The Big Picture - The 1991 Movie Draft. Plus: Wim Wenders!

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

We are drafting again! Sean, Amanda, and Chris Ryan reunite for a draft of the best movies of 1991 (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by master filmmaker Wim Wenders to discuss his new film, ‘Perfect Days’; his return to a film set in Japan; how he looks back on his long career of making movies; and more (1:31:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Wim Wenders and Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who cares about your team winning the Super Bowl when your team could win the offseason? My name is Danny Heifetz and I host the Ringer NFL Draft Show with Danny Kelly, Ben Solak, and Craig Horlbeck. We cover trades, free agency, the draft, obviously. We cover quarterbacks, and there are a lot of good quarterbacks this year. And the teams at the top of the draft, Washington, New England, Chicago. Big teams with big histories. Listen to the Ringer NFL Draft Show on Spotify. 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 Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about 1991. CR is here and we are drafting again.

But as usual, I have a grate of world cinema to follow CR on this podcast. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Wim Wenders, legendary German filmmaker responsible for Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, Buena Vista Social Club, so many more classics. His latest film, Perfect Days, is the Japanese nominee for Best International Feature at this year's Academy Awards. Perfect Days, Chris, is, it's kind of like what I like about you. You know, quiet, profound. It sticks with me for a long period of time. Vim, amazing guest on the show. Perfect Days, one of Bobby Wagner's top five movies of 2023, a beautiful film. I hope you'll stick around for my conversation with him. He's

really just a legend of world cinema. And so are you, Chris. I'll definitely save my most deeply inappropriate story about 1990s cinema for right before Vin Ventures. So we are talking about 1991 on our draft today. We were kicking some ideas around and been looking at like the 2000s and how we're running out of years. And Amanda just burst through the group chat like the Kool-Aid man.

And she was like, 1991! Why not? And we did it. We did. What made you think that? What made you say, how about this year? I was thinking of years that I had been alive for that we had not drafted. Okay.

And most of the 80s, we haven't drafted. But my consciousness was not really raised to the right level in the 80s. And 91 is when I was just coming online. So as a- Not online, not like on Instagram. Not like as a- Like Skynet. Like Skynet, yeah. Exactly. So I proposed it. I would like, for the record, to say that I think I just asked, have we done 1991 yet? And then it was decided in the great mind of Sean Fennessey

that 1991 would be next, but a fun year. What did you think of that choice, Chris? I'm ecstatic about it. Yeah? This is a unique one. This is a phenomenal year for movies, and it's from the top to the bottom,

and I'm really excited to draft these. So Chris, 1991, who were you? What were you doing? So this is, I actually have an answer for this that isn't just bullshit about travel baseball. Was travel baseball over by then? Well, so, but this is like when basically I stopped caring about sports 100% of my waking

life and started getting into other stuff. That's sad a little. Sure. But it led me here. That's true. But it was the end of an era. It's been just days since I saw the ball fields on which Chris excelled as a rising second baseman.

On Collin Fields and on the parkway. Yeah. And now you've moved on. I have. And one of the gateways into moving on was getting into, so I was like 14. And this was the period of time where I went from just liking movies to being really interested in how movies got made and why movies got made and why certain movies won Oscars and certain movies didn't. And what, like, I basically started developing taste in 1991. And so I went back and looked at all the movies released this year. My long list for this year is 51 movies. Wow. That's crazy. That's like the dream. And the thing that I loved about this year was the dispersal of the movies across the calendar. So you basically had like a cool movie every week, every two weeks. There was something to talk about and it wasn't all bunched up at

the end of the year. And I just remember really like getting into reading premiere and movie line at this time. There are several movies on this list of just things that came out this year. Premiere would have had you believe or like, get ready for William Hurt and the doctor. It's going to change the way you feel about medicine and film. That didn't happen. I think this is where I first started getting, you know what? This is the beginning of We Are So Back.

That's how it felt. Like you would pick up Movie Line magazine and read about a new William Hurt vehicle. Right. And you'd be like, we are so back. You mean after the low lows of Goodfellas and Dances with Wolves in 1990. We were so back. You mean after the low lows of Goodfellas and Dances with Wolves in 1990. We were so back in 1991. 1991, you were a little bit younger than Chris.

I turned seven. And yet you were online. As I said, I was just coming online. Yeah, I turned seven. I think that this was the era of the largest possible glasses that could be purchased. Think about the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial glasses, but with a plastic frame all the way around. It was sort of like a bluish clear tent. You're like Chris Sabo or something.

I don't know who that is. I got a smile from Bobby. Okay, all right. The mission today is cheer up, Bobby. Third baseman for the Cincinnati Reds circa 1991. And big rec specs. Are the Cincinnati Reds the team that you guys spend a lot of time talking about? They're the perfect example of man, baseball was my fucking life when I was nine.

But like two drafts ago or maybe last draft. Yeah, we were talking about St. John's alumnus. That was on the night swim. Which you may recall is a pod we did about three weeks ago. Okay, listen. It all works together. Yeah, so I was young. I went to school.

Did you go to the movie theater often as a seven-year-old? I don't know about often. I think I probably went to see Beauty and the Beast. I think, although I'm not totally sure, that might also have been just big VHS, because that was the era of let's just run it back 45 times. My godfather had a, like a toy car that was like a VHS rewind machine. Oh yeah, for sure. And you would just like put it, and I just, I mean, we just, you know, rewind Beauty and the Beast and start over. So, I mean, I think I was there, but I mean, what do you remember from being six or seven years old?

I can't say much about six or seven, but in 1991, I was turning nine. Yeah, so that you remember from being six or seven years old um i can't say much about six or seven but in 1991 i was turning nine yeah so that you remember big time yeah big time uh i think this is first kiss year for me wow nine yeah yeah okay which was it was a kiss that was stolen from me a girl who approached me on the playground who i was not in a relationship with her dating but just kissed me um this is the year you're saying like a peck no it was like a third base oh yeah a peck of course yeah uh my my parents got separated this year so that's very memorable okay uh i started going to the movies a lot um a lot more than usual and it was the probably the first year well obviously uh well get there? Well, obviously, well, one, I had a movie theater that was within walking distance,

a single theater at the mall where I grew up. And the mall where I grew up was five minutes from my house. You make it sound like you grew up in a gap. I mean, there was a gap in this mall and there still is in the Walt Whitman shops. Sean, he lives in the Orange Julius. There were times when I felt like I was,

especially after my parents actually split up and I was pure latchkey kid. But at this time, the Old Mid Mall had a single theater. And so that single theater would always play really like the big run movie. So Beauty and the Beast played there for probably six weeks, maybe even longer than that. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves played there

for a long stretch of time this year. I definitely saw that in theaters. I wasn't going by myself, but it was often me and two friends. And if it was a PG-13 movie, they just let you in. It was a great time to be a young man getting obsessed with movies this is the year that i also like you know i'd seen violent action movies or horror movies or whatever before this and even even sex scenes and stuff but this was the year that i think i got introduced to like ideas that were really way over my head like my mom took me me to JFK this year. You know, I saw like a...

What was the idea that was over your head there? Was it communism's incursion on our nation? Was it the way that the mafia pulls the strings like the puppeteers of God? Why are you pretending to be me? You know you're a fucking Oswald Truther. But I didn't see that movie. You're just like, it's just a nice windy day in Dallas.

This guy just got lucky. You know what the absolute best thing I've seen on the internet is in weeks? Is Brock Purdy looks just like Lee Harvey Oswald. That's my favorite thing that has happened. Hold on. I'm Googling them right now. There is a remarkable tweet with two images that is just Brock Purdy and Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, I do sort of see it.

Hold on. And frankly, Brock, lone gunman. He's got the vibe, you know? I didn't see JFK in 1991, though, obviously. That's a big movie for us

and I think it will come up as we get into draft order. I don't think I could have even grasped it. Did you feel like you were getting Reddit conspiracy pilled by watching that movie?

No, but like, I think it was just like, it was, I mean, I remember vividly seeing it in Lake Worth, Florida with my mom and her being really shaken up afterwards and being like, I had no idea. Really? Yeah.

I mean, I don't think that she was then dedicated her life to covering the truth the way Oliver still does. Oliver's still working. I know. He's still putting in time on this issue. So is Bill. The doctors have never wavered on this issue. So has Bill. The doctors have never wavered on this. Still the best thing

that has ever happened on Twitter. But yeah, that's the other cool thing I remember about this year is like, just like being introduced to sort of like

the more adult concepts and like ideas and themes that would go on to govern the rest of my life what do you how do you think like how would you define what movies were because you kind of got into this a little bit that there's like kind of something for everyone like all different kinds of genres you know we don't we didn't feel like we had this kind of like um sequel chokehold necessarily a lot of the movies that were in the top 10 in the box office that year were, some were for kids, some were aimed at older people,

some were aimed at men, some were aimed at women. You had the rise of a couple of big stars at this time. I'm reluctant to say this is the last pure time for a certain kind of mechanized Hollywood storytelling. But it does represent

something... I don't quite know how to put my finger on what it mechanized Hollywood storytelling, but it does represent something. I don't quite know how to put my finger on what it was, but it feels certainly a lot different than it was this year or last year or even 10 years ago. Well, some of it, it just feels like that the movies are the center of culture. And so like whatever you want to see, whether you're six years old and need to see Beauty and the Beast or whether you need to be, like, radicalized and go see JFK.

Like, all of these movies were big deals. Like, we all, you know, had some sort of relationship to them. And if we didn't at the time, we went and sought them out. And it, you know, movies are, with the exception of, like, Barbenheimer or whatever, which is a fluke, are not the center of the culture in the way that they were. I'm in the 70s and the 80s or whatever, but this kind of is like the prime of that 90s era that raised us. to figure out what we talk about when we talk about genre movies or what we talk about when we talk about hitting doubles to to to borrow andrew davis's description of of warner brothers is like approach at the time uh when they made the fugitive is like just go go to the 1991 list of american films on wikipedia and look through it and you'll see that a lot of the like the peanut butter and jelly movies are like thrillers, like adult kind of like noir thrillers

that were probably made for around $35 million or something like that. They made about 60 and everybody went home happy. And movies felt a little bit lighter and more, they were legion. There was just so many things to choose from, from the like scrappy Sundance indie stuff that was starting to bubble up out of independent cinema to like big glossy Barry Levinson,

Hollywood productions to whatever. But like they did, I think everything moved with a little bit of a pep in it step because it wasn't like the entire shareholder quarter is resting on whether or not this has a fucking blockbuster opening weekend. Yeah. We have this, this understanding of four quadrant marketingadrant marketing now with movies

where they're trying to hit as many people as possible. And I'm sure that there were marketing departments and data scientists working in 1990 and 1991 to do this for movies. But it felt like at that time, the biggest movies were movies that everyone wanted to see. And even though Beauty and the Beast was aimed at

seven year old Amanda my mom wanted to see Beauty and the Beast and even though Terminator 2 Judgment Day was aimed at 19 year old boys six year old girls

and 28 year old men wanted to see it too like it really went across the stratosphere for all of these different kinds of things or if we didn't see it then we still were being like

I'll be Bach, you know, on the playground. It fully permeated the culture. So this is a particularly fascinating top 10 in the box office. I set the threshold

this year at 75 million. That gives us 14 movies to choose from. But I mean, if you just look at them, T2, Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves,

Beauty and the Beast, The Silence of the Lambs, City Slickers, Hook, The Addams Family, Sleeping with the Enemy, Father of the Bride, and The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2. It felt like everybody that was in my life saw eight of those 10 movies, if not more. And it just doesn't feel that way anymore. It just, obviously, things have changed pretty significantly. How many times did your dad see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 Secret of the Ooze? I mean, I went in theaters. I went in theaters. But did your dad go with you?

Was he like, this is a four quadrant film for me? I think I have a very fond memory of this. You know, I just saw my dad at the live show. He came to see us do Rounders in New York. And I could tell that my dad's very proud. You know, he's like my son who I think when he was nine was like a big fucking loser clown, you know, who was like really into action figures and horror fiction and comic books. And he was like, I don't really,

what is this kid's problem? Like, why doesn't this kid want to work on cars? Why won't he, you know, why won't he play football? Like, I think he was really confused because he was jockey and a guy's guy. And I think when I was like, Dad, I really need to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 Secret of the Use. He was like, what the fuck is your problem? Why are you like this? But you know what? 30 years later, paid off.

Jackpot. We're doing rounders in front of 800 people in New York City. So I don't regret anything. I don't regret loving The Secret of the Ooze. I haven't seen it in a long time. Have you ever seen it before?

I've never seen that. Okay. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back though. You know about this, right? Like all my little nephews now, they're just like, I'm Leonardo.

I'm Raphael. Right, because they liked the movie. It's a mutant man movie. I saw that. Yeah, quality film. Yeah. I enjoyed it.

It stirred some feelings of my youth. So, do you have like any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knowledge? I skipped it. Yeah. All of it. I mean, I know the guys. Oh, name them.

Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Sean. It's Donatello. Donatello. Do you know, do you remember their sensei's name? Yeah. He was a rat, right? He was a rat. No.

Splinter. Master Splinter. Right. Do you remember The Big Bad? No. Do you remember The Big Bad? The Big Bad was not featured in Mutant Mayhem. No, then I don't remember.

Shredder? Oh, Shredder, of course. Yeah. Shredder. Shredder was huge. Yeah. I really like those films. Is Secret of the Ooze, that's the origin of uh ninja rap no

not ninja rap what's the what's the vanilla ice song called no not no no one blank there there are hundreds of millions of listeners at home screaming the title of the vanilla ice song from the teenage ninja turtles movie but unfortunately we can't hear what they're saying uh okay any other thoughts on on 1991 I mean, obviously a very historic box office or excuse me, Oscars year because it's

the last big suite. It's the last time we had one film win in the top five categories. I don't know if we'll ever see this again. Unless we see it this year,

right? Well, I guess not. Yeah. No actress. That's right, Chris Nolan. You did that to yourself. You think that's going to be

his next challenge is to write a film with only female characters? Yeah. You think he could do it? I think it'll go really well. He should inflame Barbenheimer more

by just remaking Little Women. What if he just signed on for Barbie 2? Yeah. Little Women but the guy's perspective. What's his name? Laurie? Yeah, Laurie's name laurie yeah laurie's very important uh yeah laurie little women colon laurie's version yeah as

directed by there is a sequel called little men that louise may alcott wrote yeah did she really yeah but i think it's like about all the like children of because joe winds up at a school i mean i don't know I obviously like don't care about it so is it because it's IP yeah that's that's why

you know me did you so recently on Twitter there's because of Curb being back somebody was like who's got that one Larry Davidson

and all of my Twitter feed has just been Curb clips do you remember the little women joke on Curb no I can't repeat it okay it has to do with Leon but never mind clips. Do you remember the Little Women joke on Curb? No. I can't repeat it. Okay.

It has to do with Leon, but never mind. He was like, I love Little Women. Stack them up one on top of the other. Curb, you know, Curb ebbs and flows, but J.B. Smoove has never lost a step. Never lost

a mile per hour on his pitch. It's Larry David, Tracy Ullman, and J.B. Smoove has never lost a step never lost a mile per hour on his pitch it's Larry David Tracy Ullman and J.B. Smoove in a scene talking about little women it's unbelievably cool okay

should we draft one? yeah Bobby any thoughts on 1991? I just saw Point Break in theaters last night oh sick wow

what a great time to be writing what timing? the cinema is back. Yeah, what timing? It's almost like they knew. Bobby, do you have

any affection for the 1991 Minnesota Twins led by Kirby Puckett and Kent Herbeck? Isn't that the year that there was the Jack Morris

10-inning shutout in the World Series? When guys used to actually work for a living? Yeah. That man had just nothing but forearms by the 8th inning

and he was like, I still got this guys yeah Jack Morris pitched 712 innings that season and then threw a 10 inning shutout and everybody was like

I don't know if he's a Hall of Famer I'm not so sure but this guy who pitches 84 innings a season is going in and then this fucking geek was like

what if he only threw three innings talk that talk Chris let him know let him know 1991 bad news is I forgot my top gun had it home hectic morning you guys Talk that talk, Chris. It needs to be a fucking country. Let them know. I'm with you. 1991. Bad news is I forgot my Top Gun hat at home.

Could have a little bit of a hectic morning, you guys. Yeah. So we're using a random. Bobby, we're here for you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. That means a lot. We're using random.org, which I have cleared the cookies. Thank you so much.

According to random.org, the randomness comes from atmospheric noise. Not really sure what the fuck that means. What? Wow. We're going to go for it. Thanks so much for bringing that energy. At from atmospheric noise. Not really sure what the fuck that means. What? Wow. We're going to go for it. Thanks so much for bringing that energy. Atmospheric noise. Atmospheric noise.

I like your garden center hoodie, Bobby. Thank you. This is my first job. The big picture is kind of atmospheric noise. Are you, so you have a lot of gardening expertise? Yeah, somewhat. Did I tell you about my, I tried to do like a wildflower garden this year and we'll see whether

and I like did the seeds and the mulching and everything right before the atmospheric river. So we'll see how it goes. But I wish I'd known. I would have asked you

for some advice. I'd love to see some progress. I know how to water plants really well and I know how to throw mulch into dudes' trucks. Okay. It was like kind of

the whole thing. That was my whole job. Are you a landowner, Robert? I don't believe in landownership. I don't believe in landownership. Property is theft. Coming up on JMO. Okay. The order will be Chris selecting first.

Sheesh. Followed by Amanda. And then the third slot is Sean. Okay. Thank you to the atmosphere for that. Really appreciate them. Big ups to the atmosphere. It's harder than you think.

It is. I would say there are seven, no doubt, bangers. Okay. Mileage may vary, of course. I think there are a handful of true Blue Amanda classics on this list. Yeah. Obviously, Chris and I both coming of age at this time, learning a lot about our government and the way that men operate together. So maybe we share some things.

Right. And then there's also some category-ish stuff to manipulate in terms of the Oscars were historic with a sweep. But that didn't leave a lot of room for other nominees. There was a surprising... There are some. There are three. But they could get taken up in other categories. It's a little dicey.

Before we get into the categories, I did just want to address a piece of news that came out, which Amanda raised. Oh, right. Which is that there is a new category at the Academy Awards this year and it's actually interesting to think about in the in the arc of oscar history it'll be for next year yeah because they don't have nominees they're introducing it officially next year which is the best casting award great um now i am not surprised that they did that given that um some of the leadership has a history in casting and so there is a desire to raise casting to the level of the other categories.

I think it's a great step. I have two thoughts about this, and I'm curious what you guys think. One, if this award is just another place to put the same seven movies, I'm not going to be happy about it. This actually, they need to make an effort to underline other films in a category like this.

Otherwise, there's no point in adding additional categories. The point of adding more categories is to expand the portfolio of films that they're celebrating. Two, to do this and not do stunt choreography as a category is a crime. It's ridiculous. It makes no sense. If you're going to open up more categories, the stunt choreography category should have been added 25 years ago to the Academy Awards. And even in movies like this that we're going to talk about from 1991, there are movies, there are more than enough movies that would have qualified for an award like that. And it's a critical part of the business. Stunts and out for justice alone.

Honestly, yes. Yeah, I know. So I'm a little bit mixed because it just feels like this is fucking Academy politics, where there's just a bunch of people who are in casting who are in power right now, pushing this one over the line and not other categories where people have less power. And in stunts, obviously, there's not a lot of people who are in casting who are in power right now, pushing this one over the line and not other categories where people have less power. And in stunts, obviously, there's not a lot of people with a stunt history and leadership. So I'm a little bit skeptical, but I do like that they're expanding and they're adding more awards, which is something we've both advocated for a long time. What did you think when you saw this?

I guess I took the positive better than nothing view. I agree with everything that you're saying. There's also like if casting were being added this year, then it would be the one award that Barbie gets, you know? And it does have that opportunity just to kind of be a consolation prize for something that's like, well, we liked it, but, like, we're not actually taking this or any other movie seriously. I also agree with you that we need many more categories, including a stunt choreography category. So, you know, and yes, the Academy is a bullshit organization run by politics and self-interest. We know that. But I don't know. It's a made-up awards show, so cool. They made up another award. They did. Sierra, what's the one award you want to see at the Oscars? Best topless scene?

For men, yeah. Just guys' pecs. Yeah. Best pecs. How's the bulking going? I haven't really gotten for men yeah just guys packs yeah best packs how's the bulking going I haven't really gotten into it because of the rain the rain got in the way and the tour

what does that mean I just like I didn't feel like going to the gym you know it's like this rain in California really makes you feel

claustrophobic no I I said that's the first thing I said to you and frankly it's because of other drivers it's not because of you guys I'm just's the first thing I said to you. And frankly, it's because of other drivers. It's not because of you guys.

I'm just like, some fucking guy is going to cut me off. You know, just stay at home. A man and I drove across town yesterday in the middle of the evening to go see Bob Marley One Love. Together? Well, we sat beside one another, but we took separate cars. Yeah. And did you enjoy yourself? Wasn't one of the better days of my year so far.

And then we drove home in the rain and rush hour from Century City across town. If anyone at Paramount or anywhere else is listening, just help us out. Pasadena, look into it. What about an Oscar for Best Prestige TV Show? We're trending that way, aren't we? We are trending that way. Have you started Monsieur Spade yet I haven't but it's

sitting in the queue god damn it I also have been on tour so please show a little respect you watch so many things when traveling both of you

you just like the laptop that's like okay goodnight everyone like sleep well and then like the laptop opens up you make it sound like

we're sleeping in the same room like all the rewatchables guys shared a room. When Chris and I tour, every night we fall asleep holding hands. It's really beautiful. We just curl up and watch Spaghetti Westerns together. Can you believe Mark Honey did it again? I did see a film in Philadelphia. I saw one from The Heart, which I saw in part.

Oh, cool. To support our forthcoming book club episode. Oh, that's so cool. It was cool. Like the re-release. That's awesome. Pretty exciting. That's cool. And I actually got a chance to see it at one. Oh, that's so cool. It was cool. Like the re-release. That's awesome. Pretty exciting. That's cool.

And I actually got a chance to see it at one of Chris's dad's former locals. Yeah, he used to go to the Ritz at the Bors. And so I went. Very nice. That's nice.

Okay. If you've never listened to a draft episode before, here's what we do. We draft from six categories and we work in a snake fashion. Obviously, Chris is going first, Amanda second, and me third.

The six categories this time around, pretty standard operating procedure here. Drama, action, Chris is going first, Amanda second, and me third. The six categories this time around, pretty standard operating procedure here. Drama, action thriller or horror, comedy, blockbuster, and again, the threshold is $75 million, Oscar nominee, and wildcard. You guys feel good about these categories? I do. Is this okay? Yeah.

Do we need to be mixing this up? Are you feeling all right about how we've been going lately? I've been feeling great. Honestly, the list of movies from this year i found to revitalize this whole project for me that was my intention was that we needed to get that's wonderful we need to get back to a classic time yeah i do want to say that we are going to do 1977 at some point in the near future in part to celebrate chris ryan because that's his his birth year and also because it was a very good year for movies and it's also a fun

for me personally a fun viewing project to go back and either fill in gaps or revisit things I haven't seen in a long time. But it is a start now situation. We all will start watching including hopefully the listeners will start checking out not just Star Wars. Make a letterbox list and be like here's the curriculum. I will make a list I'll publish it and people can look at all the movies that are going to be

eligible for that year. 1991 a little bit easier to catch up on. Yeah the curriculum. I will make a list, I'll publish it, and people can look at all the movies that are going to be eligible for that year. 1991, a little bit easier to catch up on. Yeah, though, I mean, I have gaps, for sure,

and I also have, like, special, you know, like, I have a reserve of six-year-old movies, you know,

that if we gotta do it, we gotta do it. But that's okay. You know, something I noticed, and both of these films won't go drafted, but I believe that

An American Tale, Five Old Goes West, was released like the week before Beauty and the Beast. Dude, you gotta look at the kids. Which I'm like, what were people thinking? That's a bold move. You know what would be kind of funny one time for you guys? Is if you find a year that you really like, you should do the big picture as if it's that year. Oh, that's a great idea. And you should basically do the episodes of like this week this movie's that year. Oh, that's a great idea. And you should basically do the episodes of like this week,

this movie is coming out. Oh, that's good. Because I was going through the months in 1991 and there are some like... We should do that for 94. Meaning like, let's just do an episode that's like the day Pulp Fiction came out? Yeah, or like, you know, or a couple

because it's 30 years. And also that's like a very formative year for both of us. You know what I thought of this? Because a couple of years ago, actually it might have been last year, last fall. It was the 30th anniversary of the day that Enter the Wu-Tang and Midnight Marauders came out. And people are like, this is the greatest day in rap history. I was on mushrooms that night. Is that true?

Yeah. Are you serious? Yeah. Wow. You never cease to amaze. Did you have access to both records like on purpose like and

like had you planned it for that was it Minion Marauders or was it what was the one after that Beats Rhymes in Life it might have been Beats I can't remember

because it would be a little early for me to take mushrooms when Enter the Wu-Tang Clan came out but I had a night where I went out it was like the first night

I met Andy and I was like I'm fucking my face is melting off and yeah never mind maybe it was the love movement was it the love night I met Andy and I was like, fucking my face is melting off. And yeah, never mind. Maybe it was the love movement. Was it the love movement?

Was that 95-6? Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I was not on mushrooms when I entered the Wu-Tang Clan. I strike that from the record. Okay. Well, that's a damn shame. Nevertheless, I do think in an episode where we're like, it's October 13th, 1994.

Today, we'll be talking about Fern Gully, Pulp Fiction. Just doing like a typical... There was that one, like, Wilco AM and Ghostface's first solo record came out the same night. Sure, Iron Man. Yeah, and I just fucking smashed both of those CDs into both sides of my brain. It was like, this is my personality. What made you cry harder, Wilco's AM or Ghostface Kill's Iron Man? Oh, by far, Iron Man. I was like, I didn't know it could be this beautiful.

No, but there's a couple weeks that leapt off the screen when I was looking at 91, where it's like on February 8th. It's like LA story, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Sleeping with the Enemy. You know, I revisited Sleeping with the Enemy recently for a pod. It must like, LA story, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Sleeping with the Enemy. You know, I revisited Sleeping with the Enemy recently for a pod. It must have been

for the Julia pod. The Julia Roberts Hall of Fame pod. It wasn't good, I don't think. It's fine. Yeah. It's like,

it's a fond memory for all of us, you know? How so? It's a quite upsetting film. Sure, but it's just like the Julia,

like the Julia wave, you know? Because everybody went to see it because Pretty Woman had been the it was the first one after Pretty Woman yeah yeah yeah because she was filming Sleeping with the Enemy during Pretty Woman it had that very unique quality and I don't know if you're planning to draft it I'm sorry to have this conversation but when I was re-watching it I was watching Patrick Bergen who of course plays the terrible abusive husband yeah he's a toxic male presence. He is.

And the whole time, and this is what they want you to feel, but I was legitimately like, what's this guy's fucking problem? Why is he such a dickhead? And I guess the movie worked. I guess it worked on me because I felt that way. You want to draft? Yeah, sure. I'll take Silence of the Lambs and Oscars.

Okay. Wow. Oscars or Silence of the I'll take Silence of the Lambs and Oscars. Okay. Wow. Oscars or Silence of the Lambs? Silence of the Lambs. I mean, it's really good, but... I re-watched it because we did Philadelphia recently on the re-watchables, so I was in my Demi bag, and this movie's perfect.

I re-watched it last night. It's really, really upsetting. Yeah. I guess I didn't consider that. But it's also really upsetting. Yeah. I guess I didn't consider that. But it's also like really good. I find it upsetting. No, I've seen it before. It is really good. But I was just like, oh, yeah, this is really fucked up again.

I'm really good. I've just been jame gum pilled so much that like I, you know, it's just an absolute perfect diamond. So you were how old when this movie came out? I was 14 or 13, I guess. Yeah. And when you saw what Migs did, you thought what? I was just like, what did he throw at her? You couldn't figure it out.

I don't think so. I think it took me a couple of viewings and it was definitely, but I knew I didn't want to ask my mom what happened. Was it Bill Simmons who finally made it clear what had happened in that sequence? No, I learned. Okay. I haven't seen this in a while, but I remember first time I saw it, probably on cable,

I was like, holy shit. Are you downplaying Silence of the Lambs? Aren't you like a huge Silence of the Lambs person? No, no. I wasn't.

That was not my intention. I think it's amazing. I think it is a five-star masterpiece. Okay. And... But I didn't... It's one of those movies, you know,

there's a lot of movies like this over the history of time, but it was like, I wish I was old enough to have seen it in the theater, you know know with my friends or on a date or something and just like had that version of that experience a date would be really fucked up yeah just the look a woman in the eye and do the jame gum voice and say what do you think hun should we keep this evening going i think i think that you are like far enough away from like dating to like you've

forgotten that you do need the date night movie to set a tone. Like that's what I'm saying. Got the delayed reaction from CR on that one. Do you think Eileen and you are meant for each other enough that if that was your first date, you'd still be married with a kid today? I, I,

I agree. That would, that would have been the true test though. If I was like, sweetheart, I know we're in sixth grade, but let's rent silence of the lambs and see how things go from here uh no it's amazing movie incredible yeah uh demi just a god to me and um i've never read this book

the but they say it's an amazing adaptation of the book ted tally wrote it right i mean i i i think one of the great what ifs of a lot of the last 25, 30 years of all this IP stuff is if they had ironed out the Thomas Harris Hannibal stuff. Because they can do Clarice, but they can't mention Lecter. Or they can do Lecter, but they can't mention Clarice. And they've tried in a bunch of different ways with Hannibal and with, I think, Clarice was a show on at CBS. But I'm sure it'll come up. How's your Meg's prequel going? Jesus. in a bunch of different ways with Hannibal and with, I think Claire East was a show on at CBS, but, you know, I'm sure it'll come up. How's your Migs prequel going?

Jesus. Is it in development or where's that? It's about him coaching college basketball and he's like, I'll... Okay, well,

the big Oscar winner of the year is off the board, but maybe not the most iconic film from this year? Right, yeah. I don't know there's a few options here yeah i'm um i did you think you were getting silence of the lambs no i i thought that i was not getting what i'm about to draft which in action thriller horror i will i will be taking terminator 2 uh which i thought was i think i've taken Terminator 2 in some context before. I thought it would be your number one.

I'm obviously leaving another very celebrated Sean and Chris core film on the table for you, Sean. And I thought about doing that as well. But first of all, action thriller horror is always a tricky spot for me. Especially at the age of six, seven. But I have now seen this film thanks to the big picture and a movie swap episode. We did quite good.

And, you know, and it also, when I watch it, I was like, Oh, that's what this from obviously one of like the great, most influential action movie.

Asla Vista baby. I'll be back, et cetera. Sure. so also a five-star world-class masterpiece a movie that changed movies forever um the uh 4ks of all the cameron films are coming out very soon coming in march so the abyss oversee them he did so. So The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator 2, and True Lies. True Lies never been on Blu-ray in the United States. Apparently, the transfers are not great. Oh, Jim! Apparently, the color grading is not great. Apparently, they look weird. Apparently, they look like hyper real.

Oh, no. Oh, like auto-smoothing kind of? Yeah. Oh, no. And so I'm a little concerned. I've been wanting to own The Abyss and True Lies for a long time. Do you think Jim Cameron has like walleye

from being underwater too long? It's a great take. That's a really, really great take. It's possible. It's possible. It's possible that just from spending so much time

in the world of digital creation. You've been like a pressurized metal tomb for a long time. I don't know if you're the number one dude to be 4K transferring anything. He's also getting on in years. That could be a factor. Been living in New tune for a long time. I don't know if you're the number one dude to be 4K transferring anything. He's also getting on in years. That could be a factor.

Been living in New Zealand for a long time. Don't know what's going on down there. So when Tim was on the pod, we talked about this. I know. I listened to all of it. I'm giving context. Did you listen to all of this yet? I listened to about half of it.

Did you make it to the part with the Billy bookshelves and that Tim is using VHS tapes to prop up his... Why are you mad? I'm not mad at all. You're so mad. I'm not mad. Tim is so nervous that you are so disgusted by him and this endeavor that we're into right now. No, he's not.

He is. He was genuinely concerned. And I told him Chris can fuck off. I would say the low point for me was when you were just like, I went to the Atwater Village Best Buy before an Eagles game. Uh-huh. And I couldn't find DVDs, and I was sad. Is this like an opposite day situation where you say the low point for me was actually the most riveting pod you heard that day?

Because that was doing the work. Yeah. Why did I bring this up? Jim Cameron? Right right because Terminator 2 the blu-ray isn't going to be what you want right well the point is I'm going to do what George Lucas did

which is 30 years from now I'm going to go back into every movie draft and I'm going to edit and I'm going to cut and I'm going to recut you know I'm going to cut you guys completely out of the episodes

I'm going to add Jabba the Hutt into every episode just our AI voices being like I can't believe how lucky we are to get to pod with Sean great pick Sean God you are so wonderful it's so nice to be your friend and colleague Just our AI voices being like, I can't believe how lucky we are to get to pod with Sean. Great pick, Sean. God, you are so wonderful.

It's so nice to be your friend and colleague. Thank you for being with me. Okay, so I have two picks. This seems obvious. Yeah. It seems obvious. It sure does. It seems very obvious.

And so I will take an Oscar nominee of the film JFK, There you go. Okay. which is also in my mind a five-star masterpiece, Oliver Stone's crazed depiction of his imagination of what transpired when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That's what makes you sleep better at night? You call it a work of imagination? That's fine.

You say imagination. You say that. That's Sean makes you sleep better at night and call it a work of imagination. You say imagination. You say that. That's Sean saying imagination. His work of solid journalism representing the events of 1963. I mean, just like Chris and I did a pod about it. Amanda, you've been very kind about that pod. It is my favorite piece of recorded material. And I listen to it once a year when I need some comfort.

You guys all sound absolutely insane. You also, walking in there thinking that you didn't need to have your take on the assassination ready. You're just like, oh, so we're doing this. You know, I hadn't heard by then that the doctors had never wavered. And then when I learned that, I've started to evolve my thinking. On Thanksgiving Day, he tweets that out. I was in my in-law's house in Philadelphia being like, this is going to be a long day. And then I just, Bill has logged on to talk about a new JFK documentary about the doctors and how they have never wavered. They've done great work over the years insisting that the wounds were so specific and could only be from multiple shooters.

So the movie itself is obviously like an extraordinary act of creation. Hank Corwin's editing is, I think the thing that is like, is most memorialized for her as a filmmaker in addition to Stones directing and writing. But really great performances, like this incredible menagerie

of awesome movie stars and character actors. Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon, Joe Pesci, of course, Kevin Costner as Garrison. Just a radiant movie

that I love to revisit. And I did just spend $44 on the Shout Select Blu-ray expanded version. What additional features does Oliver Stone come over and indoctrinate your child into the world of conspiracy theories?

He's moved in. He lives in the ADU now. So for the low, low price of $43.99, Oliver Stone lives in my house and will tell Alice about the theories. He let him out

for one hour a day because he's got the diagrams back and to the left. Sean, it's time for Alice to eat and also for me to speak about Joe Pesci's performance in JFK. Alice, today, Bay of Pigs. Okay, my next pick, and thank you to Bobby for alluding to it,

it's Point Break, an action thriller horror. Also a five-star masterpiece, Catherine Bigelow's religious, I would say, action thriller horror um also a five-star masterpiece catherine bigelow's uh religious i would say dissertation on the two sides of man you know the the the radical and the conservative the the thrilled and the thrilling um keanu reeves patrick swayze and in the in the death struggle of the criminal and the government man. And surfing. And Lord Petty. I like it when hot dudes

surf. Yeah. I mean, everybody in this movie is on fire. It's unbelievably beautiful. Super hot. It's shot as though she were filming the creation of the Grand Canyon. It is such a beautiful movie and a fun movie. I actually did something recently for Gallery

with Adam Neiman where we watched it and did like a chat alongside it. And that was really fun and a fun way to watch it. If you've not seen Point Break, I would recommend it. It was one of the first rewatchables, as I recall. I was not on that episode.

Yeah, I think that was Jason and Shay. Yeah, that sounds right. But no, maybe I was on that because I think I talked a lot about the football scene okay yeah and Johnny Utah

and whether like like 2D surgeries oh yeah like what would happen there I am an FBI agent Johnny fucking Utah I didn't even recognize you man so uh

did you see this in theaters yes yeah for sure like five times okay yeah me again yes okay in Oscar nominee I'm taking Thelma and Louise Yes. Yeah, for sure. Like five times. Okay. Yeah. Me again?

Yes. Okay. In Oscar nominee, I'm taking Thelma and Louise. Uh-huh. One of my favorite Ridley Scott movies, Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon. You know, like one of the great American movies, one of the great movies about two women, one of the great endings, great women. One of the great endings.

Great script by Callie Corey. I don't know. Like, this is one of the ones that gets sort of overlooked in the Oscars this year. But... It suffers because of that sweep. Right. Exactly. But, like, a pretty legendary and sort of, like, you know, paradigm shifting movie in its time.

I think its legacy is secured. Yeah. I feel like people have recognized. I think we've only selected movies thus far that are undeniable. Yeah.

Sierra, you've got two picks. In drama, I'm going to go Boys in the Hood, which was like a just volcanic movie

when it came out for me and for like my friends and seeing this is like right when I really remember like this feeling that like with Slacker and Boys in the Hood and a bunch of movies that were coming out at this time where you're like, holy shit, like this kind of looks like real life. Like this kind of looks like not, I obviously didn't grow up in South Central Los Angeles or Austin, Texas, but the way people talked, what they were interested in, the music that they listened to,

the shit that they were obsessed with, the things that they were thinking about really started to show up on screen. That's such a great moment in your life is when you start to get your generation's movies and your generation's art. So I'll do Boys in the Hood for drama. And I'm going to ask, I'm going to throw this out there.

I'm going to take it either way. So just so I'm not trying to category manipulate anything here. Can I put Barton Fink in comedy? I have it listed in comedy. I will take Barton Fink as comedy. I think it is a black comedy. Yeah, certainly that. Yes.

Yes. It's very funny. So Barton Fink is Joel and Ethan Coen's harrowing depiction of a man losing his mind in a hotel in Los Angeles in the 1930s as he's working on a wrestling picture, a screenwriter, loosely based on Clifford Odette's.

And he kind of comes in. It is one of like literally like the greatest ensembles I've ever seen. Just everybody firing. John Mahoney is essentially William Faulkner. John Goodman as an insane neighbor living in this hotel with John Turturro, who plays the titular Barton Fink. John Pulido.

Everybody is cooking in this movie. So yeah, I'm going to go with Barton Fink for comedy. I'm trying to remember where I put Barton Fink on my Coen Brothers list. I'm going to check that out right now. I think pretty high. I'm sure it was. I'm trying to remember if it was top five. That was one where you ranked them at me.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is podcasting here. You know, we're doing great works. And I was just like mostly like a supportive. I have it in the list that I wrote. Wow. I've got this pretty low. Do you?

But I think you updated it when we, cause you redid it on the podcast. No, I don't. It's at six. I did update it though. When I, I don't remember what I had it on the show,

but I had no country at five Fargo at four. Miller's at three Lebowski to a serious man at one. Is my list there? It's not. Yeah, you don't have like letterboxd lists of my lists. Were you on that episode? You weren't on that episode. This was a list that I wrote for the website.

Yeah, and then two years later. Oh, Deakins was like, that was right when we did Deakins. Literally six years ago, I wrote like a 3,000 word piece that's like, here's every Coen Brothers movie ranked like I was writing for Collider or something. But honestly, I felt great about it. And then during the pandemic over Zoom. 3,000 word piece that's like here's every Coen Brothers movie ranked like I was writing for Collider or something but honestly I felt great about it and then during the pandemic over Zoom

he re-ranked them and he just like assessed his own work and I just like sat on the other side of the computer and was like

mm-hmm mm-hmm and I got so many emails that were like thank you for stretching out and doing the work once again Sean you have done

what we all need did this make the Deakins Hall of Fame or did it get replaced by Rango? It's not shot by Marge Deakins. It's Barry Sonnenfeld. That's right. It is still in the Sonnenfeld era.

Actually, is this the last one? Maybe. It's shot by Deakins. I'm looking at it right now. Is it really? Yeah. It must have made the Deakins Hall of Fame then. Yeah, it did because I remember you were doing

a lot of show you the life of the mind stuff on that pod. Do you remember when John Goodman is racing down the hallway, surrounded by fire? Yes. I mean, at some point, that podcast did devolve into you just describing shots. And Chris and I were just like... Again, you keep saying things like they wouldn't be good podcasts.

Like you being like, remember when you guys listed Cincinnati Reds? And I was like, the last time I was happy? Yeah. You mean when we cooked? Barton Fink did make the Deacon's Hall of Fame. It did. Oh, good. Fargo was the final cut.

I remember you were really upset about the car headlights and the snow. That's right. It's tough. You know, the car coming up over the hill there. What did we cut it? What did you cut it for? Exact same thing with the hand. You did the same thing.

Did Rango make it? No, no, no, no, no. There was a huge fight about whether it was going to be prisoners was going to get on or Sicario. Skyfall.

Yeah. We cut 1917. Yeah, that was fine. Yeah. That was chilling. Should we redo the Deacons Hall of Fame? Only if I really,

really have to pee, I think would be the only... Skyfall did make it. That was the one where you were like, I have to pee, but I will not be the only Skyfall did make it that was the one where you were like I have to pee but I will not leave the studio

without Skyfall in here yeah many people have noted that that was the episode that changed the big picture forever we got a lot more comfortable being insane on the show

Barton Fink wonderful pick thanks Amanda you've got a pick course by course one by one till you shout enough I, I'm done. Do you know what this is from?

I don't know what you're talking about. It's Beauty and the Beast, you asshole. Wrap a napkin around your neck, Sherry, and we'll provide the rest. You sound like Jason Siegel singing Les Mis. He's one of my chief inspirations. So that is a song sung by a dancing candelabra

named Lumiere. Lumiere. In the film Beauty and the Beast which I'll be taking a blockbuster. Just a great film. It's so

it's wonderful. We actually haven't watched this at the house yet. Oh it's so good. She likes to read. I know. You know. I think it's going to be

a good one. And then she cares about her dad a lot. We're trying to avoid getting too caught in princesses. No, I get that. And I would as well. What are the role models you're showing her aside from Oliver Stone? Well, New Jack City, of course.

We've been showing on repeat, which I'll be speaking about later, hopefully. No, Lion King is what's dominating right now, as you guys know. Lion King is really important. Although, you know some complicated aspects honestly like I mean you're

a lot of hierarchies in Lion King I gotta tell you her best take so far and this is how I know that we are blood is that she's basically like Scar was right

like the Scar is the true hero of the Lion King and she has a giant lion that looks exactly like Mufasa and she's like that's not Mufasa, it's Scar.

He is more nice. And maybe she's just a fan of Jeremy Irons. Yeah. I mean, as am I. Has she seen Beekeeper? Not yet,

but sounds like a good watch-along guest. Should we do a Beekeeper watch-along? Sure. Okay. I mean, that was really fun.

In like two years when we can finally buy it like you can buy it right now it's on it's on vod yeah man it's not still in theaters not everybody is still in theaters they're given you can have it all here's why the beekeeper pot is going to be incredible next week all four of us saw it in theaters so we really understand the beekeeper but we'll get to that later uh after watching our know whether I fully understand it. I want to get that on the record, but I was there. I invested.

Bob and I had such a nice time watching it, and then he gave it one and a half stars on Letterboxd, and I was like, what the fuck, bro? The politics are tough. Yeah, after watching Argyle and giving Argyle one star, I did retroactively go back and keep it. There we go. For sure.

It's like two and a half. Can you give a half star? Yes. Argyle's like a half star. It's pretty bad. I listened to that podcast. That was very entertaining. Thanks.

Thanks so much. I also like imagining huge swaths of reality just being Argyle spinoffs. What if this pod, since Deacons, has been scripted by Matthew Vaughn and we're just part of Argyle? That would make this make a lot more sense to me in the abstract. Beauty and the Beast, great pick. A wonderful movie.

The last time an animated film was nominated for Best Picture. Angela Lansbury was in Beauty and the Beast. Chris? You've never seen it? Not all the way through. What have you seen?

What do you know about Beauty and the Beast? There's a woman and she gets into a lion, right? There's a lion guy, right? Jesus Christ. The beast is a lion, right? No.

I mean, he's a beast. He does. She comes over. It's raining. She comes over. A guy lets her in, right? So a beast comes to your door and you say what? It's raining outside, right?

She's pretty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she comes over and there's candles that start singing. It's raining outside, right? She's pretty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she comes over and like there's candles that start singing. It's raining outside, Jim! She walks up to the Beast's front door, Jim! She's wearing a coat, Jim! He's wearing a coat, Jim! This guy's got a terrible secret, Jim!

The blades are singing, Jim! I can't believe it! I actually don't really know what's the tension in Beauty and the Beast. It seems like they fucking... Well, he's a beast and she's trapped there.

Got comb syndrome. In the castle with him. Again, Beauty and the Beast was not invented in 1991. It was a fairy tale from the 1700s. Yeah, but I didn't watch... It was a Jean Cocteau film

in like 1945. I haven't seen that either. It's not like I'm cheating. Wow. Well, you got to get your weight up in terms of this literature. You're too busy smashing Wilco's AM

with the Ghostface Killer records in your head. You're fucking having 19 Budweiser's with Jack Morris. Okay. Will you show Beauty and the Beast to your young son?

Yeah, I think so. He'll like the, at some point. But right now, we're just doing top gun maverick like i know that's great he but so here's an interesting thing so i i showed my two-year-old son top gun maverick everyone because i'm mom of the year um and so because he loves planes so it's just like music and planes but apparently last night while you and i were at

bob marley um zach showed him some more and he wanted to re-watch the Jennifer Connelly boat scene and he kept saying boat boat boat even though they were

doing the dog fighting afterwards and he was like I don't want these planes I want this boat now was that because of Jennifer Connelly perhaps

it's a great question it might also be because of the big sale you know he likes kites flags all modes of transportation sure

yeah yeah yeah but that's so that's a new interesting development. She does have the power to radicalize a young mind. That's something I will say. But if that's what

he is responding to, then that's also great. You know? I'm open to it. Bit of a pickle here. Do you got two? I've got two picks. I would say that this has gone

essentially in the order that I expected. But that doesn't mean it's been good for me. It hasn't been good for me. Did you expect Boys in the Hood to come off the board?

I was hoping it wouldn't, but I assumed it would. It was my number two in drama. Okay. Obviously an amazing movie. Drama, weirdly, looking a little thin.

Yeah. I have some favorites, but I feel like maybe I should just bypass it and go to movies that I care about and or need at this point. I mean, there's a Marty movie on the board, right? So I got to take the Marty movie. While I wouldn't say Cape Fear is one of my favorite Martin Scorsese movies, it's still an incredible film.

We did do a rewatchables about it recently. Yeah, I listened to it. And it's sitting in Blockbuster, and so I'm going to take it in Blockbuster. Okay. Okay. Okay. How wonderful that a movie like this could make $75 million and become a Blockbuster in a year like this. This is Robert De Niro as Max Cady. It's a remake of the 50s classic starring Robert Mitchum.

A recently released felon who's come to torture the life of the lawyer who put him behind bars in the first place, played by Nick Nolte in this movie. Harrowing, intense, very weird. My favorite nugget about this movie is that Steven Spielberg almost directed it, and I can't even begin to imagine what that movie would have been like if it was Steven Spielberg. They were trading this and Schindler's back and forth? Yeah, I believe that's right,

which seems bizarre. Or something. In retrospect. They were trading two projects back and forth. I think that's what it was. Steven Spielberg did produce this movie, ultimately. And it's just a banger. Just a high quality,

kind of the essence of that thing we were talking about, which is adult thrillers that were dominating movies in 1991. Can we also just shout out, because on the rewatchables, we talked a lot about the perversion of the Juliette Lewis-Robert De Niro relationship in this movie.

And obviously we joke a lot about like what people were exposed to watching JFK. But this was really a time where like you would go to a mainstream entertainment and really get your buttons pushed in a pretty extreme way, which does not typically happen anymore. And I would even say for the most part in indie movies,

it's kind of like we're here to make everybody feel pretty good about the world you know what i mean like for the most part like it there i mean yeah maybe not like you go to you don't go to iron claw and come out thinking like man i love life but like you still like it's a pretty affirmative look at them you know it's not the filmmaking the things that they're saying are not like whoa i'm I'm uncomfortable. This is fucking cool. Yeah. I mean, it's also kind of a downer movie and an insane movie.

It was a blockbuster. A huge hit. Yeah. And also deeply informed The Simpsons and Treehouses of Horror and Sideshow Bob. I really appreciate it for that reason. Okay. One more pick. And I just got to go from the heart.

So in comedy, I'm taking Defending Your Life. Yeah. Albert Brooks' consecutive, fourth consecutive masterpiece about being sad and having existential dread. This time in the form of even after I died, I'm still feeling fucked up about how everything went for me. Right. Even if I've had incredible success in my life this movie features

indescribable chemistry between Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks and I know that Meryl Streep is like kind of like a comedy star now but was not at the time that she made this movie

and she's bringing the heat she's yeah amazing opposite Brooks and so funny and so warm. And so like the, just the,

the person you want to be with, uh, and obviously very insightful and funny about the way that the afterlife kind of works and the idea of putting yourself on trial and re-imagining all of the moments of your life. Fantastic. He's great as, as Brooks's lawyer.

Um, you know, Brooks celebrated last year in that documentary about his life, which that was a tough one for me because it's like I wanted more. I wanted more from that movie. I had a lot of fun time watching that documentary, and I thought the framework of it was cool, which is like Rob Reiner and Albert Brooks could go out and have a bite to eat,

and they've known each other since high school, and they're best friends. But I didn't want like famous people being like Albert Brooks is cool and here's why. I wanted just Albert Brooks talking to me the whole time about how he did everything that he did

and instead it was like Alana Haim and Chris Rock being like, yo, he's so cool. Alana Haim was like, I've been throwing myself at Albert Brooks since I turned 18.

It's a very weird thing. Did you guys see that? No. Okay. She was like, he's my dream man. Which I respect. He's my dream man too. But that wasn't what I wanted from that movie. Nevertheless, Albert Brooks is my goat. So defending your life in comedy. You're up, Amanda. Oh, good. Okay. I will also be selecting comedy and I will take probably my favorite movie of

1991, which is Father of the Bride, theles shire and nancy myers remake of the spencer tracy classic um i do vividly remember seeing this movie i like we rented it but i must have been like seven or eight and i watched it with my dad and i'd like it was like the first time that you like of understand, like I understood the emotions in the movie, you know, and was just like sobbing at the end. Very funny. We still have not solved the hot dog and hot dog buns problem that Steve Martin gets thrown in jail for. No, like I'm serious. Like what will it take? It's been like 30 something years and it's like eight hot dogs and 12 hot dog buns or whatever.

Like what are we doing uh so you know it made some good points it's just just like i think that when chris rock did the you know they could make a cadillac that lasts 30 years but they won't because it's bad business do you think that that's the same like did he jack that from Father of the Bride? And the whole, like, we got six hot dogs, eight hot dog buns situation? When I was in my more of a hot dog era, about like five, six years ago. Tell us more of this hot dog era. It would just be like something that my wife and I were like, do you want a hot dog for dinner tonight? We'll like make grill hot dogs. If I would sometimes, like if I was hangry, just like rock a bun.

I just grab a hot dog bun. And that's how I got around. Bobby, you want to weigh in on that from a macros perspective? Honestly, bread has more protein than you think. Like people villainize bread in America. So it's okay, Chris, especially if you were moving around, grilling a little bit, working that off. But a bun solo?

What kind of bun are we talking? Like a potato bun? we talking like a potato bun because i can get with that but like a bun a little dry no a little bit okay yeah what would be your beverage of choice with your hot dog bun uh a beer guinness were you unhoused at this time in your life just eating a hot dog bun but what the fuck was i gonna do with it otherwise that's the point right this is why new y York City baby you walk to the street corner get a Nathan's from the truck

can I tell you you know what I love when I've just got a loose hot dog bun is some cold cuts just put like some turkey and some cheese on there do you have a lot of cold cuts

in your house I love cold cuts yeah why not how come you're never like doing a sandwich I got some cold cuts because I'm trying to get you out of the house

as quickly as possible why else because Oliver's coming over Oliver's downstairs ready for another screening. Just throw bologna at Oliver Stone. Okay.

Sierra, you're up. Okay. So I have two here. I need a thriller. I need a wild card and a blockbuster. In thriller, I'm going to kind of

pivot a little bit here because I am trying to become a little bit post-results with these drafts. Now you're going to start being post-results? Yeah, I think that I've hit, like, I've had a moment of clarity where what I really want to do, in the same way that you're like,

don't fucking put the casting award up and then just nominate Oppenheimer 15 times more. I want to spread the wealth. I'm not just going to keep trying to edge out my guys here. Right? So I'm going to do some movies that I really loved at the time. You know?

I say this with respect. This is what you've always done. I know, and I also never win, so I don't know why I'm making such a big deal of this. You've won plenty of times. I think people see your spirit, but this is, again, with respect, this is not a change from the man who drafted Iron Man 3 first overall.

You know what it is? Let me put it more succinctly. I'm trying to draft movies that I haven't talked about a lot before. Okay. Okay. Aha.

So, in Thriller, I would like to take Dead Again. Okay. Tell us more. Which is, Kenneth Branagh's kind of like big jump into

Hollywood mainstream filmmaking. Him and Emma Thompson made this like amazing Hitchcockian psychological thriller written by Scott Frank, I believe. I think it was his first script. It was like the one that popped for him, at least. Scott Frank, obviously, Queen's Gambit and hundreds of others. And Monsieur Spade. And Monsieur Spade.

And this is just a hell of a ride that is just Branagh really like kind of being like, what if I was the five tool player? Like what if I could be movie star, like Academy Award winning director, like everything at once. And he and Emma Thompson are kind of like the king and queen of the whole shit. Yeah.

Right? Like this is like them. They were until. Yeah. It's fine. She married Willoughby, a.k.a. Greg Wise. Right. It's fine. She married Willoughby, a.k.a. Greg Wise. Right.

It worked out. And fantastic Robin Williams kind of supporting turn in this film. So I don't know if you guys liked that again. I've never seen it, which I can't believe. What? You know what?

There's something. First of all, I was young. And there is, like, I am still mad at Kenneth Branagh. You know? So there are things. Emmapson is resplendent in this she's wonderful but there is something about like that era where i'm like okay like i guess but

literally everything you like it's like all right i'm gonna see it great interior design like an adult sexy thriller it's great do you like this film sean uh you know to be honest with you i saw it for the first time a few years ago and I had a hard time locking in. But it might have been a question of the circumstances. I'm a little bit up and down on the Kenneth Branagh directed experience. I'll just put that out there.

I think he is very hit and miss as a filmmaker. I guess I'm just trying to, I was trying to set the scene. But Thor, you're very in on. No, I'm not. I was a joke. Okay. I do not like the Thor films.

Coming off of Henry V and coming out of the theater world in England, he was very hotly tipped. He was like, this is fucking Orson Welles. This is a big deal right now. Yes. No, I'll tell you what. I'll take another look. It's okay.

I was really just trying to like, you know, there's like some... That's good. Now I have a movie recommendation. So thank you. Yes. really just trying to like you know there's like some that's good now i have a movie recommendation so thank you yes and uh so for blockbuster i'm gonna go with what was 14 year old cr's favorite movie probably ultimately of that year and it's backdraft speak on it so this is kurt russell uh william baldwin robert de niro um jennifer jason lee um great year for jennifer jason lee So this is Kurt Russell, William Baldwin, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Great year for Jennifer Jason Leigh in 1991.

And it's about Chicago firefighters. And it's about an arsonist who's, you know, is attacking Chicago fire. He's basically setting fires that seem to be targeting firefighters. So it's like a little bit of a mystery, but also like a portrait. It's like you're kind of like Ron Howard making popular entertainment. This is before Apollo 13, but he's just doing all the shit you want from him. And Kurt Russell, a great performance by him. William Baldwin, we really thought we had something there. And I actually really enjoy this De Niro. This is De Niro with basically no affectation. He's playing the fire inspector in the city of Chicago.

And there's like one little monologue, but for the most part, it's like invisible De Niro and he's fucking awesome in it. It's like his scenes with Donald Sutherland are great. So if you haven't seen Backdraft, I think like honestly also like just a great use of practical effects. Like there's some CGI stuff

but they did a lot with fire in this movie that you probably can't and shouldn't do and I thought it was fantastic I like Backdraft as a

it's like the Jackson Brown of movies yeah like it's never gonna be my he's never gonna be my favorite songwriter

but if you catch me at the right moment and I really listen to the lyrics but when Running on Empty comes on you're like yeah Jackson Brown of movies. Yeah. Like it's never going to be my, he's never gonna be my favorite songwriter, but if you catch me at the right moment and I really listen to the lyrics. But when Running on Empty comes on, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is pretty emotionally sophisticated. Maybe I should open my mind to this a little bit more deeply.

Ron Howard was, was on a run. This was the, this was the Willow parenthood backdraft, you know, well before all that. Yeah. You know,

Da Vinci Code crap that Amanda loves, you know, well before all that. I also love Apollo 13. Yeah. I like Da Vinci Code. Thank you.

Yeah. You, you like the movies? Yeah. What do you think of the mythology? I think it's got a lot to, to be considered, you know?

Yeah. Some good ideas there he's a grail guy remember that's right yeah he's a grail guy yeah god so sad um amanda you have a pick i think i do this is you know we're just doing amanda stuff from here on out i mean we were but um i in drama i'm gonna take uh a movie called truly madly deeply written and directed by anthony miguela which is just, there we go. There we go.

I just, yeah. Excellent film. Got a fist bump from CR from that one. Rickman? Is this Rickman? This is Rickman and Juliet Stevenson. This is wonderful.

So basically Juliet Stevens and Alan Rickman are married, but Alan Rickman has just died. And so it's sort of like a magic, like a magical realism world where Juliette Stevenson is just a woman in London trying to get on with her life. And her husband comes back as a ghost, but not a spooky ghost. It's just like he's back. And they have this set amount of time together to really say goodbye and figure it all out. And it's just lovely.

There's this scene where they like, they do add on the sun ain't going to shine anymore. That is just like transcendent. Um, very sweet, small affecting movie. So if you haven't seen it, seek it out.

Excellent movie. I don't know if this is available in, uh, on physical media. Okay. Not sure. Well, I don't, I don't have to this is available in uh on physical media okay not sure well I don't I don't want to close out the Minghella oh you are I mean he's got he's got like only five films right five films four films Breaking and Entering Cold Mountain Talented Mr. Ripley English Patient and Truly Madly Deep I think it's just those five so uh can't get this one okay it's a heartbreaker. Okay. I have two picks. My final two picks.

In drama I will be taking New Jack City which is a full-blown crime drama masterpiece. This is

Mario Van Peebles following in the tradition of his father Melvin Van Peebles and making independent cinema. This movie premiered

fascinatingly at Sundance in 1991. Stars Wesley Snipes in the performance of his career as Nino Brown, Ice-T, Chris Rock, Judd Nelson. Judd Nelson. Your boy, Judd Nelson. It would be named a category in the rewatchables

after this performance. Yeah, I was... The Judd Nelson Award for doing your own thing in a movie. Yes. I was hurt deeply that I was not asked to participate on this episode because this movie definitely hit for me hard interesting combination

of like a filmmaker who never even got close to anything this good again but when this came out people were like wow we got one

we've got Mario Van Peebles and he is a visionary but also just like a right place right time like the culture was ready for a movie like this

draft of this year would be versus like you know what I mean? Like, would you take Branagh and Mario Van Peebles? That's an interesting question. I mean, what are like the, what are the amazing debuts of this year? Singleton. Obviously, Boys in the Hood, good call.

I mean, Slacker comes out this year. So you've got Link later. But like even like Maddie Rich making straight out of Brooklyn, I think people were like, whoa. Yeah, not much came of that ultimately. Yeah, interesting. Okay, so I'll take New Jack City and drama. And I've got Wild Card.

And I'm a little bit stumped on what to do in Wild Card. How do I want to represent myself here? Because there's a lot of movies that are movies that i watch all the time i need you to let your freak flag fly i need you to i need you to pick something really out there really out there no just like just you know you have like a personal favor from this year i just want to hear all about it i can tell you i can tell you a story about a movie that i didn't see in 1991 but that i think actually probably got me to this point okay

uh Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern that's not really what I had in mind I know well you want me to say like Don't Tell Mom

the Babysitter's Dead which is like a movie that I like a lot and I watched all the time on HBO and thought it was a fun comedy that's literally

what I want you to say but I don't but I Raise the Red Lantern um and I'm just trying to do the same thing you're doing I'm trying to spread the word

we never talk about international films in these drafts so I'll just and there were the same thing you're doing. I'm trying to spread the word. We never talk about international films in these drafts. So I'll just, and there were a lot of really good international films this year. This is an Edward Yang year.

There's like an amazing, a lot of great films this year. Razorhead Lantern is the first movie in the first Film 101 class that they ever showed. And I don't even know

why they showed us this movie as the first movie. But I think that the idea for the professors at my school in Ithaca was open your mind to stuff beyond Terminator 2. You know,

that there is an entire experience. And if you were a kid from the suburbs like me who like, you know, was kind of interested in this stuff, but definitely in 1991 did not know that there was a movie like this about China in the 1920s. They were like, strap in, because this is what we're going to be doing here.

I think actually the first, so we had three hour doubles basically every Monday in this 101 class where in a big auditorium, they showed us two films. And I want to say it was Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger and Raise the Red Lantern on a double. And it's one of those things where like, I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget how like kind of mystified I was by it because both of those movies did not have really much in common with what I thought was cool movies. I'm not even sure I liked both of those movies the first time that I saw them, but they informed where my taste started to go as I got older. And as I started to think more openly about what cool movies were, it doesn't mean that I don't just want to watch new Jack city sometimes, you know, my taste started to go as I got older and as I started to think more openly about what cool movies were. Now,

that doesn't mean that I don't just want to watch New Jack City sometimes, you know, and watch Chris Rock beg Nino Brown for his life. But, cinema can be

so many different kinds of things. I mean, if you want to have your mind opened and turned on to new experiences, you can also watch Jennifer Connelly and Career Opportunities. Yeah.

I saw that as well and I clocked it the way that Knox is clocking Jennifer Connelly to this day. So yeah, I'll do Raise the Red Lantern. Amanda and Chris, you guys have your final picks. I also have Wild Card. I don't know whether this is what you were looking for, Chris, but I will just paint a picture of myself in 1991 and take my girl. Good.

One of the absolute stone cold classic yeah this was a prequel to the beekeeper coming of age bees loss allergies yeah mood rings macaulay caulkin anna chalemsky had had it all um yeah i mean this just absolutely wrecked me are you kidding like i can't believe they do this to seven-year-olds you were you were kind of a veda sultan fuss what are you i mean sure yeah yeah i've got this is another example of transgressive mainstream entertainment it's like it's pretty fucked up what do you know it like it was so so. I'm like about to start crying right now. You know, and it just hit me. You didn't know

that that could happen in life. It's just so fucked up. What I love about doing these drafts, especially from this era, is that she feels this so deeply. This movie came out so long ago, and we can't remember the plot of Beekeeper

that we saw two weeks ago. That's movies, man. That is movies. That's what they do to you. It is imprinted on Amanda's brain. It's such a special thing. Yeah.

I'm with you. My girl is great. At least when I was nine, I was like, this is it, man. This is drama. Okay. Also, Anna Kolomsky,

who didn't have a crush. She was great. I mentioned earlier in the pod about how this was sort of when i started to learn a little bit more about movies being made and how movies got made and the characters behind the films that i really loved so the wild card i'm gonna pick is hearts of darkness which is eleanor coppola's documentary about the making of apocalypse now just rewatched this last Which for a solid two or three years there, I think I was like, I don't really need to love Apocalypse Now

because I just have Hearts of Darkness. Like Hearts of Darkness was almost more important to me than Apocalypse Now in some ways because I had never seen movies being made in that way. Like my idea of what movies were like was like the Universal Studios Backlot tour.

And it was just like, everything is perfect. The stuntman rolls over here. And like, that's how I thought movies happen. And the idea that this guy was just out in the Philippines, like negotiating with the Air Force and dealing with monsoons and his star having a fucking heart attack and firing actors and trying to rewrite dialogue and dealing with Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando. It's honestly my favorite making of any movie.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Sean and Amanda are going to be doing a lot of Coppola stuff in the future because of the book that they're doing for their book club. I do honestly think that we should

do the movie with... It's hard to talk about the book without talking about the movie yeah yeah so we'll talk about the movie a lot revisit apocalypse now and revisit hearts of darkness yeah because it's like the book is centered around apocalypse now and you know like the candor with which people talk because I think that this was an era maybe before people were worried about everything that they say is going to be like recontextualized forever and ever and ever in different ways. Like Martin Sheen talking about being in apocalypse now is like as naked as you can possibly see like a person's soul. Like he was just like, I was having a nervous breakdown.

Like this was happening. It was away from my family. Like he's obviously drinking and stuff like that. Like it's, It's such an incredibly searing portrait of these people. And if you haven't seen it, almost more than any movie I've drafted, please watch this. So,

this was discussed a bit in Raftery's Do We Get to Win This Time series. But the thing that stuck out to me when I watched it again today, especially with a journalism background, is that this is the ultimate fusion of primary sourcing with basically the best ever behind the scenes featurette you're ever going to see so because so much time transpired

between the making of the movie and the making of this documentary you've got all you've got the ability to basically sit down with George Lucas John M john millius robert duvall um you know martin sheen obviously coppola and seeing the experience through eleanor coppola's eyes and through her diary and having her kind of broker the film but then having george hickenlooper come in who was not present yeah for the making of the film and bring this kind of like incredibly studious fanboy approach to telling the story of the making of the film and bring this kind of like incredibly studious fanboy approach to telling the story of the making of the movie and you put these two things together and it's unlike any other making of document i mean is for me it is like my dream of that there are a lot of good there are a lot of good versions of this but this one because of the psychotic nature of the production of the

movie right francis ford coppola being this like extraordinary showman, you know, like such a good speaker about his own mythology. I mean, that is what it is. But it's like, it is the combination of the, I can't believe

A, that this happened, that they pulled it off. B, that we got this on tape with the journalistic rigor applied later. It's,

I mean, it's astonishing. It's really cool. Eleanor forever. We're done. You want to go through your picks? Sure. Chris, you want to go first?

Okay. My drama was Boys in the Hood. My action thriller horror was Dead Again. My comedy was Bart and Fink. My blockbuster was Backdraft. My Oscar nominee was Silence of the Lambs, which won all the Oscars. And my wild card was Hearts of Darkness. Amanda?

My drama is Truly Madly Deeply. My action movie is Terminator 2, Judgment Day. My comedy is Father of the Bride. My blockbuster is Beauty and the Beast. My Oscar nominee is Thelma and Louise. And my wildcard is My Girl. My drama is New Jack City. My action thriller horror is Point Break.

Comedy, Defending Your Life, Blockbuster, Cape Fear. Oscar nominee, my beloved JFK. And wildcard, Raise the Red Lantern. jack city my action thriller horror is point break comedy defending your life blockbuster cape fear oscar nominee my beloved jfk and wild card raised the red lantern so about to throw to a convo with vim vendors but we should uh we should talk about some honorable mentions because there's a lot of movies this year well how about until the end of the world yes speaking of vim this was his uh i actually wanted to revisit this before this pod. There's a director's cut on Criterion Channel, right? Yes, so I acquired that edition. Are you off streaming now?

Are you not watching films? I'm trying to not watch movies on streaming because of the compression and the sound. It's all much worse. Obviously, there's many cases where I can't do that. So I wanted to revisit it and it was like Eileen and I were doing

a movie night we were like let's watch a movie together what can we watch and I was like let's try to watch this but this film of course is two hours and 40 minutes

or excuse me 240 minutes so that's a tough one for a single sit so you really gotta lock in if you wanna watch until the end of the world but very good movie

lot of those international movies that we didn't really go through Double Life of Veronique Kieslowski movie Lovers on the Bridge Leia's Carax's movie

Brighter Summer Day Life is Sweet the Mike Lee movie which I was on my list my own Private Idaho yeah Gus Van Zandt

love that movie Fisher King from Terry Gilliam Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth Center Stage I think that's the Stanley Kwan movieiam Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth uh Center Stage I think that's the Stanley Kwan movie I mean there's it's like I got a bunch here man Jene's uh Delicatessen yeah uh City of Hope John Sayles movie remember loving that when I saw it Homicide the David

Mamet film and Joe Mantegna uh the double of uh Bugsy and Billy Bathgate, like a very kind of cool, like star ego driven, like gangster movies set in, I think in the twenties and the thirties and Bugsy is a little bit later than that. We didn't talk about last boy scout or a couple of other like kind of blockbuster things. Mississippi masala was this year.

It was fantastic that we talked about that. And maybe on the Denzel draft, yeah. Jungle fever. I mean, B. Masala was this year. It was fantastic that we talked about that maybe on the Denzel draft. Jungle Fever. I mean, just like the idea that these movies were like in theaters, man. Jungle Fever, are you kidding me? And I also just love the commitments. Yeah, had that

on along with this too. Daughters of the Dust, Carl Franklin's One False Move, also in the Criterion Collection now. Once Upon a Time in China, also in the Criterion Collection now. Naked Lunch, also in the Criterion Collection. I time in china also in the criterion collection now naked lunch also in the criterion collection i was wondering if this is the the year with the most criterion additions in the last 50 years is ski school in the criterion ski school yes there is a 4k uhd expansion um so that the new cut is seven hours long ski school it was part of like a kind of sub genre of movie where it it was like, let's be lifeguards

or let's be ski school instructors. And then it's two dudes and then like a bunch of playmates. I mean, I don't, is there something wrong with that? And it's usually like, oh no, the mountain's going to get closed. The ski school, we got to do a fundraiser or beat the jocks at this. Oh, great, okay. I got more here, man.

I got El Motivar's High Heels. I got The Addams Family, which was a huge movie that year. We didn't do What About Bob, right? We didn't do What About Bob. So much stuff on the table. Is City Slickers the movie that you explained the plot of during that other movie? I think I explained the plot of The Legend of Curly's Gold, which is the sequel, right? So, Babalu Mandel and Lowell Ganz, who are your shamans, your shepherds in screenwriting.

They're my Fitzgerald and Hemingway, yeah. You studied under them for a decade and you didn't draft City Slickers. What's happening here? What happened? I don't know. You reached so soon on Barton Fink for comedy. Could have had it

in another category. La Femme Nikita was this year. The Five Heartbeats was this year. There's a lot of stuff here. Poison. Todd Haynes' debut. Can I shout out

one incredibly random movie that is my most vivid theater? I saw this in theaters at the age of seven. It's a movie called Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. Do you know about this? And it's about like horse diving,

which is a thing they used to do where you would just like ride a horse over off like a 30 foot tower into a pool. And then it was a romance. But like, you know, and then some things went awry with the horses and some of the divers. But like what's up with horse diving? Let's bring it back. Is Land on the Moon this year yeah it is race forever yeah what about the doors i was waiting for you to talk about the doors um my review of the doors is that it stinks however the the five to one sequence um when morrison is arrested on stage yeah is one of the best moments in movie in the

90s movie history i don't know why the movie is so bad and was released in the same year as jfk oliver stone was just cooking imagine what was going on inside of that guy's brain chemistry to make the doors in jfk in the same year release them i mean honestly us doing a pod about 1991 is like oliver stone in 1991 cooking up pods about the doors and jfk you know and by pods i mean uh 80 million dollar films that were released widely to america people under the stairs john carpenter yeah really good movie hook yeah it was a movie does hook need a revisit from the big picture if you want when i was a kid i liked it and then when i was like 20 i was like i'm gonna see what hook is like and it was so stupid and bad and even at the time it was not really and i was like on the julia train

i well maybe i wasn't in 1991 do you think I was allowed to see Pretty Woman in 1990? I do not. Okay. You were six. Isn't there like a pretty deep hook hive? Like I think there's a real contention. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. People will literally take any Spielberg movie and be like, you don't understand the master was at work here.

Watch him cook. This is War Horse. I think there is like a mid to young millennial crew of people who really, really love it. That's your people, Bobby. I know. I don't have a huge relationship to it. I mean, I've seen it a bunch of times just because it was on cable all the time. I think it's people that are just a little older than you.

I think Joanna Robinson is a big fan. I feel like it came up when we did our Spielberg pod. I've decided I've become anti-Spielberg because I learned recently that he's pretty high on the Forbes billionaire list. He's worth $4 billion. You and my dad can start the club. Hashtag not all billionaires. Can you imagine if he had made Jurassic Park and everything he's done and he wasn't on the billionaire list? Wouldn't you be mad that he wasn't being fairly compensated?

Wait, you're out on Spielberg because he's a billionaire? Yeah. Sorry. Regrettably. Bye, Steve. Bob. But Steve Cohen's cool. There's only room in my heart

for one Steve who's a billionaire. And we know who that is. All billionaire Steves are welcome in my book. Steve Jobs, Steve Cohen, Steve Spielberg. Any other Steves you can think of?

Any at all? Or billionaires? Who's the dude who owns, is it BlackRock or Blackstone? One of those guys named Stephen Schwartzman. Absolutely.

Yeah. I'm in on him. I hope he hasn't done anything terrible that I don't know about. Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Chris, you mentioned Rush pre-pod.

Yes. Didn't draft that. Why? Because it's a private it's a private experience for me is to watch Greg Allman walk around

a bar and then Jason Patrick and Jennifer Jason Lee do fucking junk for two hours and Sam Elliott goes you're in too deep

you don't know the line anymore one thing that's great about 91 he plays a guy named Dodds if you could just swap lives with Sam Elliott would you do it

I think it would be a pretty dope life yeah who's he married to Jason Patrick picks If you could just swap lives with Sam Elliott, would you do it? I think it would be a pretty dope life. Yeah. Who's he married to? Jason Patrick picks Jennifer Jason Lee to be his undercover cop partner because she beats

four guys at like the 200 meters running. He's like, that one's got some spark. And then they just fucking shoot heroin. That's your best Sam Elliott? You could do better than that.

No, that's Jason Patrick. Oh, that was, okay. I see. Would you swap lives with Jason Patrick? No, I would not. Okay. In 1991, there was a movie. This is the fun thing about a year like this.

Just like look at the list that I put on Letterboxd called One Against the Wind. In the poster, it's just Judy Davis's giant head and two Third Reich Nazi insignia scraped alongside of her. Great. Here's the description of the film. and two Third Reich Nazi insignia scraped alongside of her. Here's the description of the film. Mary Linden works for the French Red Cross in occupied France during World War II

and helps Allied soldiers who have been shot down to escape to the unoccupied side. Her activities are complicated by her high profile and her daughter's love affair with a German officer. This is based on a true story.

I want you to start going into the Atwater Village Best Buy and be like, do you have one against the wind on Blu-ray? I'm Sean Fantasy. What I'm trying to do is create a pathway

for all of these distributors to directly contact me. I can tell. I don't want third parties. Yeah, but I think it would be funny. Forget about these third parties. Only go into Best Buy

to get like vaguely Nazi adjacent blueberries. Do you have a good German? Your version of Criterion Closet is huge. Wandering around a Best Buy? No, but all that your Criterion Cl criteria closet is randomly picking the Nazi adjacent movies. Is this the place to talk about what Bill wants me to do? What is it? One good blurb.

So Bill wants me after I go see a movie to start recording one good blurb, which is immediately upon exiting the theater, I film myself and I give a like one sentence review of the movie. Okay. So I say like, hey guys, like one sentence review of the movie. Okay. So I say like, hey guys, it's Sean from the big picture. Okay. This is one good blurb for Bob Marley colon one love. Are you supposed to do this while walking with like air, you know?

Yeah, I've got AirPods. Well, I'm not walking and talking, but you can see the marquee behind me. Okay. You know, and I'm making a big show of how I'm out at the movies. Yeah. Okay. You know, and I'm making a big show of how I'm out at the movies. Yeah. Okay. And for, you know,

for Bob Marley, One Love, it would be like, you know, we jamming straight to hell with this middling adaptation of the life of Bob Marley. You know,

like, do you think that would work? And then at the end, I'd be like, see you at the movies. You think that would be good? Yeah. Really good. Do you think there think that would be good? Yeah,

really good. You think there's like sponsorship opportunity there? Yeah. Who do you think wants to come on board? The Criterion Channel. I was going to say, could we get like Boeing

to come on board that? Just some of the bigger, maybe Exxon Mobil. I'm buying the dip on Boeing. They're paying extra for that. I told you that, right? Buying the dip. Yeah.

Is that like a plane crash metaphor? Did you tell your wife that? No. I mean, how's that going? She's just checking to make sure she's not on a 737 Max or whatever the hell it is. Is something going on with Boeing? I'm not up on this. Are you being serious?

Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Are you serious? They made the plane that the door blew off. Okay. And then they did a search and then half of the planes... Are you pretending not to know what I'm talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. This is like when you didn't know about about. Like the windows aren't screwed in.

Like read the news, Sean. What are you doing? On like half the planes. It was a flight from Portland to Ontario, Canada. And the fucking door blew off in mid flight. So what happened to the people? They like their phones like got blown out of the air. Like it was like, ah, and they landed.

But everyone survived. Yeah. Okay. Well, gotta make some tweaks. This is why Chris is in the driver's seat of JMO. Because. Well, gotta make some tweaks. This is why Chris is in the driver's seat of JMO because he knows

where the plane was going, what happened, the destination. You're like, did they get border security passed or what? Right, guys? This is all of what

makes JMO so special is that I don't have to know and I still can have an opinion, you know? It is just your opinion. It's just my opinion. Yeah. What is your opinion on the window blowing out of this?

I mean, it's not what you want. Sure. You don't ideally want that. Okay. Sure. Everyone's surviving. That's great news. How?

Like, okay. They looked at all the planes, and they found a lot with some pretty loose bolts. I see. I said loose screws, but bolts is probably right. That's what you want on a plane. Okay.

You have two options to fly I don't know where you need to go. Wherever. Yeah. Cannes. Okay.

To Cannes. Riyadh. Okay. Did you get some Just One Blurb sponsors? Saudi Aramco? This is Sean Fancy Just One Blurb sponsors. Saudi Aramco. This is Sean Fetish. Just One Blurb

brought to you by Aramco. You have a normal plane where the ticket is, I mean, I don't know, let's just say $1,000. Okay. And then you have a Boeing 737 where they haven't checked the bolts.

Right, but it's $213 for that ticket. Exactly. What are you, Sean Fetissey, doing? Who's paying for this flight? See, my attitude about it is that this should be the safest they've ever been because they just went around and tightened all the screws, right?

I had a friend like this in college who was like, I'm going to Chipotle every day now. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how I felt about... That's how I tried squirrel. That's how I felt about... I had never I tried squirrel. That's how I felt about...

I had never been to squirrel until the moldy gym. Yeah, yeah. And then there was no line. And I felt very confident about the food safety practices. I was like that with Jenny's after Listeria. Oh, yeah. Because I was like, they probably got that. All these potential sponsors are so excited to hear us having this conversation.

You might want to bleep every single brand throughout this discussion uh well this is just an incredible way to transition to vim vendors even by our standards i don't think we could do worse i was joking at the beginning of the pod that i'm gonna fuck this up again but i did and as soon as we get into the conversation my tone's gonna be like hey we're here with soim Vendors. Thank you so much for being here, sir. But nevertheless, Chris, thanks so much

for keeping things super normal as usual on the show. Amanda, you too. Very normal stuff from you. You were very cool and normal. Bob, thank you for your work.

He says this and then he's just like, I have been looking for the Blu-ray of my girl for 11 and a half years. Okay, let's go to my conversation with Vim Vendors.

It is an honor to be joined by Vim Vendors on the show. Two films this year, actually. And I want to talk to you about both of them. But I want to know, how do you know when you've landed on a story you want to tell? Well, you know it when a couple of things come together well. And for me, the first thing that has to be there is place. And when a place comes together with a story that

can only happen in this place so when i can make place and story cross and then have a character that belongs into that place then i feel i have a movie i feel like that's a perfect segue to my next question about perfect days which is it's been about 40 years since Tokyo Ga, and you've done some things connected to Japan since then, but it's been a long time since you've set a film in Japan. Yeah. Is that something you'd wanted to do? Yeah. I wanted, I felt homesick. I hadn't shot in Japan for 25 years, something like that.

And along came a letter inviting me to come to Japan and look at toilets. Tell me about that letter. I was about to put it away when the opening line was about toilets, and I'm not an expert. But then again, I've traveled a lot, and I've seen a lot of countries, and I realized that toilets are different in places and that you can learn a lot about countries.

So I read on, and then there were some pictures, and then I knew what the whole story was because it turned out that these 15 great architects who built stadiums and museums and big things, not all Japanese, but most of them, and I actually know some of them, they built the tiniest little thing. They built a public toilet beach. And then I saw the pictures, and I thought, oh, wow.

They don't look like anything I've ever connected to the idea of a toilet. So I was interested. And as the letter asked me to come come and it was noncommittal, so I could just find out if I liked that idea. And then if I liked the places, we could discuss if I could do a number of short subjects on the architects and their creations. And as it was sort of an art project and with a social connotation,

as it was linked to an invitation to come to Tokyo, I went and saw these toilets and they were quite amazing. Never been in any toilet like this. It was very welcoming, completely clean and beautiful. I was very privileged to sit in those and doing a business. So I then realized it wasn't really my life's dream to make little documentaries about toilets and the architects and i was there for a week and in that week i was so happy to be back in tokyo and that happened to be the week where the people of

tokyo came back from the longest lockdown in history after two years almost it was it was epic and they were so joyfully taking possession of their city again it was so good to see that and but the best thing was how civilized it was because in my own country of in my own city of Berlin. At the end of the lockdown, it was reckless. The little park where I live was done with after two weeks. It was a garbage heap. And it seemed, at least in Europe and also in America, because I was in America for a while in that time as well, it seemed that one of the victims of the pandemic had been the sense of the common good.

And it wasn't happening like this in Turkey. It was the opposite. It was like almost utopian, the way they cleaned their places and the way they were disciplined and respected the common good, which is parks and streets and places and toilets too. So I was very moved by that.

And then I... Can I ask you a quick question about that? Sure. This seems like a strange question to ask, but were the toilets that you feature in the film and that, you know, were the invitations purpose treated with the same respect as other public toilets or were these treated as art pieces inside of the city well they do look different they do look different and they create an aura around themselves because they do look different than any other time but they're for everybody so anybody can go the homeless people there use them and they too are very respectful because they're happy to have them.

They have clean water and it's nice and they can wash. I mean, they're quite complete. Sometimes there's a whole family of toilets and there's, of course, the one handicapped and the one for mother and child and the one for the father and there's one for children only too.

And it's little toilets. Never seen anything like it. So, but as much as I liked them, I didn't feel I was going to make a movie about them. And I explained to the producers that, and thinking I was talking myself of a nice job and some time in Tokyo, I couldn't make these little documentaries

on the architects and the toilets, but mainly because I sensed there was something much bigger to do and with more sense and more important and worth our time, both theirs and mine. And the toilet could still appear, but I could tell a story that would involve a person, a caretaker of these toilets, and tell his life and talk about Japanese culture and toilets inside that culture. Because in the end, I know that places, if they are the hero of a movie, they don't mean much.

But if they're inside a story, they're fabulous. Like if ever I wanted to take anybody to a movie to tell them what San Francisco is like, I know lots of documentaries about San Francisco. I wouldn't take them. I would show them Vertigo, and then they'd really know. And if anybody would want to know what Berlin was like when the world was still up, they would have to see Wings of Desire,

and no documentary ever showed that city as well. So places are well kept in fiction and they can show their potential. So I explained that to the producers. I'd rather do a story and a story that mattered. And I felt what I just witnessed in Tokyo, the tenderness with which the joy expressed itself in public. It was beautiful. And I wanted to make a film about the common good as such and how we could all live a little

differently than we do now because I do have a feeling after the pandemic that we all have that slight idea in the back of our heads that we could live differently if we only knew how, but we just forgot how. It's interesting that you frame the movie that way because it does feel like it is about that when I watch it, but it feels like it is about something else too, which to me was the safety of routine, of comfort. I think that your protagonist is very um present but also

at times isolated but purposefully isolated which is also a product of the pandemic to some extent this is where the other element character comes in and this is where place meets story and character the character is a very special man. I must say he's a little bit utopian for me. I don't exactly know that character, but I know some people a little like people who do service work and who are proud of what they do and how they do it and try to do it as good as they can,

not for others but for themselves and for their self-value. And then I know a lot of craftsmen in Japan and I know how craftsmen I looked at in my culture in Europe in Germany or also in America and while they're respected but they're at the lower side of the social ladder in Japan crafts people are national monuments some crafts people are revered. There aren't. People recognize them on the street and bow.

A craftsperson is a fantastic job. And there's more crafts remaining in Japan than anywhere. And I thought my toilet cleaner could do his work with the attitude of a craftsperson. It's his craft is to clean them. Well, then he actually invented tools to clean these toilets as good as possible. So the character brings in other elements to the story. Yes, he's not a young kid, he's an older man,

and he brings some culture with him from his youth, from the 70s and 80s. And he's never heard of Spotify. And when his niece sits in the car, she comes to visit her uncle. Actually, she wants a way to live with her uncle. And she doesn't even know how to put the cassettes these funky things she's she's this is a cassette she says and then she

tries to put it in doesn't know which way it fits into the little machine and then she loves the music that she hears which happens to be van morrison it's just can I get this on Spotify? Can I put it on my iPhone? And my man doesn't know where that shop is. So he's not digitally cultured. So in a strange way, his world is from a different world, but what he brings to today's world is beautiful. And some of his world is quite valid. And the kids who meet him are quite impressed with him and some of his technology. Well, that's the thing is that old things become cool again once a certain amount of time has passed by.

You know, rock and roll has always been kind of a core text in your work. And so it was fun to watch the character in this, having it come back. How did you go about picking the music and thinking about how this would play such a critical role? A lot of American music for this Japanese character as well. Yeah, but you know, people in Japan listen to the same music than people in Germany. I know that because I have good friends in Japan. A Japanese designer, Yoshihiro Yamamoto. I made a movie with him and we compared what we were listening to and it was identical.

And he grew up with the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and the Rolling Stones and the Kings just as well as I did. And he makes music and he plays guitar and he sings, but it's American songs he sings. So I felt quite free to, and I spoke at length with my Japanese co-writer, Takuma, can I really impose my taste, my musical taste on our Japanese character? And he says, don't you worry a bit. He listened to exactly the same stuff you did. So I DJed my way through the script and put all the songs into it that I wanted. I was going to ask you that. To also tell the story,

because they're not just additions. They also tell the story. Our man doesn't talk much, but he lets the music do some of the talking. And so for the first time, we did something for me quite revolutionary. We had the music of the talking. And so for the first time we did something for me quite revolutionary. We had the music in the scenes. We didn't add it afterwards. We played the music in the scene. And that is a very different feeling if you

have music is in the scene and the music is part like an actor present. Not in your head that you want to put it in afterwards, but it was already there. And that gave a great good feeling to the idea that this movie in Tokyo was also a little bit of a road movie. You know, you're well known for your road movies. You have this amazing ability to enter foreign territory and to make it understandable to audiences very quickly, even though you may not be from those places.

So obviously I know that you're very familiar with Japan and you've been many times, but how do you know how to make us comfortable with the world? How do you scout? How do you determine the way you see the city should be seen in the film? My sense of place kicks in right there. And I try to be informed about the place first and understand the place and spend time with the place, let the place tell me how the people live there. Not just the people tell me how they live there, but also the place, because places have lots of messages.

And if you develop that sense and i think i have a highly developed sense of place it tells you stories about the people who live there and so after a while then you get to know the people of course and you get to know history and god knows what and social conditions but place is an important element for me. And so I love Tokyo as a place. And I took lots of pictures over the years. I took a lot of photography without making movies, but just as photography. And I had a lot of favorite places that never ended up in a film of mine. And I always thought, well, it would be great to have a senior.

So in the end, I knew a lot of my locations. And these toilets are all in an area of Tokyo called Shibuya, which I pretty knew well and had already shot there. I love Shibuya. And it has an entertainment area. It has technology it has freeways that are going through the city on three levels it's still science fiction even if it was built in the 60s for the Olympics at the time still today it looks a little bit like metropolis and

and I only know cities in China that have that, but nowhere else. So a lot of the locations I had in the back of my head, and I knew where my man was going to live, is in one of these last leftover old areas, almost like a little village, but just at the foot of a new tower in Tokyo, quite a fancy new TV tower with a high platform. You can see the city and it's called the Sky Tree. The elements came together nicely.

The idea that he was a little bit of a craftsman and a little bit of a monk and very much so a service person, proud of his work and for whom every other people are like he greets and realizes he's there. The homeless man just as well as the banker who comes to pee in his toilet. So this isn't a classical road movie insofar as the distances are not traveled far, but there's, we're in the car every day. We're going to work every day and we're seeing the city all the time. You once said that traveling and working are inextricable for you, that they are correlated, connected to each other. I wonder why is that for you? And that 50 years, 40 years later, you're still telling stories that are connected to this idea of being on the road. Well, it's such a common feeling. People know that feeling. People know that they do feel differently on the road and that travel is liberating. And you do tend to have more open eyes if you travel, especially in foreign places. So it's a little bit of a state of bliss to be traveling,

even in Tokyo. And if you can take the highway and take the third floor, you drive past the city like you've never driven past the city because you only drive by the roofs and higher apartments and so you have a very unique perspective on the city. So driving to Tokyo is quite an experience and I was happy that part

of the job was to go to work, drive to city, have an hour and come back. So driving was also nice timeouts in the movie and it also allowed me and basically we did shoot the film as much as possible in chronological order which was initially my reason to do road movies because no production company and no production manager even if i was the producer myself they never understood why i would want to shoot a movie in chronological

order, because most movies you shoot the ending and the beginning, and then you shoot locations, and you shoot it off, and then, and so you can never really change anything anymore, because you've already shot something that happened later, and road movies was a perfect, doing road movies was a perfect excuse to shooting. Total chronological order. I mean, the road defines the story. So I shot Perfect Days a bit like a road movie. He does have an old crummy car and there was only a cassette recorder in it,

so that suited us fine. And then when we realized that, we realized the cassette was his only medium of music and it's just as well. And it does have, it's not hi-fi, but its lo-fi quality is very rock and roll as well. Yeah, it sounds good to him and that's really what matters. The movie also has

this is true of anselm too a kind of religiosity about the idea of work that there is something about sacred about doing your job and i wonder if that's something that if you think of your life's work that way if you think of it life's work that way, if you think of it in that, if you're thinking about it differently, maybe at this stage of your career, I don't know. It just, it occurred to me as I watched both movies. There's something very true about that. I mean, I always considered I was doing a very, very privileged job. And I think I would have, I would have made movies movies at night if if I needed a day job to finance it so I always figured making movies and even being able to live from that was very

privileged I always loved working in movies once I discovered that you could actually make a living and do something as privileged as make a film and I do think that work is an enormous way to define who we are and how we want to live. And to like your work, again, it's a great privilege. But other people can like their work as well, even if it's not as fancy as making movies. I mean, musicians like their work and writers can like their work. Well, a lot of musicians like their work and writers can like their work well a lot of writers hate their work i was gonna ask you about that actually whether you still like writing well i never did but it's part of the movie making process and if you have somebody else

to write with like in my case takuma a beautiful japanese creative head and poet. And then it's fun. If you have somebody to write with, but if you're sitting alone and writing, this is hell. I never liked it. And then if people say dialogues that you wrote and they all talk like yourself, it sucks. I can relate as someone who hates to write.

I would not describe myself as a consistently present person. I think increasingly it is very, very difficult to be present in these times. There are so many distractions and they are so easily accessible. Hariyama is very present, I would say, in the film. Do you, are you, can you make yourself that way right now i can make myself that way i've learned to make myself that way because i've suffered too much from not being able to do that and you hit the the core theme of the film really is about the ability to live in the moment how he does it well he's a bit old-fashioned and like a craftsman for whom every

part that he does is again the first part he does and is again the only part that he wants to survive of his work craftsmen have that ethos about the stuff they produce it is always the first time it has to be and every great actor does every scene he or she does as if it was the first time he or she could do this. So there is a certain ethos about how to work and how to do it in the moment. For a painter, the moment counts a lot. Musicians know so much about living in the moment

and who they are on stage and how they fell apart if they're just back home. And so living in the moment is a state of bliss, and if you know it, you try to get as much as possible of it. And maybe, especially now after the pandemic, we've all lost more and more of that ability to do it. And sometimes we don't quite know what we are missing. We forgot what we're missing,

but then we realize we are so much guided by outside sources and manipulated by our machines and our iPads and phones and computers and Zoom calls and whatever, and that if we are all of a sudden somewhere and we are there, and it happens more easily if you're in a strange place than if you're in your common place, then we realize, oh, wow, this is good. It's good to be there.

It's good to be in the present. And our man Hirayama, that's his whole philosophy, to live in the present, and not tomorrow and not yesterday, but each time as if it was the first time. And that's the way he wakes up in the morning, and that's the way he gets out of his house and pulls the same coffee, cold coffee, out of the same vending machine.

It's always the first time. And he knows a lot about being in the present. And he's able to teach it, too, to some young kids he meets. I recognize that desire to have that feeling but i worry that i will have to go to japan to have that feeling whereas your character can stay right where he is in his hometown and do his job and and achieve it well i think japan was a perfect place to shoot. And there again is the idea that the place and the story have to go together. But I managed to translate the film into my own world where I live in Berlin. And I've learned a lot from Hirayama from my short time with him.

We shot the movie in bloody 17 days. But in these 17 days, they were so intense that I walked away from that. And I remember it now. I have it now in my bones and I've, I've started working on the consequences. It's been very exciting to watch, um, coach Yukusho get recognized for his performance because it's not the kind of performance that often gets recognized because as you said there's so little dialogue it is a very quiet performance um getting celebrated at can was incredible i know you've been in la with him this week um

what how why was he the the actor that you chose for this part goes back quite a ways it goes back to when i first saw him i first saw him in a little movie called Shall We Dance? It was later remade in America, Richard Gere, but I'm talking about the original. And that movie was so thrilling for me. There was something so beautiful and human and lovely in it that I took a daring step to declare it our Christmas movie because in the family, three generations, for a long time already, we always go to the movies together.

Old, young, middle, kids, whatever. And it's mostly a catastrophe because the film is either nice for the kids and terrible for the old ones, or the other way around. And Shelby Dance was the first hit. It really hit everybody, and everybody was happy. We came out as a family, three generations, and we're dancing, all of us. And it was good, and it was due to this man.

And I realized that, and I kept sending more people into the movie and sending the DVD to everybody. And then I saw his next film and next film and next film and it was always the same. He was always very much there and beautiful and I realized this actor is all about his eyes. He has the kindest eyes you can imagine. And I think when I suggested him for our film Perfect Days, I think it was with the knowledge that I wanted people to look at the world through his eyes.

And you also see his eyes. I mean, every day starts in the movie with him opening his eyes. And you slowly get into the skin of Hirayama, and that is maybe why the film connects, because you can connect to these eyes. You've always been incredibly prolific, but even by your standards, two features in one year is a lot. What accounts for that, do you think? It wasn't my life's plan to have two films at the same time. It just so happened that the documentary I started in 2019 just took an eternity and was complex

and became more and more difficult to make. And not difficult, but it took more time. And I realized I was needing more time. And instead of shooting in one go, I shot in seven installments. And it took two and a half years. I shot with Ansem Kiefer seven times, and each time we shot for 10 days. So it was a huge and long time, and then it was in 3D. It was quite complex, and for a while we had to do all our shoots

with these masks and stuff, and had to have tests every day. You know all that. So it was a long process, and I was also sitting in my editing room for almost three years for this film. And it was long. And when it was finally finished, the other film that I shot in 16 days

and edited in two months was ready at the same time i had been able to go to tokyo and shoot because i had the picture lock on ansam it had to go into post-production 3d is quite complex with post-production they had a lot of stuff to do it was all well discussed so they said vim you can come back in six weeks and then we can show you. In these six weeks, I went to Tokyo. We prepared for a week. We shot for those 16 days. And then I came back. And I edited perfect days on weekends and in the evenings

because I was still post-producing and finishing Ansem, who was already accepted for the Cannes Film Festival. Not in competition because it's a documentary, but an official entry and to be seen in the big hall and the big screen as part of the festival's official program. So out of a sudden, around the same time, the Japanese producers came to Berlin in February and wanted to see the rough cut. And I had to tell them that there was no rough cut.

The film was finished. Is that the fastest for you? I've never done anything so quickly. I don't know. Shooting a feature film in 16 days plus one day without the actor. So in 17 days, I have not done that. It's pretty remarkable and it has led to this kind of serendipity where you have

two films to look at now and now everyone is looking at the full body of your career. Then here in Los Angeles they're showing many of your films at the American Cinematheque theaters. I'm sure many people are asking you but what is it like to have your to be retrospectively celebrated but still be making work?

Well, it feels pretty good. But is there any, there's no sense of it's getting away from me or I'm not going to look back? No, not at all. You see the films that we show at the Egyptian, at the American Cinematic, I've worked on them for the last few years because we restored, all of the films we show are really beautifully restored in 4k and look like new and they're very present for me because I've worked on them over the last few years extensively, well over the last 10 years, so they're more present to me than ever before. So it doesn't feel like I'm showing old stuff.

It feels like I'm showing the stuff in the way they want to be seen. And it's a lot of work to be releasing two films at the same time all over the world, and I'm a little overwhelmed by that. I must admit that it's more work than I really wanted to do at my age but then again it is fun and I like both movies a lot and some the documentary was done with quite elaborate means and over a long time and a lot of thinking and editing and re-editing and shooting again and then editing again three months and then knowing better what I still need.

So, and seven shoots, seven shooting periods is quite a luxury. And it was high tech, some of the stuff that we used. We built the very first drone to shoot actually 3D with two cameras on it. And, well, we used a lot of equipment I never worked with, and 3D was so beautiful to come back to with today's technology as opposed to the prototype stuff that we'd used on Pina. And so that was fun, but it took a long time.

And then, and it was an amazing, a long amount of work, while the fictional film was in the end done very quickly and very, very simply. Our man Hiroyama, he believed in reduction. So he has reduced the stuff he owns, and his place is very simple. He only has the essentials. So I figured I can only make a movie about the man

if I apply that method to my shooting tools. So we threw out the dolly and the tracks and the gimbal and the steadicam and the crane or whatever, and basically just had a cameraman with a camera on his shoulder. And for a fictional film, that's not much, but it corresponded to his life and to his own attitude. So I felt it was necessary to go into his reduction mode.

So, and then we shot fast, because 16 days, you have to reduce your schedule, you have to reduce your schedule, you have to reduce your locations, and you have to sort of make a movie like he lives. And that was so liberating. And I can only recommend it to anybody. Do your film with less time and less locations and less overflow of stuff. And we only had one camera,

and my cameraman was basically a living tripod and shot so fast. At the very last day, Koji, my actor, said, is it true that you had a trailer for me? I said, of course we had a trailer. Don't you know it? He said, I've never been inside. Can you show it to me? And we walked around the corner, and there was his trailer, which was a drag to always have that trailer in Tokyo, but we had it,

it was there. And he opened the door tentatively and looked inside and broke into laughter. I said, I've never really been inside. And it's the first time I make a movie where I didn't spend a second in the bloody trailer and it was so beautiful of him. And then he made a samurai movie afterwards and he sent me pictures in between saying, today I've set 10 hours in my trailer. And that's all he said.

That's the thing is you can't do a samurai movie in 17 days for the most part. That's the thing is you can't do a samurai movie in 17 days for the most part no that's the challenge also very few people who are making movies who know as much

about making movies as you so you probably know how to do it in 17 days in a way many don't yeah fair to say

I know that you have to get the most of your time so to reduce your locations you don't want to spend that precious time just by moving

and sitting in Tokyo traffic. So that was one of it. And then you have to know how to shoot it handheld. In the end, it was more of a documentary shoot than Anson with this pretty heavy-duty 3D equipment. And here, just one man with a camera and it was Hirayama so much became his character. I never called him Koji anymore. I just called him Hirayama and he was happy with that because he was fine that I

called him his the name in the script and actually he preferred it because this way he could stay in character and And after a few days, and we had always done rehearsals for camera and for him, and then we had shot it. And each time in the back of my head I said, if I only had shot the bloody rehearsal, it was beautiful. Why didn't I shoot it? It was more out of respect for the actor, out of courtesy, because I felt that's the

way he was used to working. So finally, I took all my courage and I asked Koji, do you think you could allow me to shoot the rehearsal for the next scene? And he looked at me and said, he was a little bit amazed because I've never done that before. I said, of course, why not? And we shot the rehearsal and it was everything I could hope for for the scene. And we said, well, that's it. We don't do anymore.

He was a little bit amazed. No other take? No? No, I said, it was perfect. And then we basically went on that mode till the end. We shot almost directly, at least in each scene in which he was alone. When there were other actors, we couldn't do that.

I mean, with other actors, we couldn't. That would have been too scary for them, especially with the younger kids. So we did rehearsals then, but when he was alone, and he's alone in a lot of scenes, we just always shot. And we treated him like he was a real character, even if he was as fictional as anybody but we shot with him like he was a documentary character let me ask you looking back at the films that you know you were restoring and and converting to 4k was there one in particular that

you felt differently about or more excited about that you hadn't, or maybe you hadn't thought about as much in the past? Well, there was one, no, there was two. There was one that finally looked the way it was supposed to look, and that was Wings of Desire. And of course, it always sort of did look good. Always beautiful, yeah. It was always beautiful. But the truth was, every print that ever was shown anywhere at any time of Wings of Desire was seven generations removed from the camera negative. That's because we shot in black and white and color and mixed it.

And it was analog age and we had special effects and stuff. In order to have everything in one print we always had to go to a dupe negative and interpositive and in the end every print even the first print in the Cannes festival and then every print in America or everywhere in the world was seventh generation so from the original camera negative that ran through the camera to the print it was seven steps and i had always seen rushes together with my dop at the time late at night and these rushes were so fantastic they were the they were made directly from the camera negative and And that looked so superb. And then when we finally had the film, Henri Alekou, my 80-year-old DOP,

was heartbroken that he realized his black and white had to end up on color negative technically. There was no other way to make prints. And his beautiful black and white had to always have a slight red or blue or sienna, whatever, tint. You can't do black and white on color negative. It's never real black and white.

And only him and I, we knew what the real black and white had looked like. But then we didn't tell anybody because we didn't frustrate people. And so everybody thought this was the look of the film. And the fact that it was always slightly tinted was part of the concept. It was never part of the concept. That was a lie. It was never part of the concept. It was the stupid necessity of analog technology.

And so when we restored Wings of Desire, we could restore the entire film from the camera negative. So it was looking at the camera negative itself when we scanned it in 4K. And that was mind-blowing. There was so much more detail and so much more shades of black and white. And so many, I mean, so many nuances that nobody had ever seen except me in the rushes and during the editing process when we worked with the rushes. So in the end, the film is now looking more like it was supposed to look in the beginning, but we didn't tell anybody. And Henri Alicante, who is long dead in the heaven of DOPs, he's jumping with joy because this is finally what he wanted to do. That is beautiful. And an enticement for anyone to go check out that mastering.

It is so beautiful. Even if you've seen the film several times, you see that right away. That is a different animal. You may have convinced me to come out and see it very soon. Well, I wanted to. Then we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they have seen. Have you seen something recently that you've responded to? Yes, I saw a lot of films in Cannes

because I had the time in between. I saw Zone of Interest, and I thought it was tremendous work. And I saw one film that I even liked better. It was Anatomy of a Fall. And both films had the same leading actress, and she's a monster actress. She's one of the great living actresses.

Sandra Hüller, she's a German actress. And I've known her since her first movie. And she's just so good. And the fact that the winning film in Cannes, which was Anatomy of a Fall, and the runner-up, the Jury Award, was Zone of Interest. So she's in both movies. And I think she's the best thing I've

seen this year and both films are really very nice those are excellent recommendations and I just want to say I have a daughter named Alice in part because of Alice in the Cities your work means a great deal to me so thank you so much for doing the show thank you Sean my niece is called Alice too

perfect thank you Thank you, Sean. My niece is called Alice, too. Perfect. Thank you. Hey, thank you to Vim Vendors. Thanks to CR. Thanks to Amanda. Thank you to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode. Next week, well, we sort of spoiled Bob Marley one lunch.

Sure, but we're also spoiled Bob Marley one love. Sure, but we're also talking about The Taste of Things. We are talking about The Taste of Things. Which is a wonderful film, which is probably not a hugely wide release, but it is being released

this weekend. Are you ready to make a food movies list? I would love to. Your favorite food movies? Yeah. That's what we're going to do. Our top five favorite

food movies, which should be entertaining. We'll see you then.