The Big Picture - The 10 Best Horror Movies So Far This Year. Plus: ‘Renfield,’ ‘The Pope’s Exorcist,’ and ‘Evil Dead Rise.’

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Horror is booming—Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to talk about four big releases, the best movies in the genre they’ve seen so far, and what defines this era in scares (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by Daniel Goldhaber, the director and cowriter of ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline,’ and Ariela Barer, the star and cowriter of the film (1:05:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan, Daniel Goldhaber, and Ariela Barer Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Sean Fennessy, one of the hosts of the Prestige TV podcast. HBO's Barry is back for a fourth and final season. And that means I'll be back recapping the show with co-creator and star Bill Hader to dive deep on the themes, scenes, and major moments in the series. Bill will provide insight into how every episode was made and why it's ending. New Prestige TV Barry recaps will go live every Sunday night when the episode ends. So make sure you're subscribed to the Prestige TV podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the horror. Later in this show, I'll be joined by Daniel Goldhaber and Ariella Barrera, the director, star, and co-writers of one of my favorite movies of the year, How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

But first, busy times in Horrorland, which means Chris Ryan is here. Hello, CR. Meatball Chris. Right here, man. Yeah. Are you ready to challenge the great leaders of the world? How are you feeling?

I'm just worried about the sanctity of Disney, man. Yeah. It's tricky times in the world of entertainment. And when we are feeling stressed about that, we recede to our safe place. Which is watching demons barf. Yeah. Love to have blood splurted upon me for hours and hours. Interesting couple of weeks here in the world of horror. There are four pretty big, pretty noisy movies coming out. Last Friday,

we had two releases. We had Renfield and we had The Pope's Exorcist. I can't wait to talk to you about our screening of The Pope's Exorcist. Yeah. And then... A community affair. That's right. And then this Friday

we have Expanding Nationwide, Ari Aster's Much Anticipated, Extremely Polarizing, Bo is Afraid, and of course Evil Dead Rise. Yes. The fifth installment

in the Evil Dead franchise. So I kind of wanted to talk about, you know, each of these four films just in kind of snapshot form. Two of them are not even really out yet. And two of them we've seen.

And then maybe talk about just what we've seen so far this year and where we think the genre is. I think it's an interesting time to talk about it because through COVID, there was this, it kind of became a canard

that the only things that worked in theaters were Big Tent superhero movies and Fast and the Furious style films and horror movies. And that's really all people showed out for. In the last few weeks, things have kind of changed a little bit. The Super Mario Brothers movie looks like it's going to be, if not the biggest, one of the two or three biggest movies of 2023. That's a kid's movie. And the superhero films appear to be kind of on the wane at the moment we shall see

what guardians of the galaxy volume 3 looks like but there has been a significant downturn in the success of those films culminating in the disastrous performance of the most recent shazam movie which i saw and was an abomination and now horror after the i would say pretty disappointing performance of renfield and the pope's Exorcist. I don't want to say the horror run has been pierced or downed, but it's notable that those two movies, which maybe were competing against each other, kind of failed to live up to the expectations. Neither one cracked 10 million at the box office. So I guess I'm sort of wondering if there's a reset happening or if this is just something that happens every once in a while I think you have a little bit of recency bias

so I would also argue that Megan's Scream and Knock at the Cabin have been pretty successful films in what is usually a pretty like down time of the year for Hollywood and if anything the thing that I'm concerned troll nervous about

is more the lack of VOD streaming horror that is kind of like the sort of what keeps it ticking over for real horror fans who are like on any given Friday night, I can go to one of these streamers and find a fast, cheap, fun, or provocative horror movie, you know, and that's usually on Shudder, but it's in a bunch of different services. And I feel like that one's dried up a little bit, whereas I've been kind of like, man, every three weeks, there's a new horror movie to go see in the theaters. And when you go, people are jacked, man. Like we've been to a couple recently together. We both had our

experiences at Scream 6. People seem very excited to be participating in that as a theatrical experience. Well, I wonder if those two things are related, because I had the same thought. I was like, thinking about what has come out so far this year, it's already been, you know, we're almost four months into the year. By this time, you'd imagine you have 15 to 20 reasonably recommendable VOD movies, but I think

because the studios have recognized what has transpired over the last five to ten years, they're just starting to put more energy into theatrical releases, and there are more theatrical releases, of course, kind of in the aftermath of the pandemic. So it's interesting. I mean, like I'll start with Renfield. I know you haven't had a chance to see this,

but I just want to put a little bit of a frame around it because it feels like of the four films that are coming out, they each exist in a kind of individual archetype. This one is sort of like the historic IP reboot. This is a reimagining of the Dracula story

told through the eyes of Renfield, who is, of course, this kind of manservant and familiar. He's a tortured aide. The film portrays Dracula, who is played by Nicolas Cage, as this like narcissistic boss. Toxic boss.

A toxic boss. A toxic workplace, yeah. And there's a lot of kind of, you know, therapy group, therapy speak in the movie, and that is like the comic backbone of the story. But it's also a weird, ultra-violent gangster movie and a romance between Nicholas Holt and Awkwafina, and also kind of a cop drama about Awkwafina playing a police officer in pursuit of a gangster. And I saw the movie like a month ago

and I was like, this really doesn't work. And I get the idea and some of the jokes are funny and Nicolas Cage comes to play and is kind of a great Dracula and still the movie just didn't hang together at all. It comes from Chris McKay who made the really good Lego Batman movie and like the less good,

but still kind of entertaining The Tomorrow War, which was a big Amazon Prime movie during the pandemic. I kind of like that movie. I thought it was pretty fun. And this one, it just felt like it was, I've seen that it described this way. This is not my thought, but a premise in search of a movie. And it felt like it was kind of jamming a lot of different kinds of genres into this very clear pitch that the trailer had. It really disappointed it. It actually came in behind the Pope's Exorcist at the box office. And I'm not super surprised because I feel like word of mouth would not be very strong on it. Did we double the Pope's Exorcist box office by going on Saturday night? I think we represent about one eighth. Nevertheless, it was stronger than Renfield.

The Pope's Exorcist, how would you describe our screening? Interesting. We went to a, you know, like a dine-in theater, like one of the places that does recliners and they end to deliver food to you. Not Alamo, but it was in that kind of shape. We had like a pretty extensive time before the movie started where we were trying to get some beers and watch the end of the Kings and the Warriors game. And it just seemed like the vibe was off in the theater. It did. It seemed like there were some supply issues with their spiked seltzer. And there were some customers who were maybe a little disappointed in the service. But you know, I think Pope's Exorcist as a movie was a little bit different than what I was expecting. It's more of like a

religious procedural than it is a horror movie. Although it gets very CGI at the end, the climax, we can talk more about. I don't know if you very cgi at the end the climax we can talk more about i don't know if you want to get into yeah we can get into it a little bit i mean to me the archetype that it falls under is the kind of based on a true story ip that you know the conjuring or amityville horror or something like that where you're sort of meant to believe that what transpired on screen actually happened and you're a huge amorph guy well um i interviewed william friedkin the great william friedkin, and we didn't talk about the French connection and we didn't even talk about blue chips.

What we talked about is the devil and father amort, which was his documentary about this exorcist who is known as the Pope's exorcist, a man who worked for the Vatican and performed a handful of exorcisms over the years. Am I the only person in the world that you can say these words to? And I'm just like, that's A, cool,

and B, I understand 99% of what you're saying. Yeah're saying yeah i'm not have you tried saying this to your wife well i'm not worried about people not understanding me when i say something like that but i am looking for someone to say that's cool so i feel safe with you i just want to i want you to know that and i appreciate you always um this is like a very silly movie with like fully committed and pretty good russell crowe performance in the middle of it he is doing a little he's kind of doing Super Mario in the Pope's Exorcist whereas Chris Pratt chose not to pursue the Mario voice but regardless he speaks pretty good Italian and Spanish in this movie I guess yeah and it's working hard to convince you that he is battling a demon in real time it It wasn't good,

but I weirdly had a good time. Maybe that was just because we watched a basketball game and hung out that day. Yeah. I thought it was like, it's just, it's just an absolutely fine February movie that happened to come out in April.

And that he is way overqualified, even in his sort of straight to streaming period. He kind of reminds me of like an old British actor who's maybe past the point of like his Hollywood looks and is now like Richard Burton wheel me out and I'm just going to knock this fucking World War II movie out of the park for 18 minutes and you've got to fly me to Zurich to do it. And that's kind of where Russell Crowe is in his career with like Unhinged and this. Did you see him kind of like sadly commenting

on not being in Gladiator 2? No, what did he say? He was like, you know, he was basically like happy for these guys, but I think was like, I see pictures of

Paul Meskel and Barry Keegan looking like the fucking Bash Brothers and I recognize my own mortality. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's kind of heartbreaking.

I didn't reference Canseco and Maguire like I did, but yeah. He has, Russell Crowe has mortality. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's kind of heartbreaking. He didn't reference Canseco and Maguire like I did. I see. But yeah. He has, Russell Crowe has gained some weight. Yeah.

Maybe it was all for this part though, for Immorth. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's the case actually. But I think he, you know, some guys just got it. He's just got it.

He's made a lot of really mediocre movies in the last five to ten years, but he holds the screen. And I wonder if part of the reason that he has kind of fallen away as one of our signature stars as he gets into his 50s and 60s is he maybe has not been as willing to play character actor number three in parts he wants to stay at this he wants to be the pope's exorcist he doesn't want to be you know one of the uh the vatican's supplicants

so i it's interesting because i felt like he had a good sense of the campiness of the movie, and maybe the movie didn't have a sense of the campiness of the movie. Yeah, he's riding a scooter and taking whiskey shots and being a little bit more cartoonish. And then I think that the film itself is trying to treat this as like, this is deadly serious. This boy has been possessed by Satan.

It's interesting because the movie comes from Julius Avery, who directed the 2018 movie Overlord, a kind of World War II werewolf movie. A fan of, yeah. Avery was on this podcast talking about it

and it's extremely gory and fun. Yeah. And I think this movie could have used about 15% of what Overlord had to make it a little bit more enjoyable for me.

I can't say the same for Evil Dead Rise, which is coming out on Friday. So Chris and I will try to not spoil too much about it. But of course like I said. It's the fifth Evil Dead movie. It's the second non Sam Raimi Evil Dead movie. Right.

And it's directed by Lee Cronin. And it has a lot in common. With the 2013. Kind of remake reboot. Of the Evil Dead. Who did that one? Fede Alvarez. Oh okay. with the 2013 kind of remake reboot of the evil dead. Who did that one? Uh,

Fede Alvarez. Oh, okay. Um, and Fede Alvarez is known as a filmmaker who is willing to show gore. And that is one of the more intense movies of the 2010s. This movie might be more intense and gorier. This might be the goriest studio movie that I've seen in five years, seven years.

Yeah. It's like, it's like hostile, but like turned into a caricature. So it's like almost like fun torture porn, if that makes sense. We saw it in a completely packed theater, which I think will impact a lot of people's

interpretation or experience with this film. So every once in a while we get into this. But one of these days, we have to do some sort of matrix of how seeing a film impacts how you feel about the movie. So we saw it with a group of people, a full house in Burbank,

of people losing their mind for it. And honestly... It was basically a fan screening. It made it exciting and completely enjoyable, despite the fact, without getting like the details of the film it's one of the like sort of slimiest grossest horror movies i can remember being this mass release and it's so funny because like they're pushing this so hard over the first week in the nba playoffs and they've got like jim jackson and stan van gundy being like oh i'm scared just hearing about it, you know, like just doing their best. And they're like, Satan is back in Evil Dead Rise.

Oh, and it looks like Giannis isn't getting up there. You know, and it's like, this is a huge movie, it feels like, but it is fucking repulsive. I mean, it's the movie, you know, most of the Evil Dead films are about what happens in a cabin the second Evil Dead movie which is an iconic cult film

is effectively like a remake reimagining of the first Evil Dead movie Army of Darkness is a kind of parody of those kind of Clash of the Titans style movies

that it still originates with the Ash character that Bruce Campbell started all three of those movies are pretty comic and slapstick that remake or that reimagining from 2013 is hardcore gore character that Bruce Campbell started. All three of those movies are pretty comic and slapstick. That remake or that reimagining from 2013 is hardcore gore. This is also hardcore gore,

but it does have, there's a little frisson of comedy in the movie. And the way that it's reimagined is it takes place in a city. I think it's Los Angeles. There's an earthquake in the city and this family that is trapped in a condemned apartment building that they're getting ready to move out of a divorced mom and her three children and her sister who's come to stay with her. And this earthquake kind of unleashes the Necronomicon in some way, which is the book of the dead that kind of powers all the evil agents in the film. But within 30 minutes, we are actually within one minute. We are in, like you said, some of the goriest territory imaginable for guys like us and i say that very loosely yeah i'm so comfortable with it to the point of like it's not even scary i'm just laughing you know i'm just like cool you went for that and i think

that if we had seen it maybe with 11 other people on a tuesday afternoon and everybody was like jesus fucking christ i thought this movie was going to be fun or something. Like, I can't tell. It was so rapturously received and I had such a good time watching it even though it's a, I personally thought it was like a little bit thin in terms of its like emotional impact or whatever. But man, like,

maybe this is what you're going to start seeing. I was thinking about this with Scream 6 and how visceral the stabbings are in Scream 6 and how they're just like saying like, you know, what we're going to do is push the fucking limits with what we'll show you on screen, but almost present it in this very digestible box. Do you know what I mean?

Like they're almost like combining punk rock and mainstream, like in some way. I completely agree. I had a very similar thought about, is this just accepted now? Because if you go back and you look at say how siskel and ebert responded to things like this when the slasher craze really took hold in the 80s there was a real moral panic and you know of course in england the video nasties and the kind of banning of movies like this and it does feel like we have reached a moment in our kind of mainstream horror culture where there it doesn't seem to be much moral panic you know even even in the time of saw and hostile

you could find on the regular a series of um you know outcry the sort of prmc of the movie world saying like this is dangerous for our children and i wonder if now it's just sort of like horror movies are all in good fun it is what it is maybe it is also it's just like i know we made a meatball ron joke in the beginning but like are the conservatives that would ordinarily be appalled by evil dead rise like looking for codes and disney cartoons and bud light cans instead that's an amazing point it's very like why aren't they fucking talking about evil dead rise have they been willing to accept that the pop cultural influence there's not a one-to-one.

Well, there's probably no money in it. I mean, like, I guess like that would probably be the easiest answer. Isn't there like a kind of To protest Evil Dead Rise over them making

Bob Iger like squirm and like do protests in like outside of Bud Light facilities. I think you're right that there is more power in communicating the secret message

of wholesome entertainment as opposed to what is already very obviously kind of deplorable on purpose. Yeah. But still, I find that interesting. I mean, look, generally speaking, I thought Evil Dead Rise was a lot of fun. And I'll be curious to see how it does at the box office. Me too. Because I do think that there will be a little bit of Friday night. What's it up against?

Is there a big mainstream film coming out this week? Not really. I mean, Boa's Afraid is expanding. expanding and maybe we can i think it's gonna do very well i think evil dead rise will do very well i think so too and i'm not totally sure why the pope's exorcist and renfield went up against each other knowing that evil dead rise was coming at this point but um it'll be interesting to see maybe we'll talk about a little bit i do want to shout out alissa sutherland who plays the mom in evil dead rise who i think is an Australian model who had been on Vikings, which is a show I don't watch. You ever watch that show? I haven't.

I guess she is one of the stars of that show. I thought she was amazing in this movie. Really, really great. She has an incredible physical performance. Totally. Yeah. Bo is afraid. You haven't seen it yet. I'm not going to spoil anything. We're going to do a whole episode about it with Adam Naiman later this week. I also talked to Ari Aster. I do think it's an interesting moment for a movie like this to be released.

It's a three-hour nightmare comedy. It's not pure horror. It's debatable whether or not Midsommar and Hereditary are pure horror. I talked to Ari about that a little bit. Where do you stand on that? Do you think those are just horror movies? I mean, we could have this debate

about almost every single, we could have this debate about Megan. Is Megan a horror movie? Or is Megan like a dystopian sci-fi movie? Or is it a thriller with a little bit of like a horror element like it that this is kind of the most fun thing about talking about her is like what makes it her and does it

have to have one of the sort of you know tectonic things like a slasher a monster like a something that makes it that or or can you kind of make anything into horror if you if you look at it right and Ari's obviously somebody

I wanted to get into is this a genre without a true king right now or true queen in the director's chair? Because Ari was obviously set up to be this and be that. He could have had it if he wanted it. And Robert Eggers

could have had it if he wanted it and Jordan Peele could have had it if he wanted it and Jennifer Kent could have had it if he wanted it. And Robert Eggers could have had it if he wanted it. And Jordan Peele could have had it if he wanted it. And, you know, Jennifer Kent could have had it if she wanted it. There's a bunch of directors that I think have either not had projects come out in a while, or you can feel moving away from horror. I noted with real interest that Bill Hader in an interview he did with Deadline about Barry was like, I have a horror movie I want to do. And I was like, Bill Hader could be a really fucking awesome horror movie director, but I don't think he's going to spend 20 years making horror movies. director, but I don't think he's going to spend 20 years

making horror movies. I think it's also, if he's going to make one, it's going to have a lot of surrealist tinges that are going to make it more in the kind of Ari Eggers-Peel

class of filmmaker, which wouldn't be making him the next Wes Craven. Right. Which is, I think, maybe what you're saying is, where is the Wes Craven?

Where's the carpenter? Yeah, I mean, I think, so I went through and I kind of like wrote down a bunch of names of people who are you know so i think the person who's basically got the belt right now is james wan um both in terms of his directing and his producing and his and his like he obviously produced megan i believe right uh well i i'm not sure if he produced that one but um yeah i think

he did actually but you know now he is fully aligning with Blumhouse. And did Malignant and everything. So he has a feel for what is kind of happening in horror in a way that, like, I feel like you really only get once in a generation. I wouldn't necessarily have picked him, you know, at the beginning of his career. I think he's always been a very effective and successful filmmaker, but I feel like he's getting better even as the years go on. I completely agree. He's a tricky one though because he shifts pretty radically

in terms of genre. Of course, horror is his core and the Conjuring films and that kind of extended universe he is hugely responsible for. And Atomic Monster, his production company, really focuses on those kinds of movies. But he directed two Aquaman movies

a fast movie like he has spread his wings as a mainstream for hire big tent filmmaker you know Malignant was a really

interesting example we talked about that movie on the pod we both watched it at like 9 o'clock in the morning on a Friday and that wasn't

the right way to watch it and then I watched it at like 11 o'clock on a month later. And I was like, oh, this is kind of a perfect James Wan movie. And it's a huge homage to a lot of kinds of movies that he likes.

He is definitely the kind of financial king. And I like his movies a lot. I'm a big fan of what he does. And I think him aligning with Blumhouse is just one of those obvious one plus one equals three kind of situations. I don't, I guess there's a part of me that isn't sure if he wants to make 10 more malignants. Me neither. I mean, I have, so the list I had here was Juan, Mike Flanagan, who's pretty much

shifted to television and makes slow horror series. Even they're more like chamber dramas with one jump scare in eight hours. Can we talk about that? Because I haven't been keeping up with his TV series. And I think his film work is more or less in the top 1% of horror movie directing in the last 10 years. And I don't know. I just don't have 12 hours to watch like a moody series on Netflix. I thought Midnight Mass is probably the most classically. Well, I think that they all have elements of like gothic horror too.

The Midnight Mass is I don't want to give anything away about it but it has one or two sequences where you're like dude you could have

made the best this movie of like the last 20 years and I wish you had so what do we get we got basically Ouija 2

we got I can't recall the name of the Katie Segal movie where she can't hear she's trapped in the house Hush we got Doctor Sleep.

And he's directed a couple of other movies, but those are kind of the core films. And then since then, he's done Bly Manor, Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass. And there was a most recent film. What's the art series? Is that not R.L. Stine? Teenage show. Christopher Pike, the adaptation. Midnight Club?

Yeah. So, I mean, can you be the king when you've shifted mediums? No. I mean, and same with Jennifer Kent, who made Babadook and was like, oh, this is going to be the next fucking Black William Friedkin. And then made... A Nightingale. Nightingale, which is pretty cool.

A really good movie. Yeah, and hasn't done anything since then, feature-wise. Ari Aster seems to be moving away from horror. I'll just say Bo is Afraid is really not a horror movie at all. Adam Wingard doesn't really

hasn't made a horror movie in a while. Greg McLean who showed a lot of promise after Wolf Creek like a long time ago is kind of tailed off.

William Eubank who made Underwater and made the Paranormal Activity that we liked a lot but is kind of like I feel like he's more of a sci-fi guy. He could be

bigger, I think. And then I look at all of the sort of people that came out of the first few VHS movies, which is a good way to look at draft classes for horror directors. So you've got Radio Silence, who have now kind of assumed this mantle of being some of the biggest horror directors

in the game. They're kind of the guys on my list right now. Yeah. Because of what they're planning to do next, which I think is something we should talk about. And really the only other person I had in here who's a little bit more on the B-movie end is Johannes Roberts, who did The Stranger's sequel and 47 Meters Down. And then wound up doing a Resident

Evil reboot, but like He did Raccoon City. Yeah. Has some of the juice there. I like David Bruckner a lot. I enjoy Roxanne Benjamin's stuff, but there isn't really like a central like person who is pushing horror into a new direction right now.

Unless you want to say it's these avant-garde directors. I'll add one more name to the list, which is Lee Whannell. Yeah. Who is of course like associated with Juan and who's the Invisible Man movie. I think it's more name to the list, which is Lee Whannell. Yeah. Who is of course like associated with Juan and who's the Invisible Man movie. I think it's probably one of the more underrated movies

of the kind of pandemic era. It was like kind of the last hit movie before the lockdown. And I thought was going to usher in a new era of universal monster movies. Renfield is kind of part of that. It is a Dracula story. It is a classic monster

universal story. And then the Radio Silence guys just announced that they will be taking on some monster with Melissa Barrera. We don't know what that's going to be yet,

which is notable. My money would be on those guys claiming at least the kind of like where James Wan went, I think is what they're aspiring to in a way. But the experimental stuff

is good to talk about because I think the year so far is defined by these phenomena that ultimately boils down to Skinnamorink. And in conversation with Skinnamorink, I think is the Outwaters

and Ennismen. And these are three very slow, very abstract... Would you put Infinity Pool in that? A little bit. A little bit. I mean, Infinity Pool is significantly more linear. It's more psychedelic. Yeah. It's not experimental in my mind

with the exception of, like, a couple of sequences. Did you get a chance to see that? Yeah, I think Possessor is a little bit more... If you had flipped Infinity Pool with Possessor in his filmography, I'd probably put Possessor in this sort of almost experimental horror. I agree. Infinity Pool

is Brian Cronenberg's new movie which was a modest success, I would say, and got good reviews. Maybe not as good reviews as Possessor got. I was very, very fond of Possessor. I thought it was pretty audacious. I think he's really just honestly more in a lineage with his dad.

And that those other three films that I just mentioned are sort of trying to break new ground. We were texting about it and trying to kind of put our fingers on what Skinnamarink and The Outwaters

in particular, like what the native origins are of those kinds of movies. Like how do you see it? Yeah, I tried. I mean, I had like a working theory last night that was like are these post-elevated horror movies so basically i think i asked you i was like what do you think is sort of patient zero for that what we loosely describe and now is sort of dismissed as elevated horror but let's say it's the witch

in 2015 right and you have the ari a Aster movies and the Jordan pool movies that follow afterwards. And then a lot of like the eight 24 or Sundance approved horror stuff. That's kind of, kind of comes out over the last five, six years after that. A lot of it is about trauma. And now it's like psychological.

Exactly. And that it's like, that stuff is actually referenced in Scream now where they're like I don't like I like elevated horror or whatever like that is

and critics scoff at that phrase horror fans like hardcore horror fans called that whatever but it's like I always kind of

just assumed that it was a way in which indie filmmakers or artistically minded filmmakers to get their stuff

seen is to basically associate it with horror without having to do some of the conventional stuff that horror does. In any case, I was wondering whether or not Outwaters and Skidamarink are an extension of, okay, we've had five years of elevated horror rather than a pendulum swing back to

let's make Wes Craven movies. We're going further out where we just are doing the elevated part, you know, and we're not really worrying so much about horror. And even though there is a demon or even though there is a possession happening or something, we're more interested in like kind of like subverting narrative filmmaking beyond even just subverting horror as a genre.

Yeah, we should probably explain what The Outwaters is because we've talked and joked quite a bit about Skinnamorink this year. We talked about our trip to see the movie. I've seen it a couple of times. There's a part of me that wants to watch a third time to kind of really wrap my arms around how I feel about it because I definitely like it more than you. And I feel like I might like it a lot, actually. And I'm trying to... Skinnamorink? Yeah. Especially having now seen a couple of these other films. The Outwaters is, you know, very roughly like

Blair Witch Goes to the Desert. It's about a group of campers. They're going out to like Palm... No, the Mojave. Mojave, yeah. To make a music video for a woman who's grieving the loss of her mother.

Yes. But she's like an aspiring kind of Phoebe Bridgers-esque... Yeah, singer-songwriter. Singer-songwriter singer-songwriter it's directed by Robbie Banfitch and it starts out

with the premise that like a hundred horror movies start out with like this group of people sort of friends but also kind of like conveniently different

from one another get in a van go out to a remote place and for the first 45 minutes or so it's like you're like

okay this is interesting it looks like it's going to be like a haunted desert and we'll see what's happening here. Conventional setup. And then essentially it turns into a gory, time-traveling, psychedelic, physics-minded wormhole horror where there's a lot of self-mutilation and there's a lot of basically like I took

ayahuasca and I filmed it. Yeah. The word phantasmagoric gets thrown around a lot when talking about horror. This one is truly phantasmagoric. It's also, it's abstract in a way that very few films truly are abstract because it's POV lens in the dark. And so the flashes of light revealing gore and viscera and this confusion of like where they are what it is they've encountered what is happening to our characters

are they in another dimension are they in another time are they exactly where they are but just experiencing a hallucination yeah there's a lot of confusion some of it is effective and some of it felt unwatchable and it's really in this like middle ground. I really appreciate what Banfitch accomplished, honestly, on like a micro budget. 15 grand. And with a really strong vision. And he and Kyle Edward Ball, who made Skin and Meringue, you know, I think that they've certainly seen all the A24 movies and like them. They're younger guys.

They seem very, they seem simultaneously very mainstream horror and very film school. Yeah, but those guys don't have an aesthetic that I think you would compare to like Trey Edward Schultz or Jeremy Saulnier or Ari Aster or any of those people where it's like this kind of highly composed post-Venture digital framing of just like this very kind of still uh i it's i i want i need to kind of come up with a

aesthetic harmony for all of this stuff because i think it's there yeah they're like painterly yeah like you know robert eggers is like doing caravaggio you know like relative to what these guys are doing yeah these guys are much more uh let's fuck around i have a camera in 10 grand like let's make something they are but there's I think there's a lot more intentionality to it. And that's part of what I think is kind of circling my mind with Skinnamarink is some of it kind of bleeds you dry as a commercial proposition. But if you experience it the way that I experienced it for the first time alone, scared in the dark, it has more power.

And the intention, I think, is like, just like I said. Where are you having a Pabst Blue Ribbon? Or did you have a Spindrift? I wasn't having any beverages. It was too late.

You know, I can't drink, I can't drink liquid after 11, you know, it's just like, then I got to wake up in the middle of the night

and pee. I'm getting so old. I just got news for you that it's not going to change. So you can just go ahead and have a beverage or don't. You think I should just be doing scotch at 1 a.m.? Well, I'm getting so old. I just got news for you that it's not going to change. So you can just go ahead and have a beverage or don't. You think I should just be doing scotch at 1 a.m.? Well, I just want to know,

I wonder whether or not California makes us think that there's a way to like unlock the body's full potential. I can assure you that's not what's on my mind. And I think that it's like all about self-improvement. Whereas like in New York, it would just be like, yeah, we're going out for tequila at midnight you're the that's not it's not california that's that's doing that to me i know what you're saying like in our 40s which is when we start to decay right uh maybe we should just like embrace it is what i'm saying rather than be like i can't have any liquid after 11

this is because i am the mummy you. As I've said to you before, this is spoken like a man who doesn't have to wake up at 7 a.m. to change a diaper. You know, like that is really, that is the ultimate X factor in should I have this tequila after 10 p.m. But I think watching these movies, like that's another thing is like,

I would happily just like have six beers and watch a horror movie. And now I'm not doing that in a way too. So I have a little bit more of a critical cap on when I'm watching some of this stuff I think that the experimental movies are a useful wave and it's a little hard to know what to say about Kyle Edward Ball or Robbie Banfish until we see like what the system does with them or whether they decide to go into the system I find that interesting watching you know Ari and and Eggers and Peel in particular have now had three successive

films each one with growing budgets and where they have decided to go and all three of them as you pointed out basically went away from pure horror you know I think you could make the case that Nope is a horror movie and it certainly has especially that set piece of the house in the raining blood was like like high level, high end 70s horror. But for the most part, a Viking movie, a UFO movie, and a nightmare comedy about anxiety, that really doesn't have anything to say

about those things. And I wonder if these guys similarly are using the tools and the tone of the genre to explore other worlds. I'm not totally sure. The other people that you didn't mention that I think are kind of influential on these guys too are Benson and Moorhead.

I think you're certainly right. Who have shifted a little bit in terms of, you know, they directed episodes of Moon Knight and their last movie was, I thought, really good, but a real like COVID psychedelic. Yeah, me and him making a movie in our apartment. Yeah. I'm very curious to see where they go

if they go into the mainstream at all. Well, they had done that Anthony Mackie movie, right? That was like supposed to be their big Hollywood one, right? Synchronic, which starred Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, which felt like closer to a bid for mainstream, but still had a very... Yeah, that was still XYZ. That wasn't like a huge studio movie, right?

No. There's a part of me that would like to see them make at least an A24 Neon movie, but we'll see what they do. I mean, is there anybody else in the mix now that you're like...

I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody. I guess there's a couple of people who, one, I'm scouting, and one, I'm waiting to make sure he's really back. The one I'm scouting

is Rob Savage, who has made two basic COVID classics in horror. He made Host and he made... Dashcam. Dashcam. Dashcam, very divisive. Host, more or less universally beloved. I thought Host was brilliant.

I thought Dashcam was borderline unwatchable, but I think that was part of the design of the film. thought Host was brilliant. I thought Dash Cam was borderline unwatchable, but I think that was part of the design of the film. So I acknowledge that he was going for something. And he's got his big swing coming because he's got the boogeyman coming. And then the other person

who I'm like, is this happening, is Ty West, where Ty started out as like, holy shit, this guy's going to be the next great horror director.

Then kind of went into the wilderness for five years. And if you look at his IMDb, it's just a lot of TV. And now he's come back with Mia Goth and made what would be a trilogy of these Maxine movies. And I'm very fascinated to see if Maxine does well too. Does he go on to basically be to shoot call his shot and making horror features it's really he's the guy who's like i think this is what you want to be doing he wants to be making these movies and he he made a western and he has done excursion you know he

did a cult movie yeah the sacrament i think that's his most underrated movie that movie's awesome um he he can do a lot of different kinds of things but i just thought x and pearl was kind of right in my sweet spot of like knowing the history of these movies but doing your own spin on them and i think he has like real kind of master level um sense of where to put the camera with these movies and maxine you know meaghan just described it as a superhero movie which i'm not sure i'm sure i'm super excited about but a movie set in the world of LA 80s porn is like pretty appealing to me it's got an amazing cast I don't know if you've seen

who's gonna appear in that I saw Elizabeth Debicki is gonna be in it Giancarlo Esposito Michelle Monaghan Lily Collins Bobby Cannavale Halsey

and your boy Kevin Bacon in a movie with Mia Goth set in 80s LA porn in which yeah she's a I think an 80s LA porn star who's a yeah, she's a, I think, an 80s LA porn star who's a serial killer.

So that's an appealing movie for me personally. So I think you're right. I think Ty West, it's possible that if he, and I think I would imagine that A24 will roll out the red

carpet for this movie. I think they will sell the shit out of it. Yeah, because people were trying to get Mia Goth nominated for Pearl, right? Yeah, which was

never going to happen, but her performance in Pearl is incredible. You know, we talked about Scream 6 a lot on the show. I don't know. Have you and I had a conversation about Sick in public? I think Sick might be the best one of the year, though. It is, though, right?

Because that's the one that has the most obvious cheapo premise and the most, like, on paper, this shouldn't have worked, but... They let Hyams go out of his mind, though. Yeah. So John Hyams, who's, like, one of the best action

directors alive he did like the Universal Soldier movies basically directed like a COVID scream movie so it's Odessa Adlin like Pamela Adlin's daughter and a friend this is in

2020 like where it's set in 2020 they go off to like one of their Odessa Adlin's characters parents lake house to wait out COVID they're going to like one of their Odessa Adlin's characters parents lake house to wait out COVID they're going to go quarantine out there and essentially like

are getting stalked first by text message and then by masked intruders and it's got a little bit of strangers a little bit of scream and a little bit of this and that but the thing that Haim brings is like he does fights better than anybody alive so good with the exception of maybe gareth evans and the fights in this movie which are your usual like the

killers in the kitchen and this guy is gonna try and kick him in the balls but run are one take people being thrown through windows and hit with antlers and all this shit and it's just like it elevates it way beyond anything. And then also, I don't think it's a twist to say there is a twist. The twist in the film is, I thought, quite effective. So I think that that's where it will be divisive for some people.

I thought it worked too. I wasn't annoyed by it. I think some people will be frustrated by it. If you're trying to get out of the COVID-19 state of mind, the movie may not work as well for you. But it's not made like a COVID movie. No, no, no. I mean, I think it's made that way

in the sense that there's not that many people in it but it's a film actually about covid 19 and specifically 2020 like stand six feet from me have you been tested stuff in a way that just didn't annoy me i think a lot of people don't want to see those things you know it's funny we talked about this even with the jason isbell documentary that we worked on here at The Ringer, that could have been too defined by its pandemic era. Yeah. And we didn't want people to be thinking about that when we discussed it.

This movie is different. It's actually good to have a period piece that uses horror as a gateway to some of those feelings that we had. I thought it was really effective and I completely agree with you. I'm like, this is John Wick level fight sequences

inside of a three-hander. Yeah. And I really agree with you. I'm like, this is John Wick level fight sequences inside of a three-hander. Yeah. And I really, really enjoyed that one. It's streaming on Peacock right now. It's honestly one of my favorite movies of the year.

Yeah. It's been a weird year. So yeah, it's one of my favorite movies of the year. It has. I've enjoyed myself at the movies this year,

but I would not say that I'm like, I got masterpieces spilling out of my pockets. It's a little early. Sick is a really good film, you know? This is not a horror movie,

but you want to riff on air at all? Sure. What'd you think? I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. There were moments where I was like, this is like pretty much

the ideal. You got to not think about it costing $90 million. And you kind of have to put the it doesn't it costs 50 million dollars plus 40 million for talent fees yeah exactly and i felt like it it was exactly what you said which is just like the material was good the performances and the pure charisma of like who they got to be in it and the way that they made it even though it's obviously like they shot it in an office park in Tarzana,

it's fucking so entertaining. It felt immediately like, I'll probably watch this five more times movie. And I have to be honest, I was listening to you and Amanda talk about it. And I thought her points about the commercialism of the film were very well taken, but I also wear Nikes. So it's like I was the target audience for that specific kind of commercialism.

And even during the fucking ridiculous, like Matt Damon, like you will be immortal and then they will tear you down and cutting to like the headlines of his dad. I was like, this is the corniest thing in the world that I am choking up. Yep. Yeah. That's Matt's power. Yeah. You know, he's one of the few who can pull it off.

Let's talk about a couple of VOD movies because you've seen a bunch and i've seen a bunch yeah and i think that the real heads come to you expecting you to shine some light and it has been a softer year yeah i did view the film candyland can i tell you that the other day i i mentioned to my wife phoebe who i love deeply uh that i was going to be doing this podcast and she said what will you be champion because we watch a lot of horror movies together and i was like well i think i'm really Phoebe, who I love deeply, that I was going to be doing this podcast. And she said, what will you be championing? Because we watch a lot of horror movies together. And I was like, well, I think I'm really going to go to Bat Candy Land. And she said,

is that because there's a lot of beaver in it? I didn't know that Phoebe was a truck driver from the 1980s. That's surprising to learn that she uses that phrase. To be fair, there is a lot of fever in this movie. There is. There's some sex scenes. This is the horniest most 80s, 2020s

movie I've seen in a while. It falls firmly in the not good but I enjoyed it camp. How would you describe Candyland? 50% grindhouse slasher movie, 50% mumblecore movie. It's set in a Oklahoma truck stop. I think that's right.

And follows a group of sex workers who seem to be just having a completely uncomplicated and lovely time doing their jobs at this truck stop. And just kind of like going about life until a cult slash a cult shows up trying to to you know get them to stop what they're doing religious zealots yeah and then and then a slasher is among them a killer is among them so you know olivia lucardi sam corton

eden brolin and owen campbell are kind of the core actors in this. And William Baldwin doing some interesting work in the film as well. Really on his too-old-to-die-young grind. Very much so. There's elements of this movie where it's like it was made by people who obviously like really raunchy early 80s comedies and horror movies where sex is very much...

How lascivious are they? how like lascivious are they or how like chaste are they equals some sort of like what the killer will do to you. Like that's obviously a big thing in Friday the 13th and Nightmare. It kind of comes into play here but it's a little bit twisted.

It starts out seeming like a movie that's going to communicate moral judgments based on sexual activity but then it goes a little bit wider. Yeah, that's a much better way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought it was fun. I, you know, it's, it's a real, like I'll, I'll look forward to what John swab does next. Yes.

Um, I, I kind of don't know how he got all these people to do some of these things in this film, but Hey, that's, that's artistry, I suppose. Uh,

how about there's something wrong with the kids? Roxanne Benjamin, who, uh, I really have a lot of about there's something wrong with the kids? Roxanne Benjamin, who I really have a lot of time for, did Body at Brighton Rock, did some really great stuff in Southbound, which I think is kind of

an awesome anthology film that you can check out. And this is about Matt Saracen and his girlfriend. Zach Gilford, the actor. Yeah, I just like saying Matt Saracen,

she'd be sick. They go on vacation with they have no no kids they're a childless couple and they go on vacation with a couple friends of theirs

a couple who have children and over the course of this weekend in the woods the kids just get more and more disturbing

and take it from there. As a father of a daughter. Well, I feel like this movie and Evil Dead Rise actually have a lot in common. When we walked out of Evil Dead Rise, I think I said to you, that is the final statement on COVID-19. Yeah. Because it's a movie about being trapped in a house with your deranged children

and all hell breaking loose as some sort of disease infects everyone. And this movie is like a little bit of a pairing in that respect. I think that Can I ask you an Evil Dead Rise question

really quickly? We hung out this weekend. I got to spend some amazing time with your daughter and I was thinking about how you have to do everything for her. Right?

There's a moment in Evil Dead Rise that's really just quick. It's not plot dependent at all. Where the mom is like, Danny, take my car keys and go get me pizza. And I was wondering, how excited are you for the day

when you can tell Alice to go get you something? Yeah, I had her sign a contract on her first birthday that she has to live in our house until she's 30. To pay you back. So that she can pay me back. Yeah. And I look forward to it.

I mean, there's nobody I like spending time with more. Get me a case of Modelo. I'm watching Skinner Ring 4 tonight. It's funny you say that because I had a very similar feeling was I can't wait for somebody

to run errands for me. Yeah. It's, it's, that part of parenting, you don't know. You don't know until you have to do it.

You have to pick up every last thing. But there's something wrong with the children or there's something wrong with the children or there's something wrong with the kids is the challenge of that movie for me,

which didn't totally work, is I actually just wanted more mythology. And I don't usually want more mythology for movies like this, but when the thing that happens, happens,

it's largely unexplained. Yes. It's just like, you guys shouldn't have gone into that mine. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I like comic books.

Yeah. You know, I like to read the Greek myths. I want to understand. You want somebody to hold your hand and explain the quantum verse. Yeah. When they made Prometheus to explain Alien, I was like, thank you, sir. Appreciate all those data points about all these things I've been wondering about. Prometheus is really important to both of us.

So we did Alien on the rewatchables. I mean, God bless you. You did it. You got it across the line. I'm really proud of you. I love you.

Can we get Prometheus on? Do you think Bill would do that? I don't know. Has he seen it? I'm sure he thinks he's seen it or it was like on

and he watched it for a few minutes. But I find that those two films together are like peanut butter and jelly. They're so good. Alien and Prometheus

and then Covenant is just a great fucking time. Yeah. Speaking of horror movies. I agree. There's a sequence in Prometheus speaking of children

at birth that is the Caesarian. Possibly one of the scariest bits of body horror of the last 10 years. Anything else out there

in the VOD minds that you're interested in? Can I say something? I love Shudder and you and I are huge advocates of Shudder. Let's concern Troll Shudder. I mean, the original...

Well, it's tough because I don't want to threaten anybody's situation because AMC Plus is going through it. No, we can blame this on William Finnegan. Because he wrote

a big time Jim Dolan Penn Station, what's up with Jimmy and Cablevision and all his holdings. And Shudder is among his holdings. Yes. And they are, I don't know if AMC is currently for sale or if it's going to be merged with something or what they're doing.

And I don't, you know, everything with Shudder, Shudder is the thing that I check every Friday I don't even like wait for the email I just check to see if anything else has been added so I am a loyal

paying subscriber to Shudder but I'm just saying that like I feel like anecdotally there were more better films

being added more consistently and I don't know if that is a supply problem I don't know if there are more streamers bidding for more titles or if there is an issue with the curation and or buying power of the service. Some people lost their jobs a couple of months ago. Those people might have been

essential to the curatorial work that is done there. It might just be a quiet time in the year in the calendar for their original programming. i still think that their catalog selections are amazing i i went and watched a few of the originals from this year and i didn't i don't want to i kind of don't want to dump on it it was like small like that but none of it was very good and some of it is just like the after effects of a few trends where you're seeing a lot of similar kinds of movies about like religious demons and things like that that just felt iterative.

And some of it is just like... Yeah, we're going through a real exorcism, spiritual horror phase right now, which is not always my favorite. What would you say

is the defining... How would you define this era? Is there a thing that... Because we're at an elevated horror, I think. Well, I thought it was going to be COVID and we've got like three or four of them.

That's about it. Maybe it hasn't happened yet. I do think that there is an element now where I don't know if anybody has ever made it the primary interest, but I think if you took this five-year block of horror movies, there's a lot about the

way that digital life has kind of seeped into our real lives. So everything from the creepypasta nature of Hollow Man to Unfriended to Host to, you know, the texting that's going on in Sick. Like, they've fully assimilated, like, digital technology into what's scary. Even, like, the Scream 5,

where Jenna Ortega is like trying to use like her home security system to keep the killer out and he's overriding it. So there's something about that that I think is there. It's a great observation. Thank you.

But I don't know if there's like a actual narrative theme to the last few years of horror stuff. Yeah. I think maybe you might be right that the modes of making the movies is more what has changed and what we're willing to accept

in the storytelling. You know, in keeping with some of that like religious and kind of exorcist thinking, like Consecration and Husserra, The Bone Woman, are two movies

that are in that realm as well. Two movies that I think are only half successful but have amazing performances in them. Consecration's a Jenna Malone. It's a Jenna Malone. Amazing Jenna Malone performance in that movie

and the story is okay. It's kind of a story you've seen before. I felt somewhat similarly to Hussera and Baby Ruby is another movie that's on VOD

and all these movies are kind of about like birth and loss and parenthood and trauma. They're all connected to you know even the Evil Dead Rise

and there's something wrong with the kids stuff. That seems to be a kind of prevailing theme too so we're either getting something that is sort of more religious tinged or something that is like more pure slasher and there is some i guess uh maybe a third tier of experimentally informed stuff do you think that maybe the last couple of years as i think more and more people are more comfortable speaking in the vernacular of therapy and being honest about going to therapy that, I mean, I'm even thinking of like swarm that,

you know, the, the Donald Glover show that was on Amazon and night house, the, the David Bruckner, uh, Rebecca, um,

hall movie where like trauma is like front and center. It's not subtext. It's text kind of. Yeah. And Night House, the David Bruckner, Rebecca Hall movie, where trauma is front and center. It's not subtext, it's text, kind of. Yeah, I think the Rebecca Hall movie, Resurrection, is in this mold, too. I think so. I think it's long-term for the bad, but that the genre needs to get it out of its system. That in the same way that our culture kind of comes to a settle point with some of this like discourse and verbiage that we use there's a like a generation of

filmmakers that are utilizing it and then i'm hopeful that we kind of i don't want to say get past it but just make it more um set design rather than story focus sure that like it can be a part of the world that we're in but it doesn't have to be driving the story. But Swarm is another good example of what you were talking about in terms of like using our modern technologies and the way that we communicate. And, you know, I haven't finished that series yet, so I don't really want to fully weigh in on it.

But another example of like really incredible filmmaking at times and really cool, like really smart idea. But similar to Mike Flanagan, I'm like, man, the two-hour movie version of this is right up my alley. And I was wondering like what you think is going to happen with this genre in particular in TV

because The Last of Us is a little bit of this too. You know, it's a video game thing, but it's not been communicated as clearly. Like that's a horror movie. That's a horror story. There's a few episodes that are straight up just like action horror. Absolutely. Especially all the Boston stuff. Do you a few episodes that are straight up just like action horror. Absolutely. Especially all the Boston stuff.

Do you expect there to be significantly more horror on television? I don't know. I think there are elements that you can bring in. I don't think anybody's ever really successfully done horror on a week-to-week basis and been able to sustain it. There are elements of horror that you see, going back to X-Files and stuff like that, where, especially in the sci-fi stuff, they can bring in monsters and they can bring in creepy walking down the hallway stuff.

But TV is so plot-driven and horror tends to be so visceral and this is a very spare setup to put somebody in this situation. I wanted to chat with you a little bit about some of the stuff that's on the horizon that's coming out in theaters and also maybe where we think they're going to go with some of the because we're definitely in an ip moment right so we've got exorcist coming from david gordon green now that he's wrapped up his halloween thing he jumped right into exorcist with Leslie Odom it seems like the universal

dark universe thing is back up and running even if they're not calling it that but they're seemingly plowing money into that the last voyage of the Demeter is coming in August and I don't know if you know the framework for that but it's the first chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula just everything that happens on the ship

Corey Hawkins and Liam what's his face from Game of Thrones? Cunningham. Cunningham, yeah. Who is one of my faves. I thought that was a pretty good trailer. I would watch that movie for sure. It's kind of like low-grade Master and Commander with Dracula on the ship.

In. That sounds good, right? Yeah, Universal's going to keep plowing ahead on that for sure. And they should. They should. I think it's hard though to make those iconic characters scary to a modern audience you have to work very hard to make the wolfman scary you have to work very hard to make the creature from the black lagoon scary we're at the place now where um

you know guillermo del toro is using the creature from the black lagoon to tell a heartwarming story of acceptance you know what i mean like our cultures have changed a lot in terms of how we think about what is scary to us. There's some other stuff that is coming. I mentioned Talk To Me on the Sundance episode which I saw and talked

about I think before A24 had acquired it. But once they acquired it I was like oh this is the this is probably the horror phenomenon of the summer. Okay.

It's coming out at the end of July. It's from I believe that the Raka Raka dudes, the YouTube guys, I think they're Australian. And I think the film is Australian. If it's New Zealand,

I apologize. I always confuse that. They're usually pretty chill about that. Yeah, they're not. Nevertheless, shout out to all the New Zealand and Australian listeners of this show. We appreciate you

and we appreciate your film work. Talk to me, it's going to work. Top 10 demos like i feel like it's a us we're very big in in the balkans and the emerging post-soviet block right i know you have a huge serbia base which i'm not sure how what maybe they just they've sent something in your spirit that really works um yeah, I think I'm huge in Thailand just personally. My brand is really big there, which I feel good about.

I love Thailand. Haven't been. One day I'll go and I expect to be celebrated. Fetted on the street as one of the greatest podcasters. What else is coming out? I mean, we talked about Maxine.

We talked about the Boogeyman. Those are two of the big ones. You know about Apartment 7A? No, what's what's that okay this is important speaking about ip so apartment 7a is a very um mysterious production and the reason for that is it has since been reported though not widely reported that it is a kind of prequel sequel to Rosemary's Baby. Fuck. It's Julia Garner, Diane Wiest, directed by Natalie Erica James, who directed a film in 2020 called Relic,

which was very celebrated. Yes. And it seems like it could be a big deal. It's a Paramount movie. It's not dated. Produced by John Krasinski. Okay. I'm in.

You're in. Yeah. That sounds good, right? Yes. I'm very intrigued by that. That's a perfect zone for Julia Garner to be. She's like a...

I think she has a lot of Scream Queen potential. I agree. A couple of other big ones that are coming out. So the Nun 2. Didn't love the Nun, honestly, but we'll see with the Nun 2.

Saw X. You're not a Saw guy. No. Don't know why. Never really got into them, though. First one, sure. But after I saw Carrie always get his Achilles chopped,

I was like, I think I'm good for these. Did you know Rennie Harlan is doing a reboot of The Strangers? That's happening. I didn't know Rennie Harlan was still firing up the camera. He's working.

Yeah? He's working. I'm not saying he's working at the same level he was as The Long Kiss Goodnight, but he's, he's at work. Are you aware of Night Bitch? That's Mariel Huller?

Yeah. So I don't know if this is a proper horror film, but it is about a woman who at night turns into a dog. It could be. It's described as a comedy. It could be a really like playful dog comedy. Yeah. So it's Amy Adams.

You know who her counterpart is in this film? A dog? Uh, no, Scoot McNary. Oh, that's good for him, man. I haven't read this book written by Rachel Yoder, but could be horror. I will watch VHS 85 when it comes out for my sins. I don't know why, but I just am like,

I really do like horror anthologies, and I'm just glad that they just keep pumping these out. I'm going to watch the keep pumping these out um I'm gonna watch the Salem's Lot movie it's not dated right now but Gary Dauberman who was in that James Wan yeah you know um Annabelle Haunted World he'd worked as a screenwriter for years Blumhouse did sick correct Blumhouse did sick the movie that house is doing Exorcist. Yes. It's David Gorgon Green. Yeah. There's a movie that is... I don't know very much about, but I am most intrigued by this year.

And if this movie turns out to be terrible, don't hold it against me. But... It's called Do Not Watch. According to Deadline, details as to the film's plot are being kept under wraps, but it's said to be a decade-spanning mystery revolving around an unexplained phenomenon known as the Bunker Anomaly.

No one you've ever heard of, but if you check out the internet, there is some interest and intrigue around this film. Can you not say? I don't really know. I think it's sort of like there's a tape and what's on the tape kind of a movie. I missed that. interest and an intrigue around this film. Can you not say? Is it like... I don't really know. I think it's sort of like there's a tape and what's on the tape kind of a movie. Do not watch the tape

because if you watch the tape something terrible will happen. Do you think David Pryor is going to make another movie soon? I don't know. I don't know if he can get one made.

He directed The Empty Man. Yeah, I don't know if he can get one made. I mean, he directed an episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. I don't know.

Did you watch that? I watched... I don't think I saw his. It was pretty good. Okay. He, his episode was The Autopsy

and it was interesting. I hope he does. I worry that a filmmaker like that in a weird way is like spoiled and ruined

by having a movie released in 2020 by a major studio. Like that, he talked so much. That movie actually became like the closest thing we have to like a cult phenomenon.

It really did. Like that had legs. It did. Is that movie streaming anywhere right now? I think it's on Max. I'm not sure, but it's on cable a lot.

So you've just shifted to Max. You're just saying Max. That's, I mean, good. That's great. That's what it's called. It's on Max. You feel comfortable with that?

Just Casey Blys right behind me just like well done with a knife to your throat like the guy in Sick anything else coming out you're excited about no I think that the thing

I'm actually the next big thing I'm excited about is Boogeyman just because A. love Messina B. just really excited to see what Rob Savage does

with Stephen King did you think Messina was accurate as David Falk not in terms of his hairline although I don't know if David Falk had a beautiful head. I guess he's supposed to be Jewish in this film, but Chris Messina's main. I don't remember that. I don't either. I remember early pictures of Falk with Jordan being like, that is a bald man. There was a part of me as I was watching. As was Sonny Vaccaro. So I don't really know. Maybe we just decided. At least Damon put on 20 pounds.

Sure. I was waiting and waiting and waiting for a Patrick Ewing reference in here. Until they finally gave it to me at the end. Because David Falk, of course, his second most well-known client was Patrick Ewing. How are you feeling about the Knicks? How are you feeling about the Knicks? Really good. In fact, I made a joke on the Exorcist podcast

about how the Knicks were going to get swept and I asked Craig to cut it because I was like, they are not getting swept. In fact, they looked very competitive. Wait, the Alien pod? Yeah. Did you make a joke about the Knicks getting swept?

Yeah, because BS was like, you maybe hear Sean on New York, New York talking about yada yada. When the Knicks win the title, I'm going to have Craig surface that, you know, just like out of the vault that we keep all of our blackmail, our compromise. Sean doesn't hide his doomsaying though.

Like he's on Twitter after every fucking inning of the Mets being just like, Steve Cohen, retire, bitch. Ask Bobby about his texts. My iMessages. They're littered with my doomsaying. It's just all Sean. So you guys are out on Uncle Steve.

You don't believe anyone? No, that's not what I I didn't say that at all. No, no, no. We're out on Billy Eplers who are out on the Mets GM. We are truly out on Billy Eplers. How's Carlos Correa

doing this year? He hit three home runs over the weekend and has three game winning hits. But how's his lower body? It's still holding up. It still exists. Yeah.

You know who would just fit beautifully on this roster this season is Carlos Correa. Really. In seven years, I'm not sure if that's the case but this season he would have he would have done some damage chris people will be like why are you getting seven text messages right now at 10 p.m while we're watching this tv show and i'll be like it's just sean i promise it's just sean didn't you fucking try and tell me over the weekend that you were like keeping a safe distance from the medets? I am.

By my standards, I am. So you're sending him? It's fucking 10 p.m. on the East Coast and you're sending him? You know what? Because,

and Bobby, you can attest to this, 80% of those text messages are just things I see on Twitter about what the AAA team is doing. Oh. Where it's just like

Brett Beatty has once again assassinated a baseball and I send it immediately. Actually, it's really more Ronnie Mauricio. You're like a prospect writer at this point.

I am. That's basically your moonlighting as a prospect guy. Have you signed up for whatever Keith Law is doing right now? I don't think I would be

very good at that but I also think I'm more interested in it than I am the Major League Club at the moment. Okay. So that is my horror is this Mets season

is watching all these 40 year old men go on the injured list. Nevertheless, you feeling okay about the Phillies? What are they? Five and ten? I mean we just went to the World Series. I'll live. Okay. Alright. Fair enough. Fair-old men go on the injured list. Nevertheless, you feeling okay about the Phillies? What are they, five and 10?

I mean, we just went to the World Series. I'll live. Okay, all right. Fair enough, fair enough. Sixers, on the other hand. CR, you're on Philly Special? I am. I'm not going to do it tonight.

Okay. I have dinner plans, but... Wow, where are you going? All time. Good for you. Yeah. That's great. You going with like a high-power producer?

Yeah, I'm going... You and Jason Blum? I'm going all time. Talking about my vision Me and Jerry Bruckheimer going all the time. Talking about my vision for Maverick going forward. That's very exciting. Have you seen How to Blow Up a Pipeline?

No, I want to see that. So that's not a horror movie, but it is a very thrilling film. And, you know, this is revealed at the end of this conversation, but I don't mind mentioning it before we jump to that interview.

Daniel Goldhaber is making a version of Faces of Death. Fuck off. For Legendary. What do you mean? That's his next movie. is making a version of Faces of Death. Fuck off. For Legendary. What do you mean? That's his next movie. Is it about people watching Faces of Death? I don't know.

I don't know. How does Legendary have the IP for Faces of Death? It's a great question. You know, Goldhaber talked about looking for inventive ways to approach IP because, of course, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a non-fiction,

you know, leftist rhetoric and he turned it into a heist thriller so he's a talented dude I look forward to that so let's just hop right to it CR thanks so much let's go to my conversation with Daniel Goldhaber and Ariella Barrera In 100 meters, turn right. Actually, no. Turn left. There's some awesome new breakfast wraps at McDonald's. Really? Yeah. There's the sausage bacon and egg.

A crispy seasoned chicken one. Mmm. A spicy end egg. Worth the detour. They sound amazing. Bet they taste amazing too. Wish I had a mouth. Take your morning into a delicious new direction with McDonald's new breakfast wraps. Add a small premium roast coffee for a dollar plus tax at participating McDonald's restaurants. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. Very excited to have the director and co-writer and star daniel goldhaber and ariela barrer of how to blow up a pipeline one of my favorite movies of 2023 thank you both for being here

thank you for having so much for having us so how'd you two meet it was interesting to just see that you wrote this movie together we met end of 2019 because danny was making another movie that was supposed to be um it's his follow-up to cam not a sequel but just his next movie and um we had a couple meetings about it and i think early 2020 i officially attached as the lead and then that was the thursday before everything shut down on monday and that same Monday was COVID lockdown. So the movie promptly fell apart. And then we, we had just gotten so used to having all these creative conversations. And so I kind of sent Danny some of my writing. It was like, you know, this is also a thing that I'm interested in. And we very quickly just had a rapport creatively and with writing, we were just helping each other a lot until we

found this book so how did you find the book and it doesn't really seem like a book that one would adapt necessarily for a film so i was hoping you can explain how it transformed from something more like a text into a thriller an activist thriller really yeah i mean so so jordan scholl and i the jordan's the the third writer on the movie um we had been writing another movie a different movie uh and he had come out to la uh to write that film with me and uh for about five five six weeks and you know i had been here just hanging out with ariela as well and you you know, working on stuff together. And so the three of us had ended up kind of potted up for about six weeks just watching movies and working on stuff. And as Jordan left that trip, he actually left a copy of Pipeline on my desk as a research book for this other thing that we were writing, which had some shared themes and ideas. But it was just a, hey, I think you would find this interesting. And Jordan is an academic. He actually just got

his PhD on Monday from Duke. And he has been threatening, half-jokingly, to adapt a work of academic theory into a movie since we started working together seven or eight years ago. And so, you know, that's just an idea that had been planted in the back of my head. And so I started reading the book. And, you know, about halfway through, and I just, you know, you're reading this rousing text, but the legacy of sabotage is, you know, as part of social justice movements and climate, you know, change. And justice movements and climate you know change and um i just had this image of a bunch of kids in the desert struggling with a bomb and i um looked at mario was like literally in the room with me and i was like what if we what if we

took this and you know started spinning this into something um i think that that's the thing is that the book has such active language and such kind of um vivid vivid images in it to begin with that it actually kind of like it was a very straightforward idea. And then it was really just a matter of getting on board and figuring out how to actually blow up the pipeline and who would do it. Was there any part of you that thought no one's going to let us make this movie? And would that have stopped you at the earliest stages of creativity? Because it's a very unlikely project to be mainstreamed into the Hollywood system. that we wouldn't make this movie. I don't know what it was, but something really came over Danny and I where we decided we would do this any way we had to because we cared so much about the subject matter.

So, I mean, we didn't book a single meeting for it off the script and we just kind of knew we were going to have to find alternative ways to do it. So that is what we did. Can you tell me about that? I'm curious how you went about actually putting it together and funding it and actually making the movie itself. Yeah. I mean, it was similar with my first film, Cam. I think that there's this idea in Hollywood that if you're going to make a movie, it needs to be something that everybody wants to make.

But I've found the opposite to be true. That if you have a movie that only one or two people want to make but they want to make it with every bone in their body that's going to be a really good collaboration with your partners and so with this it was less so a matter of as ariela said i think that we knew that somewhere out someone out there was going to want to support us to do this and work with us on the project. It was just a matter of finding them. And so, you know, that's just kind of good old fashioned shoe leather salesmanship. So we were not even totally done with the script, but we knew that we needed to shoot it in 2020. Yeah, 2021.

We wanted to shoot it and have it ready to premiere last year at tiff and so we basically drained our bank accounts and flew ourselves to the can film festival and started breaking into any party that we heard was happening um which then led them to changing the security message measures for some of those parties because we snuck in and got caught um and basically just started talking to anybody who would listen about the project um and at one of those parties we met alex hughes and spacemaker um who came on as our kind of first financier and you know and i spent 15 minutes talking to alex about the project and he was like i really hope the script is good because this is the best pitch i've ever heard um and and then alex black and lyrical were the other financiers and producers and isa matzei who's the other creative producer and me were doing a video

game with alex black and i thought he would connect with the story and sent him the script and he also dug it and um i think what was great about the collaboration is that both Spacemaker and Lyrical were a lot more than just financiers. They were real collaborators in the project and in different ways, it just really helped shape the film and were kind of ruthlessly supportive from day one until finishing.

The film's politics are obviously not shaded in any meaningful way, but I was wondering if you both had any trepidation about being added to a watch list or being identified as some sort of dissident just by the very act of making a movie like this, even if you had completely inverted politics to what it was saying because it's it's risky i would say on some level just personally speaking it's still a it's still just a movie and like i think at the end of the day there are so many people out there who are risking so much more to actually you know who engage in the activism and the direct action and

the boots on the ground work of fighting climate change that I think that we knew fairly early on in conversations that we had that ultimately were filmmakers. Everybody knows that we're filmmakers. Oil is probably going to get mad at us. The security state is probably going to get mad at us. That will almost certainly pale in comparison to what everybody else is dealing with. And I think that, you know, that puts us in a position that we still exist in, where I think that we want to kind of be able to try to use whatever platform we garner with this film

to help give back and support those people doing the work on the front lines. Yeah, and I only laugh because I find there's this trend happening right now where people are so afraid they're going to get put on a watch list if they look up our movie. And I started thinking that'd be an amazing diversion tactic that everyone just starts looking up this movie. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if in a weird way, the movie normalizes the idea of domestically upsetting the natural order. It's an idea that I think feels extremely provocative until you put it in this case that you guys have created. It's a teen thriller in many ways, but because of the title that you've chosen, and I know that the title is inspired by the book, but because of

that title, it feels like an out-and-out provocation. And I'm wondering if there was ever a time when it was more like a movie called, I don't know, Texas or something like that. You could have Trojan-horsed some of the movies, but instead it is this overt proclamation about its intent and style. Yes and no. I think that it's just about... The title is just a description of what the movie is about like any good title is uh i think that that you know something that was part of the political core of the film was what you're saying trying to take this idea that is more or less a fringe debate in the

environmental movement and try to bring it into the mainstream and get people talking about it and considering it, not even necessarily to try to get people to go blow pipelines, but to recognize that there is an escalation of tactics coming in the climate fight. And currently, the only narrative that exists about those tactics is one that's pushed by mainstream news media, by corporate news media. And they have a very clear perspective and a vested interest in maintaining that perspective. We saw this, the counterbalance to that. kind of cultural engineering, if you will, is the title. Because the fact that there's a movie called How to Blow a Pipeline that exists in movie theaters is in itself something that gets people talking and gets people thinking about this question of sabotage, direct action, and confronting

this notion of what must be done to fight climate change so i think that on that level the title is doing the same kind of political work um yeah you know it was an ordeal that nobody was allowed to touch the title that was that was a question i had as well yeah that makes sense um you know by the same token we're we're speaking in a kind of very uh politically oriented mindset but it's also kind of like oceans 11 in some ways you know it has like a getting the gang together flashback structure and it's it's a purely like entertaining movie in its own right i was wondering if you could talk about that too in terms of writing it and thinking about structure and how to get people as invested in the ideas as the story.

I mean, I think that there's a little bit of a fear on the left to an extent that, you know, if you make a film mainstream or if you make a film commercial, all of a sudden it loses its kind of punch. I mean, that's certainly a criticism that the movie is getting itself right now, that sends the message that leftism, progressivism, revolution only exists for a niche audience. And I think that that is not a winning political strategy. I think that I love those movies. I love movies like Empty Metal. It's important that they're out there. They're a critical part of the cultural and political conversation, but we can't limit our imagination to that. If we want to be able to bring a more mainstream audience into this political ideology, we have to tell stories that obsess that culturally speaking. And so by the same token, I just love heist movies. I love entertaining movies.

I like movies that are fun. And we also saw this as a great opportunity to make a fresh contemporary heist film for 2023. Ariella, what movies did you all watch as you were working on this? Reservoir Dogs was a huge structural inspiration and tonal inspiration. Battle of Algiers, Thief, huge Michael Mann. Oh my God, of course, Nocturama, just about the disillusionment of the youth and rebellion. It's a beautiful movie.

Woman at War is a personal favorite of mine. It's an Icelandic movie. We don't talk about this one a lot, but we recently were reminded of Four Lions was a big inspiration for us. Just the camaraderie and the kind of ideology behind the group, but also the way that's all dealt with

through humor is great. Which, funny enough, Ariel, I didn't tell you about this yet, Andreas texted me this afternoon and the entire text message just read four lions with like nine exclamation points, which I guess is a movie that he loves.

We just had never talked to him about it, but he saw the line on his list. Andreas wants to do lions. I love that. I love that movie too. That's a wonderful movie. Yeah. And Sam Bain, who's one of the writers, was actually somebody that he's a, he's a friend. And, and when we were kind of writing this, we sat down with him and we were like,

how did you approach writing about this and thinking about this? And especially writing characters that, you know, exist so far outside of your experience. And he had some really great insights into that. I don't remember what any of them were, but I remember at the time that they were really helpful. The film is very clear out about the consequences of some of this stuff.

But unlike a lot of those movies that you just mentioned, Arielle, I feel like it's weirdly hopeful and weirdly progressive is actually the right word, I think. And then not in the way that maybe mainstream media would characterize it, but it sees a pathway in a way that I feel like a lot of films about activists or direct action are often like couched in tragic circumstance.

I assume that was an intentional concept on your part, but I was wondering if you guys could talk about that too. Yeah, that was extremely by design. I think that was one of the like foundational ideas behind the movie was to make a sort of aspirational story about rebellion for the left. Because it seems in my experience that all these stories about leftist action and leftist revolution are either big budget movies funded by the military where maybe their cause is righteous, but ultimately they've gone too far and they're the villain of the story.

Or it's an independent movie where it's about the downfall of the group and the internal politics of the group, which is interesting. And I love those movies. But ultimately, it becomes this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where there's nowhere to turn. And I think it's all too convenient a narrative for us to say, there's not much we can do. It's too good and easy for the big oil companies for us to all say, well, anything we could do, the politics would be shady because of this reason. It wouldn't be the perfect revolutionary act because of this reason. So we wanted to make that kind of aspirational thing that even if it is not a totally doable plan, it's not something. A lot of the movie is fantastical.

It is larger than life, but it is still something that gives us somewhere to look forward to. If we only imagine failure in our stories, we can never conceptualize a question of success. It's not that how to blow up a pipeline is propaganda necessarily, but it is, you know, I think if it's propaganda for anything, it's propaganda for the idea that there's something that can be done to fight climate change. And that's true. It's factually true. But if you look at movies like First Reformed, you would walk away from that film thinking that that is not true. If you watch Night Moves, you would think that it it's not true that it is an ultimately futile cop but i think that there's actually like a moral compromise in that position because the moral compromise is essentially that the moral compromise of climate doom is that we just throw your hands up in the air and say it's too hard we're fucked and it's like well that's easy to say but like that means that billions of people will die you know and and so i think that

it's incumbent on us morally to imagine better than that it's an amazing point that i'm not entirely sure i agree with you about but i love that you are doing it because so few artists are actually doing it i think that there's like an interesting question i think generationally about the level of kind of acceptable cynicism that people are allowed to have right now and whether or not there is an alternative to that. And I honestly don't know if people that are younger, at least than I am, are more cynical or less cynical because they have so much information and such ability to communicate in a way that maybe we didn't 25, 30 years ago. But I was wondering how it's being received even amongst your peers and colleagues the idea of making a film like this and communicating so clearly about you know the

the intent and the ideas of the movie like ariela on your part like you're a an accomplished actor in hollywood you know you have appeared on streaming service television shows like is this seem like a brazen act in in your friends and peers' eyes? Yeah, I think, you know, at least in my circle of friends in the industry, a lot of people have, I mean, been involved and supportive to varying degrees throughout the process. I think it is something that a lot of creatives in the industry want to do to just kind of throw caution to the wind and for two years dedicate yourself to an indie project like that is kind of a fantasy i think that a lot of people within the industry have um i on the flip side will say a lot of the more casual acquaintances i've had in

the industry that are more about the institution of power you know have congratulated me on on like a disney thing that i do but but have not said a word about this which i find very funny yeah um but i i think all of it's fun and i think uh a lot of yeah i it's been nice getting to kind of like collaborate and talk about this stuff with with people in the industry and you'd be surprised who who is really supportive of a movie like this daniel you know i how did the film change when you were actually making it relative to when you were all conceiving it and writing it because it just it seems like a major practical series of hurdles to get over um and did you find that maybe the science wasn't quite right or the way you

imagined you would execute it was any different than when you got on set it's funny i want to try to dig up the text message that i sent jordan um while reading the book on a text read with him and ariel being like what if we did x because it didn't deviate much from that um which is funny. I think that it's partially because one of the things that's most challenging when you're writing a film in particular is figuring out what you're trying to say. And here somebody handed us the argument, and then we just had to figure out how to dramatize it. So it was kind of as if somebody had already done that part of the work for us, which is also something that I think people criticize the movie for is

having to straightforward, uh, uh, an argument and an idea for having characters that to cleanly and clearly illustrate the argument that's being presented, but that's, it's, it's adapted from an academic text.

It's adapted from a rhetorical piece of argumentation. That's, that's, that's part of the interaction between the drama and the text. So on that level, it is kind of what we anticipated. And then in terms of actually figuring out how to blow up the pipeline, we just had great experts to work with. We worked with a bomb expert who is an expert in homemade explosives and a pipeline expert who helped us figure out how to do it without spilling a ton of oil. We worked with a ton of different cultural and political activist

consultants who helped us figure out, you know, just where these people would be from, how to illustrate their different perspectives, how to kind of engage with their different forms of lived reality, lived experience, I should say. And on that level, I think it was more or less, you know, there was a very straightforward research process there. I think in the edit, what was really surprising was that, and this is something else that I experienced with Cam, is when you're making a movie about a subculture that is on the fringes and people are giving you feedback on the script. They keep saying, you need to explain this more.

You need to explain more. Why is, why is this girl doing, why is she a cam girl? Why is she doing this? And similarly with pipeline, you know, why are these people doing what they're doing? And then very quickly, when you actually train an empathetic camera lens at a great actor, those questions kind of evaporate. And so there was a lot more kind of discourse in the movie. A lot of those scenes in the library or the scene where they're kind of getting drunk and talking about being terrorists were significantly longer inscripted. And in the editing, we realized that

a little bit of that went a really long way and that um you know people think that they want that but they don't actually really want that in a movie like this um and so a lot of that was kind of carved back but the movie structurally is almost exactly what was scripted um in terms of the nature of the flashback structure, when they come, I think there were a few scenes that we swapped the order of, uh, you know, just during the bombing operation. But, um, yeah. And I would also say the actors brought like changed everything from what was on the page.

They all kind of rewrote and rebuilt their characters to be who they are on screen, but that was also something that we kind of knew would happen as part of the process. Does the, I guess, financial success of the film indicate in any direction to you guys how open an audience is to a movie like this? Because there's obviously not a huge history

of a genuinely leftist piece of art being a smash hit. There are obviously leftist ideas in art being a smash hit there are obviously leftist ideas in big hits but have you considered like if the movie does okay or not well what is that a referendum of some kind or is that just we're in a weird time and you never know i'm not worried about it personally i think i mean there's also a danger to it doing so well that then it becomes a thing that people want to do for a cash grab and it loses what it is, but I really hope that people can go have a fun time at the theater and I'll be proud of it no matter what. Will you all make another movie again together?

Sure. I hope so. That'd be great. Ariella, will you keep writing and producing films? I feel like this is the first time you've done that. Yeah. I mean, this is the first time you've done that. crash course in filmmaking in the process of doing this. So I would absolutely love to do it again. I'm definitely developing stuff and Danny is helping and present for all of

that, even as he makes his next movie right now. Can you tell me about your next movie, Daniel? Yeah, it's called Faces of Death. And it is a re-imagining of Faces of Death. And it stars Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery and Josie Tota and some other people who haven't been announced yet. And we start shooting it in three days. Oh, goodness. I'm personally really excited for the world to learn what a star Josie Tota is. I lot of the world already knows it but more of the world will know it now this is this is the

the faces of death that you are reimagining the cult object of i'm sure both of our youths i actually had uh never heard of this movie um when the project came to me but it's it's a it is a it is a it is a very bizarre and specific generational difference of how old you were when ebombs world and rep.com were a thing because you know if you had those in middle school the vhs tape wasn't going around. And so, you know, there are definitely people in my age bracket who have heard of it. It's kind of one of these things where you go over the age of 35

and everything changes in terms of the cultural awareness of it, which is something that the movie is aware of. Interesting. Well, that's a very good tease. I just want to say congrats to both

of you you know we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they have seen do you have something you've seen recently that you like i'm gonna answer that go daniel do it go first i gotta i gotta look at my letterbox okay off the top of my head um i'm more so okay two things i saw recently more recently i saw the conformist for the first time oh amazing obsessed with that movie that is another type of political filmmaking that i absolutely want to explore and then also like a little bit to the side of that strange days catherine pigow, one of my favorite movies. Both of those have quickly become my favorite movies and are new watches for me. Those are fantastic recommendations.

I have a crazy answer to this, which is I think the best thing I've seen so far this year is this anime miniseries called Cyberpunk Edgerunners, which is something i kind of heard was very good and um you know i played some of the video game and i was there were some elements of it that have crossover on another project that i'm working on and so i kind of noodled around with it and got totally sucked into it and it is masterful. Unbelievable animation. It's a great story. It's a great, you know, obviously I am interested in kind of the novel IP rift these days.

You know, we did that with Pipeline. I'm doing that with Spaces. I think that we live in this world that's like still aware of IP and Cyberpunk Edgerunners totally uses the like Cyberpunk video game world and then just goes and does something that has nothing to do with the games uh and it's really

a great story amazing animation it's really political um I loved it I highly recommend it check it out that sounds like super mario brothers movie counter-programming if i've ever literally it's like the opposite it's it's the opposite it's like it's like gross and weird and like super leftist and it's great thank you so much to both of you congrats again on the film thank you thank you so much thanks to daniel and ariela thanks so much to CR and thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on this episode later this week on the big picture as I said it's time to talk about Bo Ari Aster's new film Bo is Afraid it's one of the most interesting and divisive movies of 2023 it's in theaters expanding wide we'll break it down with Adam Neyman and Ari will be back

on the show to talk to me about making it we'll see you then see you at the movies