish because it's animated one of them is what you're saying which is this the whole theme of anybody can be spider-man even the even there's never seen in the movie where miles morales says

even me miles morales a biracial kidacial kid from Brooklyn can be Spider-Man. It's never that on the nose, which is wonderful. It's just assumed that this is just how it goes. If Gwen Stacy wants to be Spider-Man, fantastic. If this pig wants to be Spider-Man, fucking go for it, pig. You could do the thing. And that's a very fun aspect of it. The other thing is that the way that this movie looks i mean it's basically psychedelic and the animation

style is such it just like a fight sequence in a in a superhero movie it really can only be so good it just can only be so good and we've talked many times about the the struggles with the end of marvel movies where they either turn into like big alien wars or just two people punching each other and that they never feel like they're made by a filmmaker they always feel like they're made by a pre-visualization unit that works in marvel that said this is where this scene has to go in this movie it's a lot different to me it's actually worth paying attention to the pacing and the choreography and the way that the characters are interacting physically because you're allowed to let your mind go a little bit and you're not

worried about it looking like cgi because it's all animated and you're not thinking about like is the camera on that person's shoulder or did they create this on a green screen yeah and especially i think like the the spider-man swooping scenes are just the moment where it just becomes balletic and amazing and you get like you understand that they just couldn't do this in real life and i i complain so much about all of the crappy CGI and these types of movies and the fakeness and the sense that none of this looks either real or good. And this was obviously very beautiful. Yeah, and I think it also is, it's able to be indebted to things like Spirited Away, as well as, you know, your run-of-the-mill action movie it can have a kind of artistic flair that captain america 3 just can't it just can't have because it would

i think it would confuse audiences to put a stroke like that into a live action comic book movie and for for whatever reason like the glitching for example in this movie i was it stuck it stuck out to me a lot more when i re-watched it recently and you just couldn't you just couldn't do that in a movie the idea of a character literally glitching in in the world that they exist in i think you could it just wouldn't look good and you would be you know you would your belief would no longer be suspended and it you could just see the mechanics of it you can't see the mechanics of this entirely anyway did you know that all of those people that you ran down their names were going to be in this movie did you know Mahershala played a role here

I did because the red carpet scenes from when this photos from when this were released there were a lot of Mahershala and Brian Tyree Henry photographs which I was just aware of as someone who's a devoted fan of both those people I have to say right now I think Brian Tyree Henry might be the greatest living actor it's possible this scene where he is outside the door of I guess it's Miles's dorm room because they have dorm rooms in his private high school his private high school yeah in. And I guess they only stay there during the week. And he says to his mom at the beginning, I'll see you on Saturday. Yeah. Very strange.

Yeah, anyway. That, after watching it once, that is the scene that stayed with me. And it's just because Brian Tyree Henry, once again, just takes like four minutes of a movie and steals it away from everyone else. And this time he just does it with his voice. It's tremendous. He's brilliant in the movie as the son of a cop dad. I can certainly relate to some of the struggles and some of the upside of the experience that Miles is having in the movie. Brian Tyree Henry last year appeared in seven movies in addition to appearing brilliantly as Paperboy in atlanta this guy's just working he's putting in work now i suspect the work that he did into the spider verse was not as challenging

as maybe the work he had to do in widows but it is kind of amazing and this year is not such a huge change he's in four movies this year including uh don't let go and child's play which have already come around and and joker and Intelligence, which are still to come. I really appreciate that he is genre blind. You know, that he wants to do like a classy Steve McQueen crime movie and an animated movie and Joker and something as schlocky as Child's Play.

It's pretty cool. You can always tell a little something about actors when they bounce like that, especially when they know they have a lot of credibility in the moment. Yeah. I really admire that. Who else in the voice cast did you enjoy? Love Mahershala, always.

You know, it's just what a year for him. Were you up on the Prowler? Did you know all about that character? No, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, we can talk about all of the references that I just straight up didn't get, which didn't really affect the way that I experienced the result of the movie. But there were times, for instance, that first action sequence when Miles encounters the original Peter Parker, like before, I guess, the rupture. The Chris Pine Peter Parker. Yes. and there are a lot of villains i believe from from the universe from the green goblin kingpin it's all over your head no idea so i think this is actually a credit to the

movie and part of what makes it fun but also makes it seem like a very standalone experience um it reminds me a lot more of a comic book where you'd have an issue of a comic book where six villains would team up against Spider-Man. Because there's a bunch of villains in this movie. Like you're getting Scorpion, you know, the guy with the big scorpion tail. You're getting Kingpin, who is this crime boss and who is given this very heartfelt backstory that makes him sort of a complicated, nuanced character. Even though he looks like tom brady wearing the oversized coat on the sideline he's got those big broad shoulders

um and you've got the prowler who is also his uncle and a whole bunch more is the prowler his uncle you know honestly part of the reason that this movie appealed to me is because i is i never read any of the miles morales okay run of comic books, which I believe were written by Brian Michael Bendis, who is a producer on this movie, who's considered kind of one of the great 2000s era comic book writers, who helped reinvent a lot of this stuff. And that's something that's happening a lot now in these Marvel movies even, where the more recent storylines, they're not just mining stuff from the 70s and 80s. They're starting to lean into like 03, 08. Jason Concepcion could tell you a lot more about that. But I think that the decision to do more of that is leading to just like a slightly more progressive version of these movies because the stories are more interesting and they're

not as concerned about like, what if we put five villains in a movie? They're like, cool, we'll just find another five for the next one. It doesn't matter. Whereas in the traditional Marvel movies, I think there's a lot of like, this one has to be about the Winter Soldier and he fights the other guy. Well, for me in this case, and part of it is just because when there were five villains and there was a lot of action going on, I think I zoned out a little bit. I was just kind of like, okay, at some point I'll learn what happens. It doesn't really matter.

But they aren't the stakes. That's what I was going to say is that because there are so many villains that actually the stakes of the movie are about Miles Morales as Spider-Man figuring out how to be Spider-Man and how to help all his other Spider-Men and women and pigs. The other thing that is relevant to this conversation that I enjoy is in the same way that Miles is not your typical Spider-Man, Catherine Han is not your typical Dr. Octopus. And I don't know if that's canon, but just the idea of a woman being Dr. Octopus was like kind of a wow. And the reveal of her is a big reveal in a way that it would be shocking if you saw that in a traditional live action movie. And I appreciate that the movie kind of is constantly fiddling with your expectations. Yes. Though I think, I'm not sure I received that as a reveal,

or not as a reveal, but even as like something surprising. For me, I was just kind of like, oh, now also this person is a villain, which is an achievement in its own way, right? That if you're going into it and that there can be men and women and different types of villains and it doesn't, and it all feels natural. So what else stuck out to you about this? this well are we going to talk about the animation yeah tell me what you think well i was i was talking with our producer bobby wagner about watching this um because he's been anticipating this episode i i felt for the first 30 minutes

like i didn't know where to look. And I was kind of like, you know, when they first showed people movies and there was like the train coming through the thing and they just didn't understand what was happening. They thought they were going to get hit by a train. Yeah, I didn't think I was going to get hit by a train. But the sense of not understanding like what was going on in the screen and how to process the information. I would say it took me about 30 minutes to even like really know what was going on. I mean, I understood the plot and I can follow basic voice acting. A very funny mental image that just popped into my head is you getting smashed in the face with webs from the web slinger and being like watching a movie thinking you're just enjoying it and then web is on your face.

That's where my head went. All right. That's fine. Not in a violent way. No, I know. More in a Three Stooges movie kind of way. You have to understand I was like home alone. Not in a violent way. No, yeah, no, I know. No, no. More in a Three Stooges movie kind of way. You have to understand, I was like home alone. It was a Saturday night. I gave a Saturday night to this. Thank you. And I was just like, I'm going to do this. And then I like, just imagine me sitting alone at home on the couch, just like being like,

like peering like an old grandma at the giant computer screen being like, what's happening? Were your eyes darting back and forth? Yeah, I really, it was, I didn't know where to look. My brain didn't know how to process the information, which is not, that's about me and what I'm used to watching and how you, kind of how you learn visual styles and learn how to watch types of movies. And I just don't, didn't know how to watch this. So I it out you settled in yeah I settled in I think that you can understand that pace a little bit more and you start to understand oh they're like doing a literal comic book and oh this is what the glitching is and oh you know it doesn't matter if I don't know who the villains are and you can kind of you learn what to look at and learn how

to understand the information so I, I started thinking a lot about how, about the visuals of comic books. As I was thinking about all of my complaints about Marvel movies throughout the years and why I think they look so bad. And you're always like, well, that's a comic book reference. And I like really got so deep. I was really trying to read like art history about comic books. Cause there's not enough of that, by the way, because apparently art historians don't take comic books seriously. And then no shit. Well, well, you know, one of the reasons is apparently because it's somewhere between like it should it should like literature historians take it seriously. Should art historians should, you know.

Yeah. And I think it's somewhere in between. That's part of the mission, I think, of this show, too, is the high and the low and where they collide. And then I started reading a lot about color theory and the actual color palettes of the different things. Because this is so reductive, but I spent so much time thinking about this. And this is what I decided is that the actual color palette that Marvel uses, I don't like it. When you say Marvel, do you mean Marvel Comics or Marvel movies? Well, both, because to an extent, the movies are based on the comics, but everything,

some of it is just that it's always set at night. So a lot of it's dark and there's like a lot of just dark black ink. And so then you need like super bright contrast colors, but that particular contrast is not my ideal. And then there are a lot of like purples what's up with all of the purple it's easy to shoot yeah it's easy to shoot against green screen a lot of character costumes do have purple in them it's a royal color so it's meant to indicate a kind of power but i take your point i will say there's two there's probably two things to say about this and this is a very interesting conversation to have so thank you for taking it to this place um on the one hand i think that the movies have never quite captured what it's like to look at

a comic book and i don't just mean because they're not animated right i mean because there is a kind of unreality to a comic book and there is a kind of forced essential textural experience when you're watching a movie and so the idea of somebody wearing a latex costume is brilliant on the page and it's just always going to be just kind of a little bit stupid when you see that person in real life. I think actually the X-Men movies have done a little bit of a better job of saying like, here's what the practical version of these outfits would look like. And the Marvel movies to their credit are trying to be faithful, but they can't help but look odd. Spider-Man's really one of the only characters who has ever been seamlessly transitioned.

In the Sam Raimi movies, and you see him, you're like, that is literally what Spider-Man looks like in the comic books, and that's what he looks like on screen in live action. The other stuff,

like think of what Thor is wearing in the early Avengers movies. It's like, this is really stupid. He just looks really dumb. Yeah, it's very weird. I would argue at this point, we've seen it so many times

that like that type of comic book suit is what I think of when I think of a superhero in my mind. Yeah, I know it's been established now and you expect like weird textures and like little nipple indents or whatever. I just that's like that's part of the visual language that I've learned. And that probably, and that predates Marvel too. That's going back to the Batman movies in the nineties. But the only other thing I wanted to say about it is you kind of, you can't paint with a broad brush for lack of a better word about all the comic books because some books are really bright and effervescent and happen in the daytime. Some are like Daredevil for instance, and always happen at night and are always kind of gritty and grim and some are intergalactic and those have a different kind of visual tonality so i think that's tough to say there that's true and there are scenes in spider-verse for example when uh

the jake johnson park spider-man is teaching miles how to swing after after that run-in at the science lab and it's like the beautiful autumn leaves during the day and i was like wow this is so beautiful i That is beautiful. I just wish. I wish they all looked like this. And obviously this climactic fight. Is like really really psychedelic technicolor. But bright.

But it is a sort of daylight-ish. There's just not like shadow creeping everywhere. There's so much shadow in so many comic books, or at least the ones that I have seen. And I find myself, I just don't respond to it as much. It's so funny. I was thinking about, we've never talked about this, but an artist that you and I both really love. And as do like millions of people across the world. This is not original.

Congratulations to us. But Sean and I both really love Ellsworth Kelly. And that's like a particular favorite of both of ours. We've never really talked about why. Would you like to do so right now? Well, I wanted to ask you because for me, and I think for everyone else, but those colors are obviously so powerful, but they're bright. There is like daylight behind them. Do you know what I'm saying?

I do. He's often on white canvas. Yeah. I can tell you what I respond to about him, which is it's often contrast. And in many ways, what you see is not dissimilar from seeing the Avengers lined up together. There's that guy, there's that guy, there's that guy, there's red, there's blue, there's yellow. And an Ellsworth Kelly painting is about shape and it's about depth and it's about organization. I think you and I are both very organized people. It is.

The organization is what I respond to as well. For sure. That is definitely a thing that I think we're locked in on. And it is about what happens when you put blue next to red, what happens when you put green next to white and what does that make your mind do? And there's a version of that in modern art that is like Rothko where everything bleeds and it's about pain and it's a version of that in modern art that is like Rothko where everything bleeds and

it's about pain and it's traumatic and then there's a version of it that is a little bit more austere and is a little bit more clear and we create buckets in our mind for how things ought to be and now if I can compare it directly to superheroes it's like being a kid and saying I have 10 action figures and one of them is Iron Man and Iron Man is yellow. And one of them is Spider-Man and he is red. And I put them next to each other and they are the Avengers. And it might be absurd to say that that artwork is a bit like arranging your toys, but it has always kind of had that primal reaction for me. They're primary colors and they're primary shapes.

They're really, really simple. The organization and the shape of it, I completely agree with you. That's what I respond to as well. But for me, I really do. I look at an Ellsworth Kelly and I'm like, that's like the orange-red. That's the perfect color. Like, they did it. They found the thing.

It's like if you, you know, whatever higher being you believe in had to say, like, here's blue. And I gave you green. And I gave you red. here it is and there is something about like the actual act of those colors and how they're used that is really powerful and really speaks to me and I I brought all that up just because I guess that I do have a powerful reaction to colors used that way and I think that sometimes in comics I don't have the same reaction and they are so visual and so color-based and I am just it's like I said at the beginning my brain doesn't totally know where to look so that's a really interesting point and it's nice to know that we share that in that way but that makes me think that you should admire more animated movies because there

are some movies that can achieve a lot by doing that same thing. And I said, like, guys, I really I went on a journey with this exercise. I really am taking it seriously, everybody, because I did really start thinking about, you know, I like to be a jackass and be like, I don't like cartoons because I push people's buttons because that's like what you guys sign up for when you listen to a podcast. But I was thinking I was comparing this to the, you know, the Disney hand-drawn animation that I grew up with and like watching Rugrats, which I also grew up with. And just like the concept of illustration and animation and there is a spectrum. And I do think that there are types of animation that I like more, that I think that kind of speak to me a bit more. I don't know how to account for the basic thing of my brain just shutting off when it's not a human. I haven't really resolved that yet.

Even when the acting is as good as it is in this movie? Well... Because there are other animated movies with wonderful performance. And that is a factor in whether a movie works or not. When I think of Brian Tyree Henry's performance, I'm just thinking of his voice acting. There is something that I'm just attaching to the human aspect of it. I mean, I can remember the scene. You can't see the character.

Yeah. And it's something like that it's like i would love to see him there are parts of this where i really parts of this movie that i thought you actually could do this in person with this cast and like how exciting would that be and i understand it's like takes a lot of money and time and you would sacrifice other elements of it but um i think part of the reason for that is because most of these characters most of the voices actually look like their characters. Now, John Mulaney does not look like a pig.

That's true. But, I mean, if you go down the list here, Shameik Moore obviously voices Miles Morales, and he's a bit older than Miles Morales, but he has a somewhat similar look. Jake Johnson, that's pretty close to a Jake Johnson. He does not look like Jake Johnson. He looks closer to Chris Pine. This was one of my superficial complaints is like, I think they could have made cartoon Peter Parker hotter. If we were going to do it, let's just go for it. Now my taste. So I will say that from both a physical and a life stage perspective, I deeply relate to the Jake Johnson Spider-Man. Oh, I think he's wonderful. I love that performance and I love Jake Johnson,

but Jake Johnson is like, he looks like every guy in Brooklyn. And this Peter Parker that they drew is like an Abercrombie model. No, the first one is an Abercrombie model. The second one is like a little bit brown hair. It's still the same exact facial structure and body structure. And also when he's like lying there eating the pizza he's still his arms are jacked which i noticed it's because he's been bitten by a radioactive spider i got he doesn't come by that honestly saying abercrombie peter parker is not the peter parker that i would

have requested okay he's close enough he's all right maher shalali the prowler i mean he looks a lot like maher shala yeah brian Brian Tyree Henry obviously looks a lot like him. You know, we don't really know what Nicolas Cage looks like underneath that spider noir mask. It has the same essence. I don't think Liev Schreiber looks anything like Kingpin. No. Catherine Han has a certain... Certainly.

Yeah. There's definitely a resemblance there. And I wonder if that's part of influencing. Because if you're watching an animated movie that's like a Dr. Seuss adaptation, Bill don't look like a who you know no one looks like a who so that could be a factor too where this is a movie that is mostly about humans some of them are super humans yes yeah that's a good point they're not animals they're not creatures they're not the uh animated evocation of a human emotion i love that I love that movie, though. Inside Out.

Yeah, Inside Out really worked on me in terms of animated movies. Okay. So you need there to be a notion of humanity for this to work. Mm-hmm. Yes. Like we said on the now infamous Lion King podcast. Still licking my wounds. But some of it is that I like an imagination that is based in reality that i respond to that um that because there's something for me to connect onto maybe

that means that i just have no curiosity as a human and i'm no fun to hang out with but even like in i don't know i but even in fantasy series i like i have actually read all of the harry potter because that's just like, what if magic were here in our world? But once you start doing your Lord of the Rings stuff, I'm just like, please spare me. I want to get to Sense and Sensibility soon. Okay. So let's try to wrap up Spider-Verse. Okay. is that it is the first animated film that is non-Pixar and non-Disney to win Best Animated Feature since Rango,

which if you have heard me on a podcast, you know is in the conversation for my favorite movie the last 10 years. Now, Rango doesn't do any of the things that you just described. It is not about humans at all. It's not realistic at all. It's a ridiculous... Is that like the frog who's Hunter S. Thompson? That's a rude way of describing what the movie is, but it's not utterly inaccurate.

He's a gecko. Okay. Well, you know. And he's voiced by Johnny Depp. And they, but it's the Hunter S. Thompson poster, right? He sort of is doing Hunter S. Thompson, yes. But he's also sort of doing 70s American cinema, Jack Nicholson-esque characters. Anyway, we don't have to get into Rango. I love Rango. No, it's not all the boy stuff. It's other stuff too. Rango is

a wonderful movie. But I like the idea of these two movies in this decade bookending what has essentially been like a Disney decade. And particularly in animation, but also in the MCU and in these live action remakes that we've been talking about and in a series of other films. And I'm curious to see if like Disney's going to give up the ghost on this a little bit or if these were just completely anomalous and it just happened to be right time, right year. The Pixar movie last year was maybe

not as beloved you know that was incredibles 2 so it didn't have as much it wasn't it wasn't a coco right now the leading candidate is toy story 4 which has obviously been a huge hit i don't think there's nothing like spider verse coming later in the year i don't think like a big animated movie that is a little bit left so what is the legacy of this movie? Well, when I was doing my research, it did seem like Sony was trying to actually copyright the style of animation, which would suggest... This might not be my preferred style of animation, but it certainly seems like a technical achievement. Even I can appreciate that. Yes.

I think, I mean, it was one of the absolute best reviewed movies of the year last year. Yeah, no, I do remember that. In part because of that. Yeah, I understand why. last year. Yeah, no, I do remember that. In part because of that. Yeah, I understand why. So I am curious to what you can do with that against, you know, Disney, who seems to own everything. But at the same time, it seems like they would try. What else? What else do you need to say about the Spider-Verse?

Who's your spider object of desire? What does that mean? Just the character you like the most. Well, object of desire actually has this mean just the character you like the most well object of desire actually has this very different valence but you can interpret it however you like if you want to get sexual about a spider person but i think if you pulled it most people would hear object of desire that way my non-sexual favorite spider man well i really did enjoy jake johnson's performance i have to say that i thought the nick kate joke was very funny and it's always great to have john mulaney in the in the house but you gotta go jake johnson well done we agree yeah it's it's it's peter b parker

right not your traditional Peter Parker. He is the washed version. I noticed that the gif that you sent me when I was rude to you about Sound of Music, I was rude but true to you about Sound of Music, was from the Jake Johnson Spider-Man montage. The two characters I identified with most in 2018 were Peter B. Parker as portrayed by Jake Johnson and Ethan Hawke's character in First Reformed. It's what a journey you're on. I'm on an amazing journey. Let's journey to, when does this film take place? The 1800s? The early 1800s. It's the Regency period. The

Regency period. This is 1995 Sense and Sensibility. It is, I guess, from an aesthetic perspective, about as far as you can get from Into the Spider-Verse as I can imagine. I did think a lot about that as I was watching it. Just the actual visual experience. This movie is traditionalist. That does not mean it's not beautiful because it is quite beautiful. But I want to know what you want to know from me about this. Because I think I can do like a pretty flip version of my take on it.

And then I can be much more sincere about some things. I didn't do a flip version. I know you didn't. You brought it. I have a flip version of it, but no, I thought about it. So now you have to think about this. You also have to, I want you to think about it. And I also want you to engage with it in the context of,

I mean, this was... It's time. Well, and kind of movie and Oscar history because this was immediately received as, like, a great movie. It was nominated

for a lot of Oscars. Emma Thompson won for the screenplay. And I think is regarded as the best Austin adaptation. And I, for my money, it's kind of one of the best costume dramas,

which is just a genre that you don't watch. I mean, I've certainly seen some, and I've seen some famous ones. I'm more interested in the kind of royal costume drama than I am the common folk. Or even more specifically, the trials and travails of the struggling bourgeoisie. That's like a trope that I'm not a fan of. Or even more specifically, the trials and travails of the struggling bourgeoisie. That's like a trope that I'm not a fan of. And I think that's maybe where a little bit of my Jane Austen problem comes in, which is not that I – she's obviously a brilliant writer and one of the most important writers of the last 300 years. There's no doubt about that.

I'm glad we got that on the record for me. I'm not going to blaspheme Jane Austen, but the kinds of characters she's interested in, and I don't mean women. I mean, just this milieu is not as compelling to me. Now I'm sure that I have some, some boy mentality that I bring into that, but, and I've only read, I probably have only read Emma if I'm thinking about it, because that was the only book that was ever put in front of me in school. It's a one it's a good one and i like that movie and i've seen that movie um but there's just something about these kinds of characters and what is most important to them that i sometimes struggle with now maybe that is a little bit of a assumed like class war that i'm waging where i'm like what i am is a middle class kid from Long Island with blue collar parents.

And I don't really get this. Now, obviously, I'm older now and I watch everything. So you're much more open to every experience put on film and everything that you read. But I feel like a little bit of it starts for me at a young age. Yeah, maybe it doesn't apply. It's not relevant. So what is it for you that clicked for you with Jane Austen? Well, I want to answer that specific thing and with respect to sense and sensibility, because one of the things that I think Emma Thompson does in this movie that maybe doesn't even happen in the original sense and sensibility, like the novel, and is perhaps like updating Austen more than traditionalists might like. But she does find things beyond these people are just concerned about marriage. And I mean, on the surface, it really just is two to three love stories, but it is really about where a group of women is going to live and how they're going to exist in the world and what options are available to them and what options are not

and how they face that and how they maneuver within like a very strict set of rules and expectations that are set out for them, which I think I certainly relate to and a lot of people can. But she does. It is slightly more than just like a marriage plot. When did you first see this movie? In 1995. So you're not even a teenager? No, I would have been 11. Okay. And this is definitely how I learned about Jane Austen because no one reads Jane Austen before 11. But

I don't know if you remember this. So 1995, in addition to Sense and Sensibility, is Clueless, which is an updating of Emma. There was also the very famous BBC Pride and Prejudice miniseries starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, which is kind of... And then there's also, I was rereading some of the reviews and had forgotten that there's a persuasion in 1995. And the funny thing is that all the critics at the time think that persuasion is much better. But that is... That didn't hold up. No, that didn't hold up. but that's four out of the six novels in 1995 so there's there's just like a weird austin boom that i think i must have consumed all of them and this is how i get into all of these like all of the costume dramas because

you know i had to go back and watch like a room with a view and howard zen and all of those i was a little young so like we know why Spider-Verse happened last year. It's because we're in the middle of this crazy superhero boom. So why was there a Jane Austen boom in 1995? I have no idea. I was looking around for it. I feel like if anyone cared, I would have signed a piece, but no one but me cares.

It's not like everyone discovered Jane Austen IP. I mean, there was like a 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice the bbc has been making adaptations like every decade since it existed i don't know how they end up coming together there it i guess it's just kind of that all of the merchant ivory movies peak by the early 90s and so they're like and especially like emma thompson had a lot of success with those so then they must just go to the other material. Yeah, I understood sort of in the ensuing years why it became a cottage industry. This movie was a big hit, like a weirdly big hit for a costume drama. And so I understand the aftermath, but the convergence in a small period of time is kind of strange.

It's really weird in the mid you think it's something about um enduring kind of the foibles of the bill clinton presidency is there something about like the the degrading of our sense of of decency no i don't i just think i was reaching there no i mean possibly yes i mean who knows And kind of like the response to the 80s. Sure. Reagan 80s. I think it's more that like Howard's End was made in 92 and Remains of the Day was made in 93. And they were like, what else? What else can we do?

Okay. So I just want to foreground by saying that I watched the Howard's End miniseries last year. Oh, yeah. Which I loved. And I know you loved it too. Really out well. Electric. Right. I. And I know you loved it too. Bailey Atwell, Electric. Right. I'm in love with her.

Me too. I had a little bit of a problem watching this movie because I was like, this is just Howard's End. Like, they're so similar in their structure and in the characterizations,

at least relative to the miniseries that I watched, where it's an older sister and a younger sister. They're both seeking love. They're both struggling with money. They're hoping to find the right partner. One of them knows there's a partner that's right for them,

and they're waiting a long time for that person to come around. That's really similar. Now, I know what you're going to say. We just had a conversation about two Lion King movies. Every superhero movie is the same. Yada, yada, yada. It's true, yeah. Howard's End, though, and obviously they're different authors

and they're releasing different times but it feels like a format and i think i didn't necessarily realize that there's was basically just a format even to this storytelling oh yeah of course i mean in a lot of ways should i be mad about that am i allowed to yell at you no i mean there's a format to everything like pride and prejudice is like the first i mean shakespeare is the first romantic comedy but then pride and prejudice is there is the text by which all of our romantic comedy is like two people who hate each other and like aren't going to get together and then at the very end they realize oh we love each other and that is how it started so and that's been a template for 200 years now,

almost, yeah, 200. So, I mean, if you want to be mad about that as a template, then you can be, that's your right. And it may not interest you and that's also fine. I think the difference in Howard's Zen and Sense and Sensibility is what they're exploring with that template. How so? Howard's Zen is a lot more about how a person should be in the world and connection.

And it's a lot more open, but it is with ideals of self. And I think Sense and Sensibility is more about social critique. So Howard's End, well, Sense and Sensibility is published in 1811. And Howard's End is published almost exactly 100 years later in 1910. I just feel like Ian Forster owes Jane Austen some money. Yeah, a lot of people owe Jane Austen money. That's okay. We talked about this, that stories are recycled. It's great that actually someone's ripping off a woman for once in our lives. You know, once in history, there is a woman who had some ideas and people are like, you know what? I gonna steal that so where do we begin with this movie in particular what do you what how should we explore the presentation

of the story because one of the things that i thought was interesting in reading about it and i didn't know because i have not read the novel was that emma thompson modernized it in some ways and she took certain aspects of the story out and that the true austinites were like what the fuck man you can't mess with this they They're that way about every single adaptation. Almost like comic book fans. It's true. Yes, that's a good point. They have so much in common.

They do. They do. Yes, it's updated primarily because Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen's first novel and it's not that good. Can I suggest an idea? Sure. Toxic masculinity started with Jane Austen fans. Okay, great. Also, toxic masculinity probably started with Jane Austen if you want to analyze the character.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay, go back. So, you didn't respond to the basic template of two women waiting around to get married. It's not that I didn't respond to it. Okay. I think when you, you've got a movie with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet.

So, you're in good shape. That these are literally two of the 30 best actresses of the last 35 years. So you're, you're in great hands the whole time you're in the movie. I don't really ever, I couldn't really make sense of the stakes. So this movie opens with a dying Tom Wilkinson and on his deathbed, he tells his son,

take care of my second family the family the woman that I married and the children that I had after I abandoned you right? no

his mother died and he remarried oh his mother died excuse me yeah it's like it's the 1700s 1800s people die really easily

got it I couldn't grasp that sure then the son gets together with his wife who who's a terrible person. Fanny, yeah. Fanny. Harriet Walter.

And is going to make certain that this second family gets none of the inheritance, gets no money, gets none of this stipend. And that's a very funny sequence at the beginning of the movie where they have a series of conversations in a short period of time about you'll get 500 pounds, you'll get 250 pounds, you'll get no pounds. Those stakes make sense sure those are real stakes yes you go from being a family of some some regard to a family of meager means and also that you don't get opportunities because of your sex right so they can't just go out and get a job yes they are otherwise would have a dowry of a kind to share with a partner and that would keep them in society.

Yes. I mean, also, their house is taken away from them. They have to move out. They don't have anywhere to live. Do you know what that arrangement is called?

Do you know? It's called an entail. And do you know what other speaking of people ripping off Austin, do you remember the entail as a driving plot of any other major media

that you've consumed in the past? No. Downton Abbey. That's right. Of course. It's all about the Entail. Yes. Okay. Makes sense. Now, you know, it's funny you mentioned that. I really enjoyed Downton Abbey. Yeah. At least the first couple of seasons. It's much so- It killed Matthew and then I was like, what the fuck are you doing? I agree with you. I mean, still the worst decision that Dan Stevens ever made. But yeah, Downton Abbey isane austen plus actual sex people have sex sex i think there's more sex in this movie than people give it credit for but anyway oh i'm not a fan of the illusion of sex i'm a fan of okay the acts so you don't like any movie that happened before 1950

well it depends i mean how do you communicate heat effectively to you and i'm sure we'll get into this more hugh grant is communicating a heat there is like an appeal oh interesting you respond to the hugh grant heat no no i don't i don't i'm saying you do well usually in this movie not as much oh interesting okay i thought you would say he's such a babe in this movie no it's willoughby oh yeah that guy it's willoughby on the horse and how do you communicate it is you have him literally ride in on a white horse in the rain and scoop Kate Winslet up and he's like can I touch your ankle that is Austin erotica if we've ever seen it but continue no that that is reasonable um I think that struggle that I had with the class stuff that I'm talking about is we get this explanation at the top of the film

it's pretty clear to me what's kind of kind of what's happening that they're losing their status and that they have to fight for the future of their way of life, which is also a very comic book kind of theme. It's a very science fiction kind of theme. You know, I, we can draw very direct lines between some of these things. When they lose me is when they're like,

Oh yeah, I'm going to go stay with this woman who has an amazing cottage with the most beautiful vista of all time. And they're supposed to be in peril, but there's this gorgeously shot film in the English countryside and there's this gossipy older woman who basically just wants to take care of them. And there's

this charming fellow who's I don't even know how he's related to anyone who's like, it's so good to see you! And he invites them into their life. And everything just kind of seems fine. So I understand the stakes of needing to get married. Yeah. But their lifestyle, they're kind of like, they're chilling.

They are. I mean, think about what do you actually see them do every day? Sit on a blanket and look at stuff? They aren't allowed to do anything. And they aren't allowed to leave that house. And there's that scene when it's like, when Mrs. Jennings, who is the older woman, who's the mother-in-law to a cousin of the mother in case you wanted the connection. What the hell? I don't know.

You just named like five superhero villains. I can keep a basic family tree together. Okay. Fair enough. Mrs. Jennings. Delightful. mrs jennings who's very funny she's like when she offers to take all the young women to london which is like where the quote season is happening which is where they'll be able to run into the various men that they are interested in and then hopefully things will um progress from there which i still

really relate to remember when you were like in high school and there's like a party and you think the person that you like will maybe be at the party and so then all your you know energy is about like i'm gonna go and maybe i'll see this person or you like have a class with them or whatever this is literally how i got married no i know i went to a party that my wife was at and she walked up to me and she said, I need you to go outside and talk to me right now. And then we did that. And that was our first date. So yes, I can relate to that moment. Well, I always feel like when I'm watching that, that it's that same feeling, that excitement of like, oh, maybe I will actually get an opportunity to talk to the person.

Right. But she takes them there. That's a great opportunity. They need that. Otherwise they would just not have be able to go. They wouldn't be able to leave to participate at all. Because of propriety? Also, I mean, they don't have a place to stay. They don't have money to get there. They can't literally. There's this scene once Willoughby's dastardly plans have been exposed. What an awful dude.

What an awful dude. Eleanor, who is the Emma Thompson character calls Alan Rickman Colonel Brandon to basically just ask can you take us home because we literally we can't get home and the way that she has to ask him because they can like hitch a ride with someone but they're like honestly not allowed or physically able to go the last leg of the journey solo because they have no means to travel. So some of it is about they just, you know, I mean, no one is arguing that Austin society or Regency society was well organized and fair to anyone. I mean, it seems like it was a nightmare. But part of it is just

all of the rules and logistics and how their world was organized, which is that they couldn't do stuff. And I don't want to hit you over the head with it, but women watching things understand the idea of you're not allowed to do something. There are just things that you're not allowed to do. And the question of why was not something that was asked in 1811 or whatever. In the Amanda parlance, I have some questions. Great. Love it. Eleanor Dashwood is our heroine. So you think so? I do. Yeah. And if I'm wrong about that, I'm intrigued to learn how. I think that she is as well because it's obviously that Emma Thompson wrote it and the outcome. But I think that's the central, one of the central questions of the book and the movie to me,

I think, is whose approach is right is it sense or is it sensibility and eleanor is obviously sense and how do you approach a relationship how do you how do you approach life are you going to try to be practical and follow the rules and hope that things work out and uh kate winslet is marianne and she is sense and sentence sensibility which is like the sentimental romantic one who is going to go for it. Risk and pragmatism. Yeah. Now, maybe I'm a bit of an Eleanor, so I relate to Eleanor.

Sure, yeah. I'm trying to understand some of the details. Okay. Emma Thompson's 35 years old when she agrees to write the script for this and shoots this film. She's 35 when she shoots. She wrote it. She was writing it for a while before. In her early 30s. Are we meant to believe Ele She's 35 when she shoots. She wrote it. She was writing it for a while before. In her early 30s.

Are we meant to believe Eleanor's 35? No, that's, they're just stretching it. Is it 25? How old is she supposed to be? I think between 20 and 25. Now, here's the thing. Like in Los Angeles, there are plenty of single people, but there are very few people that are 35

that are as smart and beautiful as emma thompson that are like i can't find my man my partner i can't get this this guy to be with me this is like a now i don't know about that's true austin times like marriage 200 years ago wasn't about like romance it was like an exchange of property but sense and sensibility indicates it is about romance because the conclusion of the film it's transitioning sort of yes okay but i think especially at that level and with people you know the hugh grand character is not allowed to consort with emma thompson's character for a long time because she is, quote, beneath his station. And so there's like not enough. She won't bring enough money to the marriage. I see. So we basically have to suspend

disbelief about Eleanor's age then. Yes. When we're watching the movie. OK, that was a little bit confusing because I believe Kate Winslet is like 18 when she made this movie. 19. 19. Which is quite young and a 16 year divide between the two of them, I think, creates like a little bit of a different narrative rhythm. Yes, that's fair. And their mother seems quite old. I mean, let's, I mean, be kind, but she's... No shots to Gemma Jones, but she looks like she's got typhoid or something. They do like ring her eyes with their red eyeliner.

Yeah. I mean, listen, they just lost their father in the words of Hugh Grant. Okay. Their lives will never be the same again. That's very true. That's very sweet the way that he communicates that. I guess I'm just confused as to why this was a phenomenon, which is not to say it's bad because it's clearly not bad. It's in some ways brilliant.

And in some ways it feels a little bit like what I expected. Why don't you talk about the ways that it's brilliant for a little? You're making a good face. Talk about the visuals. Because we didn't talk about that. You know, I'll say before that, it's obviously brilliantly written and adapted and there are tons of turns of phrase in the film that are really

interesting and there is a kind of anxiety in the exchanges between the characters who can't always say what they really feel. And particularly between Marianne and Willoughby this which is like sort of a will they won't they and you never really get the sense of kind of what is going on between them physically there's a tension and then Willoughby is this like daffy ridiculous dashing but also buffoonish Lothario character he's very funny to watch you get a lot of great exchanges in the movie which i enjoyed it's obviously shot just magnificently and angley is coming off of a handful of films that he has made in his native taiwan and then he's just

starting to make a couple of films stateside he's made the wedding banquet most recently which is why he was hired wedding banquet wonderful film and, wonderful film. And then I think Eat, Drink, Man, Woman comes between the Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility. And you're kind of reaching, you're getting him at a great time. There were so many funny stories reading about this movie, about the way that these people communicated on set because his style is so different from the acting styles of the cast. Yes. There's a, I think a lot of those are from the shooting diary that Emma Thompson published along with the screenplay, and they published it to help promote the movie in 1995. I have a copy of it. I read it all the time. I was reading it last night. And if you like Emma Thompson,

it's so endearing, and you learn a lot about what it's like to make one of these movies. But one of the best kind of running themes is Ang Lee's notes to the actors and they just all freak out. Apparently his first note to Kate Winslet was just, you'll get better. Yeah, he seems really harsh. And then there's also, you know, there are miscommunications

because the way a director interacts with a cast and a crew in Taiwan is very different than in England. And so he was taken aback by some of their methods and vice versa. Yeah, they had notes. Like Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant would say, would it be better if we did it this way? Right. And he would be offended.

And he said he struggled sleeping at night because he was haunted by the fact that he was getting feedback from his cast, which is a really interesting culture clash that you don't think about because you hear Ang Lee and you're like, well, kind of one of the modern masters has won Oscars. I think he's won two Best Director Oscars. He really is kind of at this point extremely underrated. And he has what seems like a kind of silly Will Smith movie coming out later this year. But we shouldn't forget that this is the guy who made Brokeback Mountain. You know, this is the guy who made Life of Pi, Sense and Sensibility. He has one of the most varied and interesting filmographies. He just has a great eye for the English countryside and that's part of what makes the movie appealing and kind of keeps your focus on it is it looks

beautiful. I definitely struggled with the story of like kind of giving a shit about these people too often because I was like, everything just seems fine. It isn't until I think I got much more swept up in it when Marianne eventually sees Willoughby after he's abandoned her at the party. At the party. Yeah. She confronts him. There's that amazing scene when it's Eleanor dancing and she turns and then it's Willoughby. Yes. Fun fact, do you know who Emma Thompson is married to in real life? Is it Willoughby? It's Will amazing scene when it's Eleanor dancing and she turns and then it's Willoughby. Yes. Fun fact, do you know who Emma Thompson is married to in real life?

Is it Willoughby? It's Willoughby. So I don't know who that person is. Greg Wise. And he's primarily Willoughby, but yeah. I mean, has he really done anything of note? He was on the ground. Oh.

He was Mountbatten on the crown, the uncle. That's him. Oh my goodness. Yeah. So at this time, was she still married to Kenneth Branagh oh no so she that's like early 90s and the first part of this diary kind of elliptically alludes to Emma Thompson like writing this script while going through a divorce and just being totally shattered about it and the story goes that apparently she set greg wise up with kate winslet and they like

went on a couple dates and it didn't take and then like emma thompson married willoughby which to make that movie emma thompson i know but it's just also to to be emma thompson to be as like smart and bright as she is and i've written this movie and give this amazing performance and she's clearly as you said like i think you and i agree with eleanor's and have written this movie and give this amazing performance and she's clearly, as you said, like, I think you and I agree with Eleanor's perspective on, in this film

and then all of that happens and then she's like, and also I'll just marry Willoughby. It's, that's, that's an all time. It's a real stunt. Amazing.

So, I guess one of the notable aspects of this is that Emma Thompson is the only person to have won an Oscar for both screenwriting and for acting. She wins in 1992 for Howard's End.

And then she wins for this movie. Why does she not write more? I know she's written some. And she has a Christmas movie coming out later this year. Can't wait. Which I can't say it's really my bag. Why not? I don't know.

It just doesn't. Emilia Clarke, I'm kind of out on non-Khaleesi Emilia Clarke. I think that she was the best part of that movie that I had to see, the Star Wars one. What was it? Solo. That's probably true. Here are her writing credits. Yes.

Wit, the TV movie, the HBO movie, I assume you've seen this. Would you recommend that? No. Okay. In 2005, she has an additional dialogue uncredited on pride and prejudice you think she gets a lot of phone calls it's from people who are like i'm doing austin you got tips oh i'm sure okay then she writes the screenplay for nanny mcphee and nanny mcphee returns nanny mcphee is one of those things where if you're 15 when that movie comes

out which is 2005 you're like em like, Emma Thompson is old as fuck. Yeah. And she's not. She also does Harry Potter in the mix there where she just looks so, she's so wild and then she's wearing those giant glasses that kind of mess with her eyes.

In 2014, she wrote a movie called Effie Gray that I'm not familiar with at all. I confess I have not seen this. This seems to be a deeply British operation, though notable that it stars Greg Wise. Yeah. I wonder how he got that job.

And then a couple things recently, Bridget Jones' Baby, which is the mildly received third Bridget Jones film. I really enjoyed it for the record, but again, that's my wheelhouse.

And then the forthcoming Last Christmas. I guess the other reason you're excited about Last Christmas is because it stars Henry Golding. Yes. I also enjoy the Wham song on which it is based um i feel like she should write more but maybe she's been writing the whole time yeah i don't know i think it is certainly

portrayed like this script took her four to five years ah so i mean and obviously she's working throughout she also says something in the, in the diary about how she, she and Alan Rickman bond because they didn't really like doing theater because there was so much repetition. And it, I, if you're someone who likes moving on and trying on different things, then writing must be like the worst punishment in the world. I say that as someone who tries, right. no longer tries to write for the similar reasons. I don't know how to talk about Colonel Brandon. Oh, yeah.

I would have thought that the Rickman of it all would have spoken to you. I'm fond of him. I'm definitely fond of him as an actor. You didn't find him handsome and dashing? Alan Rickman has a very peculiar way of speaking. And especially in this movie in which he is so recessed. He seems a bit like a Muppet to me.

That seems rude to Alan Rickman. Well, it's not until he has that kind of confessional sequence with Eleanor where he explains why Willoughby is such a bastard that he kind of gets to go full Rickman, and he's pacing, and he's speaking quickly, and he's a little bit more passionate. He's more Snape in this movie in a lot of ways yeah not as evil but they're just the pauses and the repressed repressed hiding a lot of things yes yeah i you know not my favorite rickman

as again i think that we're just gonna have to agree to disagree on the appeal of like handsome repressed men in movies, which is just like a theme for all time. Yes, truly. I can relate to the repression. I know all about that as an Irish Catholic. What else? Why is this movie important? Did you think this movie was funny? Sometimes.

Okay. Sometimes. Could you tell the difference between this movie and say, not the Howard Zinn miniseries, but the original Howard Zinn? Oh, certainly. Tonally, they seem much different. Right. The original Howard Zinn, I thought, was almost too stately. Yes.

And I'm not a huge fan of the Merchant Ivory films. I know why they are as lauded and important and meaningful as they are. It's always fun to talk to Chris Ryan, our colleague and pal, about them because his father was a film critic and those are his father's favorite films. And he worshipped those films. And I can admire things about them, but they feel like they are wearing a shirt that is too tight. They're very stiff, very staid. No, I agree. And I think that part of the reason that it's this particular movie that is so important to me is because, I mean, we talked a lot about visuals on the first half of this, but it's just spectacularly beautiful.

And there's the greens and the colors, and it's all in daylight because, guys, they didn't have electricity. So it is so visually appealing to me. And all of these movies are appealing to me for that reason. But it has spirit. It has a script with both. I think it has ideas, but also it's funny. People are making jokes. There's nothing too melodramatic.

It keeps moving, relatively speaking, for a, it just has a spark. Yeah, I think as a kid, I probably saw the commercial for the movie and thought that it was extremely serious and weighty and really not for me in that way. It's probably why I skipped it. And then you see it and you realize it's not a trifle, but it is much, it's breezier than that. Stakes are a little bit lower, which is something I'm holding against it now, but maybe at the time I would have appreciated more. In terms of the way that it looks, it's funny. I'm looking at the cinematographer, Michael Coulter, who shot the movie. And here are some other notable credits for Michael Coulter.

Notting Hill. Love Actually. Maleficent. Yikes. And 2019's The Hustle. Oh, no. Though I will say, I did think that part of The Hustle looked nicer than it needed to. And then I was extremely aware of the fake parts of The Hustle as well.

Interesting. So I think that he got this job because he shot a little movie called Four Weddings and a Funeral. Which is... Also beautiful. This is an axis of interest for you. Yeah. Michael Coulter's cinematography work. And also, it shares with Four Weddings like a dry sense of humor and a repression and a we're not going to put things out in the open that is very comforting to me. It also shares something with a lot of kinds of movies that you and I always like, which is the movie with many Oscar nominations and only one win in the writing category.

It reminds me a lot of like Get Out where we're like, everybody knows Get Out was the best movie that year. It only won screenplay and that seems ridiculous and it will seem even more ridiculous. Do you think 95, like what is the 95 Oscars? Here are the nominees for best picture. Sense and Sensibility, Il Postino, Colon the Postman,

Babe, Apollo 13, and Brave braveheart which was your winner so 1995 was an extremely important year at the movies for me apparently because apollo 13 is another movie that i've just seen i saw in theaters saw it a hundred times tried to get my parents to send me to space camp i and also clueless was released in 1995 so that's when i woke up at the movies apparently apollo 13 is good i'm not sure a bit i think babe is good too and babe is very relevant to the heated exchange we had about the lion king because i would argue that babe did a lot of that first i don't really remember babe i mean i do it was the pig and he trots around but isn't the sequel supposed to be better imagine being like extremely weird 11 year old-old Amanda Dobbins

being like, take me to Sense and Sensibility and not Babe. That is me in a nutshell. I think now you understand. Il Postino is an interesting artifact of movie Oscar history because it's one of the early

Harvey Weinstein throwing his weight around campaign movies. And this movie has absolutely no legacy in the history of cinema. And yet it sits here with Braveheart and Apollo 13 and Sense and Sensibility, which is just very strange. You know, Braveheart is obviously colored by some of the controversy around Mel Gibson. Does this feel like Sense and Sensibility or Apollo 13 should have won? If I'm picking, then yes. I mean, you know, we can't rationalize the Academy and we can't rationalize Mel Gibson at all. Braveheart is kind of the classic Oscar historical drama.

And in a lot of ways, it shares a lot in common with Sense and Sensibility, just that it's mostly, it's historical, filmed in costume, really long, and British. And it's just that instead of a marriage plot, it's people fighting. So the best movie of 1995 is not nominated for Best Picture. It's called Toy Story, which takes us right back to where we were at the beginning of this conversation, which is not putting the respect on the name of the animated film that it deserves. Is there anything else you want to underline about Sense and Sensibility before we wrap this? No, I think we got it.

I think we both respected the movies that we chose. Yeah. There's one uniting force in the movie. Do you know what the uniting force is for both of these films? I think you're going to tell me. There's one person who made both of these films happen. And her name's Amy Pascal. Oh, wow.

Amy Pascal is the person who greenlit Sense and Sensibility, greenlit Lindsay Doran's idea, who I think worked for Sidney Pollack at the time. Right, Sidney Pollack is in the diaries, but Amy doesn't get a mention, so I didn't know that. So this movie is produced by Mirage, which was Sidney Pollack's shingle. A woman named Lindsay Doran who worked for Rob Reiner for many years

she produced movies like This Is Spinal Tap was hired to run Mirage. She encouraged Emma Thompson to write this script over a period of years I suppose and according to Emma Thompson it sounds like she really helped her shape the screenplay.

I think the first draft was 300 pages. Lindsay Doran is a very present figure in the diary of making this movie. And Lindsay Doran convinced Amy Pascal to pay for this movie, which was budgeted pretty highly and had 65 shooting days, which is quite a lot. And also approved the idea of Ang Lee coming over and directing it, who was a very unlikely choice. And it's a real testament to Pascal, who has had some foibles in the aftermath of the Sony hack and obviously was unceremoniously dumped as the head of Sony movie division, but is literally one of the greatest movie producers of all time. And one of the greatest emailers of all time. Has written some fascinating and amusing emails. But she's really responsible for some of the great strokes of modern Hollywood. She's the person who made the social network happen, for example.

And she is the person who very savvily, I would say, in her exit at Sony, held on to the rights to produce the Spider-Man movies. And she's the person who is responsible for collaborating with Kevin Feige and making Marvel work with Sony. And she's the person who greenlit Spider-Verse. And Pascal Pictures is the thing you see right before you see the comics code at the beginning of Spider-Verse. And she is now at an interesting stage of her career

where her deal with Sony is wrapping up and she's moving on to Universal. And she's going to be a person who does this for Universal Pictures now. And it's kind of amazing because she's just a great little linking chain in this world of obsessions that you and I have. Do you think that Amy Pascal has a favorite between these two movies? I would guess Sense and Sensibility. Yes! Amy, if you're listening, please let us know.

If it's not Sense and Sensibility, I'll be surprised, but I think her pocketbook probably appreciates Spider-Man. You know what? There's value in both. Anything else you want to say here? We've learned a lot about each other. That's true. That was the point of this, right? It was.

It was. I feel good about it. I hope that... I will watch some animated movies, but not all of them. So you are Peter B. Parker, and I am Eleanor. Yeah. Delighted to be joined by Avi Belkin, back in our courtyard for the second time. It's good to see you again, man.

How are you? Thank you. I'm very good. Thank you. So you are the director of a forthcoming documentary called Mike Wallace is Here, and also a documentary series. We're going to talk about both of those things here. But first, I want to know, you're a guy living in Israel.

How do you get interested in Mike Wallace? How does that, does 60 Minutes come into your home in Tel Aviv? Well, I got to say, this is going to be an origin story that I'm going to tell both of them together if it's okay, because otherwise we'll do back and forth between those because they came together simultaneously. So I don't know, obviously, I don't know if you know, but I don't know if our viewers know as well, like listeners, the series is coming like five days after the movie is coming out. So I've been working for the last two years on the movie and the series together. The series is called No One Saw a Thing.

Agreed. So the story is like this. So three years ago, I'm living in Tel Aviv. I'm an Israeli and I was living in Tel Aviv. I just finished four years of work on my first feature film in Israel, which was a portrait of a river, like the first feature film in Israel, which was a portrait of a river, like the most infamous river in Israel. And I was just out of film school,

and I had this idea, I'm going to do a film about water, right? And it took me four years to fucking nail it, and it was tough, man. What was hard about it? I didn't want to use people. I wanted to use the landscape. So the idea I had for that film was that you always see a story about a place,

and the place is always basically the background. It's always about people at the end of the day. And I had this idea of telling the story of Israel through the landscape, through the river. And that river is like a biblical river. And if you know a little bit about Israel, in the end, the late 1900s, the Jews started flooding back into Israel because they were like, oh, we got to get back our country. And we were like religiously obsessed with the landscape. And then like all humanity everywhere, we came into this place, kissed the ground, and started destroying it. So I had this idea of doing a portrait of the river, focusing on the actual landscape,

and through that tell the Zionism full story, which, again, sounded nice on paper. I got money from the Israeli fund. I got a broadcast channel. And then six months after it, I had no fucking story. You need people to tell stories. But I really feel like at the end of it I got it

it just took me four years but when I finished those four years I had a film it was very successful in Israel it won like

the biggest documentary festival in Israel got theatrical release the thing but I finished these four years without one dollar

like I was broke and I had this kind of epiphany where I was like, this is it. I got to find a bigger market. I got to start moving, you know, to a bigger audience. Because Israel is very small. I don't know if people know. It's like 8 million people, the whole country. It's like a quarter of, you know, I would say a lei.

Yeah. Was your aspiration as a filmmaker not just to make films but to make a buck? Were you like, I think I can make some money doing this work? It's not a lay. Yeah. Was your aspiration as a filmmaker, not just to make films, but to make a buck? Were you like, I think I can make some money doing this work? It's not a buck. It's important to phrase it right, Sean. It's to earn a living. Fair enough.

Okay. Because I was nowhere. Okay. I don't think documentary filmmakers are never in it for the money. That's sort of why I ask because oftentimes the money is the most challenging aspect of it. 100%.

Okay. And now we're in the golden years of documentary, right? And it's still a challenge. Okay. Like, I don't know if you remember it, but a few years ago when Louis C.K. was still a name that you can mention, he submitted a short Oscar award for the festival. Yes. And he had this beautiful speech about everybody here sits and we suffer for our art, right?

But those directors, they suffer for it, but they don't go home in a Lamborghini. And then he's like, this Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic. Like to just, you know. That's right. Show the scope of what they're doing. So you're trying to get money for the car payment. That's where you're at. I was sitting in Israel back then and thinking Honda Civic sounds nice, man.

So what do you do? So I quit my job after I decided I want to move here. And all I did for four months was wake up every morning and go to the library, the National Library in Israel, and look for stories. Just look for stories that I can do in America. And I came into two ideas. One was a short microfilm story that I found from 1981 about a small town in Missouri that we will explore later. And the second one was Mike Wallace.

But Mike Wallace started a little bit earlier with my fascination with journalism. And this was like before Trump got elected. But a little bit after Spotlight won the Oscar. So journalism state was very much in debate already. And I always find myself, it's the same as the river, kind of drawn to Genesis stories. I was a history major in school. I always find it fascinating that we walk this earth without understanding anything. Like, you know what I mean? Like, even if you're looking today on the Russian-USA conflict, this is going back over a century,

but nobody really gives it the scope that it deserves. Nobody understands how it shaped the world that we're living in today and continues to shape it. So for me, it's all like that. So you're searching for the infamous river of journalism, the biblical river of television journalism. Beautiful statement, yeah. Could be Mike Wallace in some ways. So Mike Wallace, I don't know if he's the river per journalism, the biblical river of television journalism. Beautiful stated, yeah. Could be Mike Wallace in some ways.

So Mike Wallace, I don't know if he's the river per se, but he's definitely part of the river, I would say. A tributary, yes. He's definitely a big tributary. And again, so I was looking for it. And when I did research, I came across all these Mike Wallace interviews. And not only were they amazing, he's such a charismatic character, but also I felt like there's something hidden there.

I kind of had this intuition that this guy is there. And then I didn't know anything about him. All I knew was this tough guy persona that everybody kind of knows at the surface level of him. Did he come across your life when you were a kid or a teenager? Did you know of him as a sort of celebrity in this country? Again, I don't want to sound like Israel is like this, you know, shabby place, because it's not.

But we didn't really receive 60 Minutes back then, but we had illegal cables. And I used to watch sometimes like 60 Minutes, so I knew who he was. But again, really surface level, like tough guy, interviewer, very pop-like culture icon, I would say, but nothing more than that. what about like a film like

the insider because i feel like even people who are not as into tv oh you haven't seen it i haven't seen it that's so interesting because i feel like that's another way if you were a young person in the 90s and you weren't watching 60 minutes you would see christopher plumber as mike wallace and say oh this guy must be meaningful he must be a big part of our culture i should figure out who that is so you don't even have that i didn't have that and i feel like that's a good point that you're making because a lot of people, that's the first point of reference is the insider. And I think the insider kind of does Mike a little bit of injustice because it does portray him in only his weak moment.

And Mike admitted that he had a weak moment there, but he did make amends for it. And he did have, obviously, a very, very lengthy and influential career other than that moment. But that movie kind of plays him only in one color. And Mike always felt like that movie was unfair to him. And listen, I'm not on any side here. I have no horse in the race. But after seeing so much footage, I think a little bit is, he has a point a little bit. In the fact, again, like only because he was so shallowly portrayed I would say only one facet

of Mike was portrayed in that film but we'll go back to the insider probably when we talk about Westmoreland later on let's focus on

me sitting in the library so I'm sitting in the library and I'm watching this Mike Wallace clips and I'm like there's a character here

for sure now is there a story so I started researching his story and he had this unparalleled career. He started in radio. Then he basically was the first TV star in the TV days, was a pitchman, did commercials. Then obviously invented kind of the tough question as we know it today, Nightby. And I'm like discovering more and more. And I'm like, this is zealig force gum character you know what i mean i'm like perfect this is what i'm looking for always and i said i'm gonna do a portrait of mike and through that portrait i'm gonna basically tell you know the microcosm story of broadcast journalism how do we get here so that was that idea and i bought a plane ticket to LA and now here we are easy money man so I mean it can't

be that simple like did you did you arrive at the conclusion that should be archival only early on did you know that that was going to be your approach it was pretty early on I gotta say so when I came here I didn't know anybody and, like not one person in LA. And I got this couch meeting in CAA for a friend of a friend that I waited for two months. And I actually Googled CAA the morning I went to that meeting. Not joking, man. I didn't have any clue who they were. And I'm going- You're kind of a Forrest Gump character, the way that you're telling this. Well, yeah, without the stupidity, I hope.

But in the right place at the right time, maybe. That's true. That's a good analogy. So I. But in the right place at the right time, maybe. That's true. That's a good analogy. So I'm going to the meeting and Amanda LeBeau, who's an agent at CIA, she sat there and I pitched them those two ideas. I pitched them Mike Wallace and Skidmore. That was what No One Saw a Film was called back then. And she kind of saw something in both of them. And she set me up in two meetings.

One meeting was with Rafi Marmor for Delirio Films and I went into that meeting with Rafi and we started talking about it and he kind of suggested maybe we should focus more on archives. And I was like, yeah, that's probably what I was thinking anyway, because I didn't want to do, you know, those people who are saying, oh, Mike really changed the game. Yeah, Mike, he was a different kind of bird, etc. And there's a moment in the film that I feel like validate my choice beautifully and I hope you remember it. It's the moment with Ariana Fallaci, the reporter, the journalist.

So just to set up for people who don't know who she was, Ariana Fallaci was the biggest journalist in Europe in the 70s, 80s and she's basically a female Mike Wallace with bad teeth, I would say. And it's amazing to see that interview between them because Mike is basically talking to himself. It's amazing, really. So his first question to her is like, are you a performer?

Are you an entertainer? Which is what Mike was asked his entire career. And she says, no, I'm not. And so he tells her, what are you then? And she says, I'm an historian. And Mike is like, you're not an historian and then she says I am an historian because journalists are historians that write history the moment it happens and it's the best way to write history and not only that's a beautiful statement and a beautiful moment in the film I think but for me it says something

about doing an all archival film so that is me subscribing to Oriana's ideology, saying, when I go to do a film about someone who is dead, I don't want to go and have people 50 years after discuss what were, you know, the Nazis like, what was the Cold War about, etc. I want to be in the time. I want to be with the person living the way it happened, the way he unfolded it. And also about the television, there's something very true that those reporters, those journalists, are the historians of our generation. We grew up on that information. So Mike was an historian, as far as I can see it,

and doing an all-archival film is just giving us the history as it happened instead of giving us the history as it happened, as instead of giving us the history as processed today by all the other stuff that happened afterwards. Let me give you a little personal reflection. I have a background in journalism. I went to journalism school. I studied it, practiced it, still sort of practice it in some ways. But now I'm also a person that is on mic and presenting and talking.

And there's a performance aspect to it. The absolute genius part of the film to me is showing the very blurry line between those two things and no one blurred it more aggressively than Mike. And Wallace's early stages of his career, that stuff I had no idea about. The pitch man stuff that he described, the work he was doing on television as more host than journalist, more, I don't know, sort of like just active famous person, more so than journalist. Yeah, celebrity.

At what point did that become clear that that was kind of the crux of, because that I think is the question that you keep returning to in the film. Yeah. What are you? What do you do? Beautifully stated. And I think a lot of the interviews that I'm doing, which a little bit annoys me, I got to say, because people tend to attack a little bit Mike on his being a performer.

And I feel like everybody's a performer today. You know, he changed the game, but it wasn't Mike that changed the game. I think it goes a little bit back. Television changed the game. The moment television became part of the game and journalism was a part of television, it had to compete for the audience attention. Like when you're doing a little bit of dramatic tone, you're not doing it to diminish the level of conversation. You're just doing it to engage more people to be like, oh, this is important. I want to listen to it. And that's what Mike did. And to color it in a different color for me, it's like to miss what he

did. His heart was exactly at the right place. I feel he was an old school journalist with the right intention that went about his story in the best way he felt he can get an audience to engage in it and to listen to it and I think that revolution is what you're basically enjoying today where it's norm you're saying it like obviously right

of course you have to perform while you're doing the news because it's part of the game and Mike changed that. Mike was a revolution. And any revolution has dark side. Any revolution has copycats that kind of ruin the revolution. And that's what happened with Mike and 60 Minutes, et cetera. I won't say they were perfect.

There were elements and sides to their story that obviously Mike and 60 Minutes did ambush interviews, did hidden camera things. They all admitted after a while that it was going out of control, that it became sensationalism. But I think there's so many layers to stuff that trying to reduce it into one better good thing just, you know, kind of misses the point. And the point is that what you said is who am I? All that questions that are beautifully kind of, can I think embedded into Mike personality, right?

It's like, it's kind of the question that Mike has in his crux. It's like, who am I? And I would say even more than that is why am I? Why am I this way? Why am I so obsessed? Why am I a needler? Mike was a needler.

Like you can see. So, another thing that people need to understand, I watch the raw footage of every interview that Mike did. This is like a treat. How many hours are we talking? Over 1,400. But fun time, Sean. Fun time. I'm also an interviewer, obviously.

This is what we do. He's amazing. Like, the craft level on that guy is ridiculous. You feel like you learned a lot about how to do your job? So much. And one of the most important things about it that I learned was that you, again, it's very different. Of course, every interview is different. But when you're going into an investigative interview, when you're going into like the series that I did in Skidmore, which is about a crime, it's not about, you know, something pleasant. You want to be a little bit upsetting to the person sitting in front of you.

You want to be needling at him. You want to be a little bit throwing him off guard because otherwise he's staying on script. The more a person when you're into it, and Mike was a champion at that. He started doing that. So when you're watching raw interviews, you watch the 20 minutes before an interview. They were running for the beginning, which is for me like the most enjoyable moments there are. So what's happening in that time?

Mike is on. I would say he's already started the interview. And for me, another thing I learned from that is, and that's like a tip for people who's doing interviews, everything is fair game. Like the moment you set into a studio it's starting and mike was never off the moment he would walk into the room there's a beautiful story that he did about frediano who was a italian mobster there's a very short snippet of it in the film in the beginning

where he asked him how many people did you kill and then, five. So that's like a classic Mike Wallace and it's a fun exchange but that interview is four hours long. And he was, Fradiano was in witness protection program and he was masked during that interview

and Mike flew especially to Washington to interview him. So you have, in the rough footage, you have like 20 minutes of drive and landing in the airport.

It's beautifully shot on film. Like, again, dream situation. And he comes into it and they put on the makeup for Fabiano and they make coffee for the people. And you have like a 30 minute exchange, which is off the air.

They're still talking. People are putting makeup on Mike's face and Mike is already needling. Mike is already in character, working. And then you start the interview. Mike is on. My favorite move was a killer then you start the interview, Mike is on. Like, Mike's favorite move was a killer question

to start the interview. Like, Larry King, the first question he tells him, people say you're a patsy. Off the gate, man. Like, he says, you're nervous. Larry King says, no. People say you're a patsy.

I'm grateful that you didn't start this interview like that. I feel like I didn't warm you up enough. I should have taken that strategy into this conversation. One thing that I have been kind of desperate't warm you up enough. I should have taken that strategy into this conversation. One thing that I have been kind of desperate

to ask you even since we first met is what is it like to build a relationship with a person that you're never going to meet and then try to

present that person to the world? I think it's cleaner. Cleaner? Yeah. I feel like Mike Wallace might say that too. He would, by the way.

100%. And especially, you know why? Because there's so many documentaries that you go about making, and the person that you're doing it about is old. And past his prime. Let's be gentle when we say, and we see it all the time, right? And that interview that you shoot with him, and the way that he is, kind of paints a little bit of who he is,

especially to you as a documentary and that's not right you know what I mean like at the end softer and more vulnerable exactly when they're older exactly

which is good for the candid talks but there's something I feel like less showing less telling you know what I mean there's something

when a person in his prime years when he's full on that's real character that's how I feel at old age you get more he's full on, that's real character. That's how I feel. At old age, you get more compassionate. You get more perspective. That's great.

Great. But at the prime is your DNA. And Mike Wallace at his prime was a killer. And I'm saying that with admiration, man. Yeah. Because he wasn't a killer again, like, kill people. He was after the core of his subject. And that was his number one, like killing people. He was after the core of his subject. And that was

his number one, like a bull. And he was after deciphering what's your weak spot. What makes you tick? And he was relentless in that. And I felt like going into this film, I was always very clear on the thought that I'm going to do a Mike Wallace interview with Mike Wallace.

That was my first approach. I'm also, I can be semi-killer when I'm interviewing people. And again, in the goodest, nicest way, like a compassionate killer. But I'm going after the story. I'm going after what I want to understand. And I felt like if I would interview Mike old, it will be a more relaxed interview. It will be a more peaceful interview. And I would really like him.

You know what I mean? Because he's old. You show him in your film. There's a couple of conversations. I feel like there's one with Larry King. There's certainly one with Morley Safer where he is older and more reflective. And it feels like he can't put his finger on who he is. I never felt he could.

That's such an amazing thing. So you mentioned that you're kind of looking for the nuance. It's neither good nor bad. But do you feel like you have to then represent in your film a kind of summation about what this person represented? I do, but I feel like when you start doing a film, especially a portrait, like all you're trying to do for me

is get to a sentence that defined that person. And it's fucking hard. You're trying to do for me is get to a sentence that defined that person. And it's fucking hard. You're trying to basically say this is the sentence that through that he lived his life. This is how he, everything was working through that. And if you're able to do that, that's amazing because you really gain perspective into the person. And there's something about art being suggestive. You know what I mean? You don't want art to be saying everything one of the hardest thing about doing a documentary

is not to say anything it is to hold back information but to kind of reflect it through this angle that you chose to tell it and i when i figured out who mike was i had this moment of epiphany and for me it was the understanding that mike and you see it in all his interviews but it takes a while when he's the interviewee he's not reflective it's very hard for him to reflect on who he is and to understand who he was etc and i kind of had this a moment and there's a moment where mike says and it's in the film interviews are a way to learn about others but ourselves through others and i felt like like, oh, that's interesting. And then I only watched the materials through, basically, Mike is talking to people, asking them questions, trying to understand himself.

I can relate, man. I can relate. I do this all the time, looking for the same answers. Beautiful. And once you understood that, you understood that that's why he was so relentless. That's why he was so going after the tough question. It was a tough question to himself. And you see those themes returning throughout his interviews. Like, for example, something that wasn't left out of the film because, you know, there's a limit to how much time you can bore an audience. This is not a boring movie at all. Thanks, man. But anyway, so Mike was brought up in the Great Depression. So his father lost all of his money during those years.

And Mike admittedly was shaken up by that moment. And for him, it was always like money can disappear anytime. And that entire generation grew up with that. Like he has an interview with Arthur Miller where Arthur Miller says exactly the same feel. And in every interview that Mike does, he always asks the person, how much money do you make? Every interview, man, that's like a constant question. And so you can look at that question surface level and say, oh, that's a yellow question, how much money do you make?

But then when you start seeing these questions, like you said on yourself, and of course, everybody has questions that interest to him, you're seeing this as a reveal of subconscious. This is not a question that Mike is asking out of the air. This is manifested in his DNA. This is who he is. And he's asking that question because he wants to get a better understanding of that person also, but also he wants to get some better understanding to himself. Like, why am I so frugal with money? Why am I so careful with it? Why am I so, like in the early years, Mike would take any job, any job. And he didn't know how to put it into himself. He just felt like, you know, I have kids.

I need to support them. But I read it as like this is a trauma of the Great Depression, of his father losing all the money. And you have an opportunity to make money. You make it. And his generation was kind of like that. So once you understand that, and I understood it, everything becomes so much more deeper. And interviews, I mean,

conversation between two people is like the DNA of life. Like 95% of anything great in humanity happened between two people talking. So you mentioned his kids. And I wonder what the process is like to make a movie like this and the relationship to the family because Mike Wallace is obviously a public person he's also got a famous son do you have to get their sign off to pursue a project like this? So this is exactly where Raffi Marmore

the producer who is really the godfather of this film and a great guy comes into play so when I came here like I said I didn't know anybody, and it looked like an impossible job to get CBS to give me access and to get the family to say, okay, go with it. And CBS never does this, right?

Never. I mean, news organizations don't ever open their archives. This is like a, yeah, it's like a meteorite strike or something, the convergence of things that happened in this project. And Rafi was the guy who approached the family first and got them to agree to give us their blessing. And then we went into CBS and Rafi negotiated the way we kind of got the materials. But basically what everybody kind of responded to was my approach to the film, which was like the Mike Wallace interview, which is two layers, right? Like on the one hand, we're doing a Mike Wallace interview

from all the archive stuff that he was interviewed in. But on the other hand, we're getting a bigger understanding of the craft and of him for the question for him interviewing others. And everybody was very, very much, you know, into that angle. And of course, the other angle is all archive. So once they got those two people to kind of be like, okay, you're good, then the Israeli came out, and

I flew in, because it's true, because I flew in January to LA, to New York, sorry. This is 18? Yeah, 18. And so I flew to New York to start working with CBS, and originally, like, Rafi sent me with this two terabyte hard drive

to get some materials. And I was supposed to be watching materials there and kind of be like, okay, this will work, this will not, and bring some back with us. And I got there and I was like, there's no way I'm watching materials here. I want the thing. I want the materials to really be showing of this unbelievable archive.

I really feel like CBS archives are the best in the world. And I've seen a lot of archives. They have over 50 years in that 60 minute show of unfiltered footage of every kind of big person that lived in 20th century. And it's amazing. And it's a warehouse in New Jersey, the size of two football fields. And I was just like, you know, glossed eyes.

I couldn't believe it. So you love that part of this process then? Archives? Of course, man. Who doesn't love archives? Well, I think every documentary filmmaker is different. And I feel like the project, the other project that you have coming out

is probably a little bit different than just diving into the library. But also heavy with archives, by the way. And part of it is a 60-minute story we'll see how that connect there but again like i don't understand how can you not love archives and i'm talking about people not talking about documentary like archives is like you know capsules of time you know do you ever talk to somebody who writes a book and they hate the writing part but they loved the research the six months of research is delightful and then the three months of writing is sheer hell. That's my favorite part as well. Like the research, the thinking of the story,

like the initial idea. Like right now I finished those two projects and I can't wait for August to come so I can take a little time off and start building the new idea. For me, it's like vacation, you know, and just thinking on story and really building it and researching and find those little moments in it

that kind of, you know, make you feel this is an amazing story. It needs to be told. And so for me, archives is the same thing. It's like, you know, it's just exciting. It's like, what are you going to discover? What is this next moment going to be? It's like I'm watching it excited about what's the next moment going to be. And you're watching interviews with the greatest people that lived in the 20th century. An interview with Frank Lloyd Wright.

An interview with Salvador Dali. Barbara Streisand. A young Oprah Winfrey just started her show in Chicago. A young Donald Trump. Putin. You know what I mean? Like, if you don't enjoy that, then I don't understand. Did you always have that level of interest in American culture?

Yeah. You did? Yeah. I mean, Israel is, you know, the 51 state of America. They're closely linked. Yeah, very closely linked. We grew up on American culture. I used to watch American TV all my childhood.

That's why my English is so normal is because I, you know, watched all these movies and shows without translation. So a lot of Israelis are very much embedded in the American culture. Everybody knows English in Israel. It's very much a part of it. Mike Wallace's here premieres at Sundance, very warmly received, gets bought. It's coming out in theaters. That's all great.

What did the family say when they saw it? Well, the first question was, is there subtitles? But listen, if I could tell a family story, that would be very nicely. So when I was in film, just to set up the family, right? Yeah. I was in film school, yeah? And this was like my feature film back then.

And I did this documentary in the third year, which is about an underway tunnel in Tel Aviv. And it had like an old toilet, restroom place. And there was an old janitor that used to work there. And it's like the most hard you know breaking situation and I did this

11 minute documentary about it and it's 11 minutes of nothing just you know someone lays out the toilet paper and cleans up

but there's something that I felt was engaging and I'm going to show it to my parents and I'm kind of proud of it but I'm just going to show it to my parents

so we're sitting at home and I'm playing it and you're sitting I don't know how many people have ever shared an art that they did with their parents it's a very interesting moment sure interesting is an interesting word to describe that so we're watching that 11 minutes and we finish those 11 minutes and there's crickets in the living room i'm talking like crickets sean you don't know my father doesn't look me in the eye was he like what have i done what this education i've paid for it was they just didn't hit home at all but my father was not even looking me in the eye and my mother is like bending like whispering isn't there supposed to be a story in this and i'm like you know so that's kind of the setup.

So after saying that, they really loved the film, which was shocking to me because I had no expectation afterwards, you know, if my parents will love it or not, but they really loved it. And it's amazing to me because they kind of related. Obviously, they're the generation that's closer to Mike than I am closer to Mike.

And they knew all the people and they were like fascinated by the exchanges. And I think there's something very universal about the moment we chose that thematically just hits a very wide audience because it's about us. Everybody can relate to fear and choosing career over family and fear of death, et cetera. And those are the topics and themes that are discussed in the film. And it's this amazing pocket history of the second half of the 20th century. You know, like it's showing you all those people that you described and how someone put those people in front of us on a weekly basis.

Really fascinating. You want to talk about the series? Yeah. Where did it come from? Where's it going? So I'm sitting in the library. I haven't seen this yet. So I need to hear everything about it. I'm going to send do a 180. Where did it come from? Where's it going? So I'm sitting in the library. I haven't seen this yet. So I need to hear everything about it.

I'm going to send you a link. So we're sitting in the library. And there was this microfilm of old newspapers. And I came across this little article about a small Midwestern town. I'm talking tiny town, like 300 people. And that town had a bully, but a grown man bully, not a child. He was 47. And he terrorized that town for a decade.

And whatever they did, they couldn't get rid of him. And one day in the middle of the day, in the middle of the town, 60 people circled around him and shot him dead, multiple firearms, and just left his body dead in the street, walked away. And since then, till this day, nobody's been brought to justice. There have been two federal investigations into it. It's still an open murder case. And I read that story and I was like, wow, interesting.

But I was not sold yet, but it was interesting. And I started researching more and more about that town. And I found that in the years after that, they had much more violence in that town, like gruesome acts of violence. And then it became interesting to me because it became, it's not a true crime series. I'm not interested in the whodunit question. That's not my personal taste, but I am interested in society and the way that society kind of functions and way things move back and forth. And for me, it became a question of what's the price you pay for a vigilante act? What's the price you pay as a society for keeping a bond of silence for decades? And it became a much bigger story for me once I came here where I watched that town and went there.

And I was like, this is beautiful. This town is like rural America. Everything is green. Nobody locks the door. People, everybody is beautiful. This town is like rural America. Everything is green. Nobody locks the door. People, everybody's like a tight knit. Everybody knows everybody. And the question keeps hitting me like, why all this violence?

Where is this coming from? So it became for me a way to do a portrait of that small town and through that investigate basically the origin of violence in American society. How did it shape? Because whether you lived in a small town or not, you were shaped by small town living. This is the DNA of America. Everything is small town living.

That's how this country was brought up. At the same time, this country was brought on vigilante acts. This is embedded in the culture. These are the heroes. That area is Jesse James culture. Cowboys, thieves, robbers. Exactly area is just, sorry, Jesse James culture. Cowboys, thieves, robbers.

It's a part of the ethos that made this country what it is. And we see today even more in the culture. Like, every second movie is a vigilante movie. Every,

you know, it's glorified, right? So, I was kind of interested in, again, like, what does it do?

And I think, for me, the moment where it kind of started to make sense was when I understood that the problem with vigilante and the way it kind of perpetuates itself through the generations is, of course, the way that you tell this story over and over again, but also the message it sends. And the message vigilante sends is that you have a problem, you solve it with violence.

And that's a very, very hard message that gets kind of glossed over in that vigilante phenomena. And I really believe that's in a way what perpetuates that circle of violence that we see a lot of the times is that message to kids, to young generation. At the end of the day, those 60 people went home and those kids watched their parents just murder someone and then cover it up. And the kind of lesson that they took from it is that, well, maybe it's okay if you feel like you're in a situation that you need to resort to violence. So how do you tell that story?

You have to go talk to those 60 people? What archival footage exists around something like this? Okay. So, wow, Sean, this is like a two-and-a-half-year work. So, yeah, let's try to condense it. Let's boil it down. Let's do it in a 50-second span. So, you start by going there, right?

I went to that town over like seven times, I think, in total, over two months in total. And you talk to the people. You do interviews, obviously. Hard to get their trust? At the beginning, yes yes but i felt like being an outsider really helped you know the fact that we were not judging them i feel like that community has had people come coming in from 1981 non-stop like in those days every big channel did a story like there was an oprah story on it larry king did a story 60 minutes did a story circle back to that in a second and they were tired of people coming in and judging them and they felt like everybody in america kind of knows already what happened and when i came in i was you know an outsider and i really came in with these fresh eyes on

the story which i wanted to really understand what happened. Because I really felt like this story is, there's so many layers to it that has not been told yet. So they opened up to me. And it was obviously very important to me to get the second side of the story. So this story, in all the stuff that I read, was always portrayed one dimensional. There was a bully.

The law enforcement couldn't get rid of him. So the town did what they had to do and like so many times in the American history they got rid of the problem and

you know took law into their own hands but they're never saying anything about the victim the side of the the person who was murdered so I kind of started

digging into his story into his background story and also to to the question does he have kids and he has between 13 to 19 kids. Wow.

Yeah, and over five or six wives. So you understand immediately there is a lot of people who consider themselves victims on the other side as well. Those were children, and their father was murdered. And that, again, like we got a few of the kids to appear in the series for the first time and tell the other side. And that really spiraled them down into a violence, you know, of their own stories. So those are kind of the first linear paths that you kind of take when you start telling that story. And for me, it's always about, you know, there's more than one side to a story.

So I was looking to get it, you know, the multi sides of it. And then when we started doing that, I was doing Wallace at the same time. And I discovered there was a story done by 60 Minutes about it. So obviously, you know, being inside 60 Minutes workflow was very good for me.

So I got the actual footage of that story, which was beyond the treasure trove. It was just unbelievable. So in the series, there's three big characters that are dead now. And one is the wife, the wife who was sitting next to him in the car when they shot him, who witnessed and told the names to the FBI agents in the courts, and still nobody was ever prosecuted. So that wife, which is unavailable, obviously, was alive and well in those archive 60 millimeter beautifully shot footage for over a 45 minute interview in 81, right after the killing.

So that was obviously her character came to life, given that. Two other big characters was the sheriff, who is considered to be part of the conspiracy. Naturally. Of course. There's always to be part of the conspiracy. Naturally. Of course, there's always, right? And the lawyer. So he had this lawyer who was like a Johnny Cochran of the Midwest. He was called the Nickel Slick and he's an amazing character, Richard McFadden. So those three characters are actually only alive for the archive materials that 60 Minutes gave us and just add an amazing dimension to the story.

Which one is more fun to make of these two projects? Mike Wallace. Is it because of the gruesome nature of the other story? Such a misleading word. Fun. I can see that you relish this, so that's why I asked. I think we're passionate about what we do.

You as well. I see you, you know, the eyes twinkle, so we're passionate. When we're talking You as well. I see you, you know, the eyes twinkle. So we're passionate. When we're talking? Everything. Like whenever I see you, you're passionate about what you do, which is great. And so I love what I do. But doing a film is a very, very masochistic situation. It's very tough.

So I enjoyed Mike Wallace more for two reasons. One, the archives of Mike Wallace because it's kind of hitting where I am as an interviewer and I also am part journalist in a way. All documentaries are. It was just the core subject of my life. And I think Mike was at the top of the game. So for me, it was cool. I was just watching this fascinated with the technique and just learning all the time. So that was that one.

And the second one is there's something about not dealing with people. Living people, interviews, recreations, all that stuff is tough. I mean, it goes into a more scripted kind of situation. And again, enjoyable in its own right but very it's more demanding I would say you mentioned that August is at our doorstep and that's when you

go back into the archives so you know what you're going to do next? you do what you can't say no I actually have like a lot of ideas right now and I need to

start you know deciding which ones are the better ones out of those and start developing them into stuff. I have a few though that I really like and I need to start getting on top of it. I end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what is the

last great thing that they have seen. Have you been seeing many movies lately? What have you liked? I haven't watched documentaries in the last two years almost. It's like crazy. When I work on a documentary, I can't watch any other documentaries. I just find it distracting. Quickly, who are your documentarians? Who are the people that you admire, that you emulate?

Wow. I like a lot Patricio Guzman, the Chilean director. He's amazing. Eric Gandini is a favorite. Errol Morris, obviously. I think anybody who does documentaries is a little bit influenced by him. Those will be my first names. I like a little bit Georgie Halpe, if you know him.

I love him. I came from the, I would say, in film school, I was a much more scripted kind of guy. So, you know, I'm a fan of Kubrick, who isn't. So all this stuff kind of culminated. Ellen Berliner is a director that I love in documentaries. So all those things kind of, you know, mashed up into my early viewings. But again, like recent years, I got to say,

and I'm honestly saying that I have not watched a lot of films. What was the last thing that I watched that I like? I thought that, I know it's a joke to say, but I thought that Infinity Wars was maybe the best superhero movie I've ever seen. This is an amazing answer. Not the one I expected you to say. Please tell me why you thought that.

First of all, it was an amazing film. And second of all, I find that the more hard I work, the more I want to escape in the things I watch. Yes. I think you're like a lot of people. And I think that's why a lot of those movies are succeeding. That's an unspoken tension in society is people work harder than ever. And their escapist fantasy has to be even more escapist than ever.

Our job is to say, to speak that unspoken tension into existence. And I agree with you. I think a lot of people are watching that Marvel films as an unwinding situation. And I felt that Infinity War specifically was just done marvelously. It was just a beautiful film. But again, there's a lot of good stuff being done all over, especially television right now. There's a beautiful stuff.

I really enjoyed the first season of the OA. I thought it was very good. That's a daring show. Yeah. For the first season was very good. The second season I felt was good, but a little different. Well, you know, the classics.

I watched Game of Thrones. Where are you, by the way, on the last season of Game of Thrones? I can't say it was my favorite thing. I felt like it was a 12 episode season that was crushed into seven episodes, but we take what we can get in life. I mean, it's strange to say,

but I actually had a similar relationship to Mike Wallace's here to seven episodes but we take what we can get in life um i mean it's it's strange to say but i actually had a similar relationship to mike wallace's here as you might have to infinity war which is that this is just the kind of movie that i love to get swallowed up by so i want to say thank you for doing this thank you thanks for making it Thank you.