The Big Picture - ‘The Brutalist,’ the Best Movies at the New York Film Festival, and ‘The Apprentice' With Sebastian Stan!

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Sean shares a recap of the best movies he caught at the 62nd New York Film Festival, including the heavy hitters at this upcoming Oscars, the latest installations from old masters and personal favorites, and the biggest surprises of the festival (1:00). Then, Ringer writer and ‘Press Box’ host Bryan Curtis joins to share the myriad successes and failures of ‘The Apprentice,’ Ali Abbasi’s character portrait of early Donald Trump’s rise to power in the New York real estate world and his complex relationship with lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn (50:00). Then, Sebastian Stan, who portrays Trump in the film, joins (1:30:00) to discuss how he chooses projects, what attracts him to playing characters who transform, and the long journey to getting ‘The Apprentice’ in theaters. They also discuss his work in ‘A Different Man,’ Aaron Schimberg’s new A24 movie about an aspiring young actor who undergoes a procedure to drastically alter his appearance in the hopes of improving his career prospects. Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Bryan Curtis and Sebastian Stan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that scientific studies have found most people lie once every 10 minutes? In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell, from faking illnesses in high-pressure moments to making up stories on national TV. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started.

With TD Direct Investing, you can get live support. So whether you need help buying a partial share from your favorite tech company, opening a TFSA, or learning about investing tools, we're here to help. But keeping your cat off your keyboard? That's up to you. Reach out to TD Direct Investing today and make your investing steps count. Plus, enjoy 1% cash back. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Donald Trump and New York and where they meet on film. We have an action-packed episode today.

Let me tell you all about it. Later in this episode, I'll be talking with Sebastian Stan about his two wildly different and impressive performances in two wildly different movies out this month. The first is A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg's complex, eerie character study. The other you may have heard of, it's The Apprentice. It's one of the discussion topics of today's episode. It is a movie in which Stan plays Donald Trump in Ali Abassi's film. Perhaps you've heard of Donald Trump. This is a complex movie. I've got some strong thoughts on it.

I know Brian Curtis, our guest, does as well. Stan is best known for his work in Marvel movies, but he's quietly amassing this amazing resume for what I'll call the character-leading man. Stan's a fellow 42-year-old going through it, like myself. So we had a frank and interesting chat about his work and his career. I hope you'll stick around for that

and stick around for my chat with Brian Curtis about the movie. But first, I want to talk to you about some special movies I had the chance to see last week at the New York Film Festival. It's an interesting festival. I only spent a week there. It's usually about three weeks long. My producer Bobby Wagner was there too. It's wide and deep and fascinating. You see a lot of movies from the various international festivals, from Cannes, from Venice. You can do a lot of catch-up work there. There's also some gala presentations of movies that haven't played in America yet.

It's a fascinating place for discoveries and revivals as well. I love going to New York. I hadn't been there in a couple of years. This was a big one. A few of my guys had movies performing there, which was very exciting for me. It all takes place largely at New York's Lincoln Center,

and so it's pretty easy to navigate. And this year I got out to most of the stuff I wanted to. Before New York started though, I did get a chance to see what I would say is one of the two or three signature films of the festival this year. I saw it in LA. It's called The Brutalist. The Brutalist has been a discussion topic on this podcast for months. I think it was back in July, perhaps June, when Amanda and I were talking about the lineup for the Venice Film Festival. And I, with a red marker, circled a movie called The Brutalist. I'd heard about it. I heard a little bit about it. This is Brady Corbett's third film as director.

Corbett was an actor. Maybe you saw him in Michael Haneke's Funny Games American remake. But this movie is certainly a fun movie to talk about in a joking sense, but it's also an incredibly serious, powerful, staggering work of cinema, to be perfectly honest with you. It's probably a movie that I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about over the next five months, and so I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who is very excited to see it. But I feel like I have to mark it here on the show now, because even though it doesn't come out until December 20th, it's the sort of movie that the movie studio A24 is going to want you to be anticipating for a long time. It's a story about a brutalist architect portrayed by Adrian Brody. His name is Laszlo Toth. He's a Hungarian born man of Jewish descent who escapes the Holocaust and comes to America,

seeking refuge, seeking a way to sort of relaunch his life. And along the way, he meets a very wealthy benefactor figure played by Guy Pearce. And together, they work on a project. That's more or less what I want to tell you about the plot. The movie's been compared to stuff like There Will Be Blood. I thought a little bit more of more classical American epics like The Big Country watching this movie. I just, I have to say, this is exactly the kind of thing that I want from movies. It took my breath away watching it.

I was incredibly excited that even though the film was made for only $10 million, it has the kind of sweep and reach that is uncommon in American movies right now. It's uncommon in an adult cinema. It's been a great time for genre movies. It's been a great time for genre movies.

It's been a great time for small character studies. This is something much wider, much more fascinating. I think it's pretty daring too, even though it feels like it's in the mold of a kind of movie you've seen before. There is a kind of abstract esoterica to the movie that is not common in the William Wyler movies of the 50s. So I'm pretty excited about it. Bob, I know you got a chance to see it too. What did you think

of The Brutalist? Well, first of all, I think it was the most anticipated movie at the festival. There was electricity in the crowd and it showed on, I believe, the first day or the second day of the festival in terms of present industry screenings. What did I think of The Brutalist? I think it's a lot of movie in a great way. I like movies, and so therefore I like when you serve me a movie that is big and there's a lot to chew on. I think that the film, I think it's well worth bringing up a film like that. And I can't wait to hear what people think about it and their reaction to particularly, honestly, the pacing. Because we've talked so much in recent years

about movies that are over three hours and how they can't draw crowds out. This is a good example of a movie that doesn't really feel like it's over three hours. And we just had a movie make over a billion dollars that was three hours and ten minutes last year that people were not complaining about the length of so i'm fascinated to see about that um it's crafty for sure it's very crafty and it's about someone who cares about their craft and so therefore it functions as a beautiful microcosm of itself at the same time yeah it's a movie as many movies about great visionaries that is also

about filmmaking clearly brady corbett relates to the laszlo toth character and his desire to create something big and profound that you can't forget you know a lot of the joking we've been doing on the show is about how the film is not just three and a half hours with an intermission but that it's shot on 70 millimeter in the vista vision format this is the first time a film's been shot in vista vision in decades and you can feel it and at the outset of the movie, when it's being presented, you sense that grandeur that Corbett is going for. But honestly, I felt like the movie pretty quickly immediately shrank down to this much more tightly focused story through that first hour and a half. And I

totally agree with you about the pacing. The film is bifurcated and the first part feels like more of a classical kind of rise recovery. Someone coming out of something and returning to a new stage of their life. And then the second half is significantly darker and more complex. But man, the first half flies. It really moves so quickly and you are so deeply invested in Toth and his relationship to the Pierce character. And then the second half kind of like the film kind of wraps itself around you and has you second guessing what your expectations were of these characters and second guessing where Corbin

wants to take this story. The film also has an extraordinary epilogue. I think there's going to be some questions about some decisions made in the second half of the movie, but I think the movie ends so intelligently, so smartly, so provocatively that it's a movie that we're going to be, we are going to be talking about for months and months. I was very happy to see it. One funny thing that happened to me, actually, you and I had just come out of a screening together and a wonderful man working at Lincoln Center

at the film festival named Eric spotted me in the crowd and he grabbed me and he said, Sean, please come with me. And he brought me upstairs and he said, I have something I'd like to show you. And he brought me up. This is real like the film bro Illuminati shit going on right here. That's truly what it was.

I felt like I was being ushered into a world beyond a world, and that world was full of canisters. Those canisters contained films. I did see the canisters, both 35 and 70 millimeter for The Brutalist. I saw the canisters for Nora, another film we'll talk about in a minute. And, you know, Eric just, he knew what I wanted to see. There's been a lot of hay made of the fact that, you know, they have to travel across countries to bring this film to the people. But it was a good reminder, and I got a chance to talk to the projectionist a bit about showing the

film for audiences, that showing movies is labor. You know, that there are people, there are craftspeople behind it who need to be good at their jobs to deliver an artist's vision on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, most films that you see these days are on DCP and somebody pushes a button and they don't do the same work that a projectionist used to do. But one of the great things

about going to the New York Film Festival, and I encourage anybody to go to a film festival for this sort of thing, is you get to see movies projected the way that they want to be seen. And The Brutalist is probably the best example of that. Another movie I want to talk about very briefly, just because I feel like it's a very important film this year,

is Nickel Boys. I saw Nickel Boys at Telluride. I flagged it then. I said, this is the most, this is the boldest and most daring movie of the festival. It's the movie that has resonated with me the most. I wasn't surprised given that New York is a sort of high-minded intellectual space

for the cinema community that this is the movie that probably emerged the strongest out of the festival. It had a big, I think it was the opening night slot. Was it the opening night slot, Bobby? Nickel Boys? I believe at the public festival, yes. At the public festival, yeah.

And so rave reviews out of there. I do think it's challenging. I mentioned, you know, it's a story set in the 60s in Jim Crow, Tallahassee, about a sort of boys reform school and all black boys reform school and the awful things

that are happening there. It's based on a Colson Whitehead novel. It's directed by Rommel Ross, who's best known for directing the documentary Hill County this Morning, This Evening. I talked to Rommel for the show three weeks ago, and it was easily my favorite interview that I've done on the show this year. And then shortly after the interview, MGM pushed the release date of this movie back from October 25th to December 13th in limited release. And it probably won't even come out

until January. So we're going to sit on that interview for a while. But the intention and the craft and the boldness that Ross brings to this movie is a marvel. I'm really excited for more people to see it. I really hope people give it a fair shake.

I do think it is going to alienate some people. I do think that's part of its intention, but I'm very, for more people to see it. I really hope people give it a fair shake. I do think it is going to alienate some people. I do think that's part of its intention, but I'm very, very excited about it. And so when I look at the roundup of movies from New York, a lot of the big heavy hitters for not just the Academy Awards this year, but for year endless, I think all played the festival. Sometimes that's the case in New York.

Sometimes it's not. You know, Nora is another movie that we've been talking about. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year. This is Sean Baker's new film. I've been calling it the culmination of all of his ideas. Next week on the show, Amanda and I pre-recorded a long conversation about Anora, which is an amazing film about a sex worker from Brooklyn who falls in love with a Russian oligarch's son,

and they go on a magical and then not-so-magical journey together. This movie also, I feel like, played like Gangbusters. You saw it in New York, right, Bob right pop yeah it did play like gangbusters a movie that's like right on the razor's edge of so many things where you can have bad opinions about and the movie just walks you right up to it and is like look at this this is the real world reckon with it sir or madam watching it in this theater and also while like i mean there's plenty of people have said this about sean bakers all of his movies in the past and i think you make a good point to say that this is watching it in this theater. And also while like, I mean, plenty of people have said this about Sean Baker's, all of his movies in the past.

And I think you make a good point to say that this is like all of his ideas coming together in one movie. But sort of like turns the camera back on you as a viewer a little bit too. Like, are you okay with this being a transactional society

that we live in? Are you okay with, you know, people from rough and tumble places kind of making their own way through the world? And how do you respond to it when it's reflected back to you i think in a fascinating uh way and you know i i don't want to spoil this movie at all for people their expectations at all because i think everybody should see it as purely as possible people have been talking about it for weeks and weeks if not months now at this point but like it's not just gonna it's not one of those

kind of movies that has a feel good hand you the answer I don't think anyone's going into it expecting that but it still is true that still is the case yeah I'm very curious to see how this plays

not just with wider audiences but with the awards race Mikey Madison is remarkable in the movie encourage you to see it as soon as you can it's a movie that probably will come up

a few more times on the show over the next few months but it's a special one. There are a couple of other festival films that have played earlier this year. You know, Amelia Perez, which is out on Netflix in November. Jacques Audiard's new movie, which I did mention at Atelier Ride, which also seemed to play very well, has been a bit divisive at some screenings.

There's starting to be Academy screenings for this movie. One interesting thing about the race in general is that there is, I think in part because of the aftermath of the strikes and in part because of this sort of reconstituted Academy, much more aggressive and unusual and artistic films are finding their way into the race early on. They're not just like leaking in later. I was thinking a little bit about Anatomy of a Fall

this morning and how it felt like I had real doubts about that movie getting in in September and Amanda had needled me for it a little bit and she was like,

oh, the Academy is international. You got to remember this movie won the Palm. And I think I was using my 2018 brain and now I look at, you know, a film like Amelia Perez

from a French filmmaker with an international cast set in Mexico. Film like Nickel Boys, you know, a film like Amelia Perez from a French filmmaker with an international cast set in Mexico, a film like Nickel Boys, really bold, unusual literary adaptation, a film like The Brutalist, which feels like it's based on a novel that was written in 1950, but is actually wholly original. And then a movie like A Real Pain, which is another movie that I think played really well at the festival. It debuted at Sundance that I like quite a bit. It's written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who's been on the show a couple of times. I think he's going to come back on the show to talk about this movie and

features is like a hilarious and deeply painful performance from Kieran Culkin. Did you see a real pain? I did. Yeah. And I think that for me, the Kieran Culkin performance in this here at the ringer, we've done a lot of talk about succession.

And so Kieran Culkin has lived in the hive mind of The Ringer for like half a decade. He's one of our guys. If not longer. He is one of our guys. This performance, of course, there's shades of the real Kieran Culkin in all of his performances, like there is with Roman Roy and in this performance too. But I think I was almost like punched in the face a little bit at how acerbic it is at moments and how just like visceral and real

the human response I was having to his performance was. It's a tour de force, honestly. In a movie that is like funny in a black comedy kind of way

in an extremely dry Jesse Eisenberg sensibility kind of way. And it adds a richness to the film that I think without that performance at the center of it,

it would be kind of like a down-the-middle comedy about a societal thing. I totally agree. If you've had, it would be kind of like a down-the-middle comedy about a societal thing. I totally agree. If you have a sibling or a cousin or a friend who drives you absolutely crazy, but you can't quit, this movie will resonate very, very deeply.

I hope I'm not revealing anything about any of my personal relationships by identifying that this movie worked. A couple of big swings that I saw. I was very interested to see Queer. I'd heard really mixed reactions about the movie. It played to a mixed reception at Venice. This is Luca Guadagnino's second movie of the year. It's his second movie with a script from Justin Kuritskis, who was on the show earlier this year for his script for Challengers. It's based on a William S. Burroughs novel, which is never usually anything straight down the middle. It stars Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Leslie Manville,

set in the 40s in Mexico City, follows a guy who's essentially escaped America because of some sort of drug imbroglio and made his way down to Mexico and is now using heroin, wandering around looking for people to have sex with. That is sort of the high, low and middle of the movie. It does become something significantly more psychedelic and psychological as the movie goes on. I thought Craig was fascinatingly himself in a totally different kind of role. You know what I mean? I found it was interesting. I thought he was very good in this movie,

but it's very hard for him to shake off the essential movie star charisma that he has. And not just the bondness, but some of the knives out character. And when he's holding the screen, it sometimes feels like you're watching a tequila ad. And I don't mean that as a criticism per se, but he has more aura than skill as an actor,

in my opinion. And I know a lot of people will disagree with me and he's really tabbed to be nominated for best actor here. I think he's talented, but he has something that is difficult to escape. And so for me, the movie doesn't totally work. I thought Drew Starkey was exceptional in this movie.

I'd never seen him before. And he plays this sort of younger man who Craig's character falls for, and they begin this complex affair partnership over time. The movie is bumpy and long, and I appreciated what it was trying to accomplish. And it was shot at Chinchita on these sets that are meant to look like Mexico City. And it has this great production design and it has this kind of washed out hungover energy

throughout which is clearly it sort of accomplishes what it's trying to do but what it was trying to do never really totally clicked for me we saw it I think

at the same screening right Bobby? Yes we did I think to your point I think it's like a movie in a way that is interesting conceptually and artistically that's like caught in second gear intentionally the whole time totally think it's like a movie in a way that is interesting conceptually and

artistically that's like caught in second gear intentionally the whole time totally and it's interrogating the idea of what you're talking about which is that daniel craig is like one of the most charismatic handsome honestly sexy people on planet earth and what happens when you transpose that exact energy into somebody who's like in a dirty place in a bad way in life does that still work the answer is sometimes the answer is sometimes that does still work he does still get to have sex with some of the people that he wants to have sex with and then it's sort of like i was honestly more interested in the back 45 like the back hour like let's get into it what's going on in this guy's brain are there ways to do drugs to connect with other people in life and have telepathy who

knows let's find out yeah between uh aaron rogers and daniel craig it's been an amazing year for Are there ways to do drugs to connect with other people in life and have telepathy? Who knows? Let's find out. Yeah, between Aaron Rodgers and Daniel Craig, it's been an amazing year for ayahuasca. That's all I can say. Come on now. You were just being begged to draw that connection. Been sitting on that joke for two weeks. Let's talk quickly about Pavements from our guy, Alex Ross-Perry, another movie that I've

been eagerly anticipating, not just since it was announced at the Venice Film Festival, but like five years ago when Alex first told me about it. This is a kind of blenderized biopic documentary jukebox musical about 90s slacker indie icons pavement. I am, of course, biased. Alex is a friend and a longtime multi-time guest on this show, but I loved this movie. It was amazing to see it at its New York premiere with the band in attendance. It was funny. It was self-indicting. It was hilariously edited.

The jukebox musical in particular is a stroke of genius. It was such a funny combination of styles and filmmaking. And I think sums up this interesting partnership that Alex and the editor, Robert Green, have where they understand mode and tone better than just about anybody.

And they basically detonated something that I had both worked on and complain about all the time, which is this sort of authorized biography documentary about a band that existed somewhere between 25 and 50 years ago. And I had a blast.

So shout out to Alex. It's tremendous. I'm like loathe to say too much about it because it is that type of thing where like, you see that they're willing to go there. You see as it's unfolding that they're just going to be like inside the box, outside the box, chucking the box outside of a car going down the highway at 50 miles per hour you know like they just really don't care about breaking the convention and making fun of themselves the band the fans of the band and the people who hate the fans of the band and the band so we're just all in it together honestly and i had a great time it was phenomenal i love to be told that i'm an idiot by a movie i'm watching sometimes well not always yeah joker folia do that wasn't the best but uh in this case is there something psychological there that you want to maybe drop some ayahuasca and connect let's keep talking about these films and maybe we'll learn more about my deep recessed feelings

that i'm unable to express what's coming next uh what's coming next is well this is a section i have dubbed the old masters the reason that i went to new york this year was because i knew that i was going to otherwise miss three films. The Shrouds, which is David Cronenberg's new movie. Oh Canada, which is my beloved Paul Schrader's new movie. And Hard Truths, the new film from Mike Lee. Of course, I'd get a chance to see them somewhere else. But I like to see these movies with the sort of New York press crowds or the premiere screening crowds and get a feel for what people think of them.

I also had intention to see, as did you, Pedro, El Motivar's The Room Next Door. We got shut out of that screening, something that has not happened to me in a while. And frankly, I was like really knocked off my game. I was like, wait a minute. I didn't get in?

What is happening here? And it was nobody's fault but my own. I just showed up way too late for the screening. And so did you. We were reeling from a Mets victory and that's what happened, right? Yeah, we were chatting about the Mets in line the whole time, and I don't think really realized that the line was just really long and moving really slowly. We just didn't make it in. We didn't make it in. It happens. It happens to

the best of us. We did make it into the Shrouds and Hartruths in O Canada, all three of which I thought were exceptional. The Shrouds is my favorite thing that I saw at the festival itself. The other movies I just talked to you about, for the most part, I did not see in New York. This is Cronenberg's new movie. It was picked up by Janice Sideshow. And I'm not sure, I think it won't come out until next year, but I just wanted to mention a very brief bit about it. It came up after Cronenberg's wife passed away and he began thinking about the nature of grief and how we stay connected to those that we've lost. And so he's come up with this perfectly Cronenbergian idea of a movie about a sort of tech businessman who builds this new way to bury humans,

which is that they become wrapped in this kind of electronic shroud that features all this kind of nanotech camera technology so that you can always keep an eye via app on the crumbling remains of your loved ones inside of their coffin. On paper, that doesn't sound like an idea for a movie, but once one of those coffins,

once a series of those coffins are kind of ransacked, it sets off this mystery. And you'd think that this would be a really grave and sad movie, but it was so funny and so horny. This is one of the horniest Cronenberg movies in years. And you've got Vincent Cassell, an actor who probably should have been in Cronenberg movies the last 25 years and just hasn't been. He looks exactly like David Cronenberg right now. He has the same haircut. It's crazy. And then you've got Diane Kruger doing Double

Duty and the best I think she's been in a movie since Inglourious Bastards. She's really, really bold, fascinating performance. And Guy Pearce coming back after The Brutalist. He's having a hell of a festival. Guy Pearce 2024 is Josh Hartnett 2023. Put it in the books, everybody. Could be. I already picked him to win Best Supporting Actor for The Brutalist in our Oscar bet.

So he's excellent in this movie. Like I said, I think it will come to theaters in 2025. So I'm going to mark that. Also going wide in 2025, but opening and limited release for Academy consideration is Hard Truths, a Mike Lee movie, which is just incredibly funny, incredibly painful character study of a woman named Pansy, a Jamaican-British woman living a kind of middle-class existence in which she is utterly tormented by anger, sadness, depression, and an inability to connect to other people. And it's a reunion for Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Lee, who I don't believe have made a movie together since Secrets and Lies back in 96.

And they picked up right where they left off. Very different character from the character in Secrets and Lies, but a truly agonizing and yet oddly, mordantly funny movie that I liked quite a bit. And I thought also played very well. And I was kind of confused. This movie also was supposed to come out in October and then got pushed to a limited release in December. This keeps happening.

I think some of it is because we have a very, very unsettled best picture race right now. And so there's this thought that pushing things back actually will help somebody jump ahead. I'm not sure if that's true. I wonder if actually coming a little sooner would be the wiser move. Nevertheless, I like hard truths. Do you like hard truths, Bob? I did like it.

It's an emotionally devastating movie in which nearly nothing happens at all. So in other words, a movie that played the New York Film Festival. Yes, yes. I have another one of those to tell you about. It's called Oh Canada. We see a lot of events, but I'm not sure what actually transpires. This is the first movie I saw at the festival.

You could say none of it. You could say not a lot. It's written and directed by Schrader. It's based on his friend Russell Banks' novel For Gone, the late Russell Banks.

Stars Richard Gere in a reunion for them some 40-something years after American Gigolo. Uma Thurman's in this, Michael Imperioli, and Jacob Elordi playing a younger version of the Leonard Fife character that Gere plays, who's yet another tortured

protagonist, a documentary filmmaker who is terminally ill. And he's agreed to sit for a documentary in which he talks about his work. And so it becomes this memory film in which the person who is sharing their memories is deeply unreliable. And so we get these kinds of collisions of vision and this disorientation around Fife's, what he thinks were things that happened to him, things he wished had happened to him, visions of art that he had consumed, visions of the work that he had created, and someone who, you know, presumably he is struggling

with cancer, and between the medication that he's been taking and the treatment he's been receiving, and his, you know,

difficult, the difficult state he's in, we never really know what's going on. The thing I like about this movie, aside from the obvious unflinching

Schraderian quality that it has, like all of his movies, is it feels like Schrader's saying, don't venerate me, like stop worshiping me. And so this felt like another movie speaking directly to me. I've spent a lot of time in the last seven years since the first reform boom that kind of reopened Schrader to American cinema and people kind of remembering what a master he is and what an interesting voice he has. But it feels like a guy saying like, I've done a lot of terrible things. I kind of stumbled into this art form that you're praising me for. Obviously, Banks is writing about this too in his novel. And this movie is this sort of

self-reflexive rejection of one's own success. But also the gear character has a ton of arrogance and pride and all of these complicated feelings. And while it is a movie in which not a lot happens other than these recollections, I thought it was pretty powerful. I really liked it. I'm not sure I'm meant to be trusted by the general public

when it comes to Schrader movies. I feel like if you've seen all of his 30 features, they all are part of this continuum of understanding. And if you haven't seen any of his movies and you sit down to watch this, you might be really confused. Nevertheless, I liked it. Bob, you've seen some of Schrader's movies. Yeah, certainly I like all of his early Scorsese collaborations as a writer.

And then some of the stuff like you're talking about since First Reformed as he sort of re-entered the lexicon. This movie is an incredible interrogation of the relationship between honesty and truth. And you can think that you're being honest and sometimes you're not telling the truth. You've changed the story in your head decades later. And interestingly,

as a filmmaker and how you know that it's kind of about himself is what staring into a camera lens does for that relationship between honesty and truth and the gear performance in particular is enough to get you to go to the theater if this is playing near you never mind the fact that it has other movie stars in it too like imperioli who's everybody's favorite like 63 year old dad fucking going through it big time italian american dad exactly and jacob alorti who i mean i don't mind seeing him wearing button-up shirts and pants that fit well you know so it's like I there's a lot in there to really um dig into I think uh it's a very interesting film and the way that the gear characters captured in the movie is via an

interrotron the arrow Morris creation for documentary filmmaking and honestly that's how I feel right now I'm recording in the mono studio. I'm recording in the pod cave. This is my second recording after being on Bill's show last week. Now I'm starting to feel comfortable and I'm, you know, listeners of this show should get concerned. You know, it might be, it might be a monologist's winter for your, for your boy. I'm feeling very cozy here. I'm into it. I don't think listeners have anything to be concerned about. Look at you. You feel comfortable? Well, I started writing some ideas in the doc yesterday. We don't have a teleprompter yet. We're getting a teleprompter soon, which I'm excited about too.

Once the teleprompter's up and running, look out. You know, the mad rantings of a sad movie boy. That's what's going to happen. The teleprompter is an incredible opportunity for me and Jack to fuck with you big time. I may have to remove access from the doc for both of you guys. Two more movies I want to cite quickly.

The Seat of the Sacred Fig, which is a big contender for Best International Feature this year, which comes to us from Mohamed Rousseloff. It's a story about a sort of judge's

investigator in Tehran who has just been given this new role and has also been given a gun in this new role. He's a father of two girls. He's married. And it's at a time, you know, very recent Iran history, where there's a lot of social unrest, especially around women's rights in the country. And the film becomes a sort of broader reflection of societal unease and rage happening inside of a

family, in a family of three women and one man, and one man trying desperately to retain his patriarchal, what he believes are his patriarchal rights, versus these women who are trying to come into their own and claim a kind of independence. The whereabouts of the gun play a pretty significant role in the movie. This is the German entry because Rosaloff has been, has essentiallyaloff is accused of a crime in the act of making this movie and I think faces eight years in prison in his home country. So he is exiled and is now sharing the film around the world. And it's been hugely acclaimed. I was a little bit mixed on the movie, to be honest with you.

It reminded me a little bit of another movie that I was a little bit mixed on the movie, to be honest with you. It reminded me a little bit of another movie that I was a little bit mixed on from last year. I think we both were mixed on it. The Teacher's Lounge, also the German entry for Best International Feature, in that it's an incredibly important concept and idea in the film. And obviously, what's happening in Iran is horrifying. And the film does go out of its way to show via social media capture and cell phone capture some of the real life protests and real life conflict between civilians and the government. But the actual story itself, I found to be a little bit stilted personally. I think I'm a little bit on the outside of this one.

This movie is getting incredible raves. But I had a harder time locking into it personally. It does feel like an important movie this year. And so I think a lot of people will be talking about it. I think you were somewhat mixed on it as well, right, Bob? Yeah, I was kind of with you. I mean, when the movie is directly confronting the political situation that the characters find themselves in

and causing the sort of triad of the mother and her two daughters to shapeshift through the decisions that they have to make i think that's when it's like in its best gear and when it is sort of resolving plot wise some of the stuff with the gun and the other things which as for folks who haven't seen this like it's not really clicking with you guys it is a little bit i think um it just does not land quite in the way that the rest of the movie does and so in that way it felt sort of inconsistent from start to finish.

It's nonetheless to say that it is an incredibly well made and incredibly well acted movie by all of the people involved. Yeah. Yeah. Performances are great.

It just makes a big leap from the first two acts is really sort of meditative, quiet, paranoid film and the third act is a little bit more genre forward.

And usually that's a good thing for me. But in this case, I didn't really feel like it totally worked. But it's a very taut and dramatic and serious tone. And I think that it's hard to strike for the actors. And even though the movie was not clicking for me the entire time throughout its runtime, the actors were, which is, I mean, I think a testament to it, to those folks.

Yeah, I agree. Interesting that this film also played alongside a movie called Universal Language, which I liked a lot. You didn't see this, right? I didn't get a chance to see it.

So this is the Canadian entry for international feature. It comes from Matthew Rankin. The film is shot in Winnipeg, but Rankin says it takes place somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg.

And you can see this fascination with Iranian culture and Iranian cinema in particular that Rankin has. And so he takes this movie, which is essentially about these two kids, Negin and Nazgul, who find money frozen in ice, and they're trying to get the money out of the ice and claim the money. And Massoud, a tour guide in Winnipeg, who's leading this confused group of people through various landmarks in Winnipeg, most of which are not terribly interesting. And then this Matthew character, who's portrayed by the filmmaker, who quits his job with the government of Quebec and travels home to Winnipeg to see his mother.

And these stories seem like they're not related and they find ways to converge. It's weird. Like, I think it's very clear that Rankin really likes Wes Anderson. And it's also clear that he really likes Abbas Kirstami. And he's trying to blend like, I don't know, Taste of Cherry and Where's the Friend's House and these 80s Kiarostami movies with Wes Anderson's sort of, like, metatextual, ornately designed serial comedies. And so I'll say this.

Like, it's a strange movie. I've definitely never seen anything quite like it and so that unto itself I think is worth recommending I don't know if it's really going to penetrate beyond a certain kind of art house sensibility it played at the Cannes fortnight earlier this year director's fortnight earlier this year but um I liked it so I wanted to recommend it I didn't get a chance to see Ephus, though, and I wanted to see it. You did see it? I fired this one up yesterday in the two hours before the New York Mets-Los Angeles Dodgers game 2

of the NLCS just to get my mind in the happy baseball zone. This is co-written and directed by Carson Lund. It follows an adult hard-pitched baseball league of varying ages of the people who are uh participating on both teams of this and it's an all-in-one-day movie quite quite literally the the day the sunlight plays a big role in them being able to complete their final game of this adult league before this uh the field that they are going to be that they play on there's going to be a school built on top of it so this is their last chance to play at this field and it's just about the different midlife crises that these folks are

going through and how baseball represents it refracts it reflects it back to you the different things that baseball does and how what we tell ourselves about why we're baseball fans and what that means about our lives obviously like right in the sweet spot for you and I. And just profoundly funny in some ways that if you don't know much about baseball, you just would go straight over your head. But if you're in the know, clearly the people involved in making this movie

have spent a lot of time just lounging around in the bleachers for lazy adult baseball games or just have been following baseball their whole lives. So I always love when we get a good baseball movie. And one that is like by the end of it, trying to say, trying and I think succeeding and saying something like profound about the austerity of life and how we relate to it

and what we choose to do with our time. Can't wait to see that. Maybe I'll fire it up tonight too. You did see, I missed a bunch of stuff. As I said, I was only there for like six days. I was trying to balance a lot of different things while I was there, including like our live show and another treat that I'll tell you about very quickly.

But like I missed not just Room Next Door, but I missed Blitz. I'm seeing that this week. I missed April. I missed Zha Zhangke's Caught by the Tides, which I really had wanted to see. I missed Daomei. I missed Grand Tour, a bunch of other movies.

You saw a few more things than I did, including your first one, which is a very highly touted movie this year that I still haven't caught up with. What is it? Yeah, it's All We Imagine as Light, which is Payal Kapati's, I believe,

feature directorial debut, or at least fiction feature directorial debut. It's an international co-production from France, India to Netherlands and Luxembourg. I think it's on the shortlist right now to be submitted by France for Best International Feature. I don't believe they've made a choice.

They did, and they did not pick it. They picked Emilia Perez. So now it's trying to do this thing where it's trying to... Like shoot the gap. Yeah, it's trying to be a Best Director, or a Best Picture and Director nominee without getting into the international race,

which is a tall hill to climb. Yes. Nevertheless, aside from academy shenanigans the film itself it follows um essentially two nurses one who is older who's at a different stage of her life and one who is more in an apprentice role who's just come to this hospital and they live together as part of this apprentice program at the um being nurses at this hospital. And it is essentially, I think, um, embodying what is one of the themes of New York film festival this year for me,

which was generational divide and the human nature that crosses that generational divide. They're going through kind of like similar issues in their interpersonal lives in terms of romantic relationships, but they relate to them so incredibly differently. This takes place in mumbai and this is a world that i honestly don't have much of a visual expectation of because i don't know that much about it but it drew it so beautifully it's an a beautiful like colored movie the the the reds and the blues and the greens are so um and shadowy and serious. But at the same time, there's just enough comedy in the gap between how these two characters

relate to the world. And then at the end, it goes into this interesting sort of dreamlike place, which I liked it a lot. I liked it a lot. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this. It does raise some interesting questions around Academy submission. You know, India historically has not had the best track record of submitting the right film, quote unquote, to compete. And I think this movie is triggering an interesting conversation about

reformatting international completely. Because if there are three great films from India one year and no great films from, you know, a powerhouse like France. But France has a strong board who's able to hire companies who can then advocate for their film into the Academy.

Then there's just like, it doesn't feel like the best representation, really, of what this award is meant to accomplish. And it's not easy to resolve this issue, but I'm very excited

to see this movie. I've heard great things about Pile Kapadia in general. So looking forward to it. You want to give a couple more shouts yeah I'll give a couple more so one is no other land this is a documentary and I would say uncommonly of the moment documentary this is a bit of a theme in the last few years with the Oscar the Oscars just documenting political unrest political tragedy it is a co-production of palestinian activists and israeli journalists it documents the destruction of masafir yata which is a neighborhood in the west bank um that is being

occupied by israeli soldiers who are claiming that they need this space for like a military practice zone essentially but really it's just a pretext for um moving these people from displacing these people from their homes as part of the larger conflict going on right now um in the west bank it is a verite documentary like told almost with the idea that these stories are being told online through internet activism baked into it because one of the directors one of the principal characters involved is sort of like an online activist as well as like an activist within his community and so it's like a fascinating exploration of just the just the torturous life that he lives like the exhaustion

that comes with this the constant unrest not knowing what's coming the next day not knowing who's going to show up knock on your door and kick you out of there, out of your home. But I vacillated between like the crushing nihilist feeling of seeing something as we've seen in so many documentaries that is just like, wow, this is thousands of miles away. How could I possibly do something about this? And then it does really sometimes snap you out of it and show you how community stands up to in the face of atrocities,

not in like a, let's all be friends, inspirational, sing Kumbaya way, but in like a let's all be friends inspirational sing kumbaya way but in like a this is what we are forced to do in this world and this is how we move forward kind of way so it's just um it was incredibly affecting like i had a very strong emotional reaction to this film both anger and sadness and also at the end just to sort of resolve that it kind of dares you to have about the world really looking forward to this one i missed it a tell your eye too um but i'm sure i will see it soon you want to give me one more

yeah sure um i'll cheat and do two together so there's two films called happy end and stranger eyes happy end is the feature directorial debut for a japanese filmmaker called neo sora and stranger eyes is the feature directorial debut for a chinese filmmaker siu hu yo um and these are i think two movies that the reason i paired them together is because they're both about the surveillance state and how life unfolds within the surveillance state uh it's clear that the idea of surveillance is on the mind of many filmmakers these days um happy end is like a high school coming of age story set against the backdrop of a Panopticon style

piece of technology that monitors how you break the rules in class. A great setup for a movie and I think the perfect kind of thing that appeals to me loving that genre coming of age setting it against something that I believe is ruining our society. And then Stranger Eyes is more of

a kind of like a mystery thriller rear window homage set against the idea that this couple has their child abducted and they're trying to get their child back and they go to the police and the police are using sort of their similar like citywide panopticon style, how do we find who did this?

And so ultimately these movies are about how do humans exist at the nexus of needing technology of still wanting to have the same experiences that we have had as generations before us and they're like traditional genre movies that you might recognize said in what is impressively honest and accurate representation of either the present or the near future, which I think sometimes movies get really wrong. And these movies get incredibly right. Great recommendations. Very excited about those. New York Film Festival was good. The only thing that was better than the New York Film Festival is what I did one of my days in New York, which

is I visited the fine folks at Criterion, the proprietors of the Criterion channel, the Criterion collection, of course, the Criterion channel, the Criterion collection, of course, the Criterion closet, which I did visit. I posted a photo on social media. I was in heaven. It was an amazing experience. Obviously, the work that the people there do, I genuinely cherish. In 2020, when the channel was sort of, I think it had been, had it been celebrating a year when we did that episode, Bobby? I believe so. Yeah, I think it was the, it was a year

and that was a time when a lot of people were diving into the catalog. We did an episode with some 20 filmmakers talking about their favorite thing on the channel. So getting a chance to go there

was incredible. I'd never been there before. I got to meet a lot of great people who worked there, including Peter Becker, you know, one of the co-founders and genuinely. It was one year. It was the one year anniversary. I got to meet a lot of great people who worked there, including Peter Becker, one of the co-founders. It was one year.

It was the one-year anniversary. April 8th, 2019 was when the channel launched. Go back and check out that episode. It was a lot of fun. A lot of people stepped up. Barry Jenkins, the Safdies, Ari Aster, a lot of longtime past guests of the show. I did go into the closet. I did get to take some things out of the closet.

A lot of people have had a chance to go into the closet recently because they did this very smart marketing move of having a mobile Criterion closet outside of Lincoln Center during the two weekends of New York Film Festival. Obviously, hundreds of people got a chance to go in and pick out three items. I got to do more than that.

I got to pick out more things than that. And I just want to say thank you. People were asking me, what did I get? I took one picture and I think I was holding like three or four things in the photo, but I'm just going to tell you what I got. And I'm going to tell you about the experience very quickly, which is that it is exactly what every single person says it is in the little pitter patter during every video that starts, which is, oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed. I don't know what to do. Now,

obviously I own hundreds of Criterion Collection discs. I have been buying Criterion Collection discs for 15, 20 years. I had LaserDiscs, even though I didn't have a working LaserDisc player because I thought they were so cool in the 90s. There's a lot that I do have. So scanning, when you go in there, you scan by spine number. You know, I could skip a huge swaths of the collection. So I was really looking for spines that I didn't know or didn't recognize. So I just started pulling stuff. And then also, honestly, I ended up walking out with five box sets, which sounds insane, but it's not as crazy as it sounds. I'll tell you about the things I got right now. First of all, the Pasolini 101 set, which is a somewhat recent collection of eight films from the Italian filmmaker, which I haven't dug into yet, but is a little bit of a blind spot for me.

I've seen like the Gospel According to St. Matthew and Salo, of course, and Teorema and a couple of other movies, but not all of his work in the 50s and 60s. So I'm excited to get into those. I was recommended by someone who was there with me to grab Jean Grameon's During the Occupation, Eclipse series off the shelf.

I grabbed that. It's three dramas made in France during the occupation of World War II off the shelf, I grabbed that. It's three dramas made in France during the occupation of World War II that are meant to be excellent. Finished off my Kurosawa physical media collection by grabbing post-war Kurosawa in keeping with my Grammy on grab. It's a five film collection of Kurosawa movies

made between 46 and 55. I got Wayne Wong's Chan is Missing, which is a hilarious, strange, sort of comedy mystery from 1982 about a guy in Honolulu who's trying to solve a case.

If you like, like, The Long Goodbye or any of the Sam Spade movies or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I would recommend this movie. I grabbed My Brilliant Career, which is a movie my wife really likes, directed by Gillian Armstrong.

I grabbed A Day in the Country just because I've never seen it. This is a short film that Jean Renoir directed in 1936. It was then lost for 10 years, never completed, and then he moved to America and his team completed it back in France in 1946 and issued it. 40-minute movie, I it back in France in 1946 and issued it. 40-minute movie.

I've never seen it, so I grabbed it. I grabbed the Europa Trilogy, which is Lars von Trier's first three films in the 1980s before he gained huge acclaim for breaking the waves

and then becoming an enfant tarib of international cinema. The Element of Crime, Epidemic, and Europa are those three movies. All three are great and for whatever reason,

I just had never bought this. And then on a whim, I grabbed Letters from Fontenhas, which is a trilogy of movies that Pedro Costa has made, the Portuguese director who makes these incredibly slow, durational, mesmerizing dramas. He had a film a few years ago that I think I talked about with Adam Neyman on the podcast. So that was a bounty.

I couldn't carry everything in my suitcase. Hopefully Criterion has mailed the stuff I couldn't carry with me to my home. I would want to thank them, honestly, for everything that they do. I really appreciate it. I love physical media, as you know, Bob. And honestly, we are thriving right now in the world of physical media. One other thing I'll just tease is that I met one of the kings of physical media in person. Hopefully he'll be appearing on this show at some point in the future, but I had a wonderful meal with him and it's nice to know I'm in good company in this quest to build. So you got the Film Bro Illuminati experience several times is what I'm hearing.

Yeah. It was really nice to just be seen and to be known, you know, not to be recognized, but to be known. Like people know what I care about and they wanted to show me the things that I care about. I was honestly touched the entire time. I'm just really happy that you took a utilitarian approach to the criterion closet because that's you. That's who you are. It'd be bad if you went in there and tried to prove something. I'm a man on a mission and that mission is to gain more knowledge.

And let's gain more knowledge by chatting with our friend Brian Curtis now about the movie The Apprentice. What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of junior chicken, McDouble, or chicken snack wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. Brian Curtis is here, co-host of the Press Box, editor-at-large of The Ringer, my old friend, my ex-editee. How does that work?

Recently ex-editee. Recently ex-editee. I know. We're still learning to be friends. Outside of this new relationship. In this new relationship. Yeah. Forging a new relationship here.

I'm really glad you're here. We're talking about a fascinating new movie. It's called The Apprentice. This movie is, believe it or not, about Donald Trump. Perhaps you've heard of him. He is a former president, mogul, all-around human in the world. It's directed by Ali Abassi. It stars Sebastian Stanis-Trump, who's on this episode.

It stars Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, his mentor, benefactor, godfather, father figure. Martin Donovan's in this movie. Maria Bakalova's in this movie. Donald Trump. Where are you at on Trump these days? This is a good prompt.

What do you think of the guy? Donald Trump, go. I saw him yesterday on The Stump and he stopped speaking or answering questions but decided to bob

his head along to music for 30 minutes and the titles that he was bobbing his head along to included YMCA and November Rain. Two of my favorites. Yeah. I don't know if there's old pitchfork reviews for Trump like there are for you that explain a lot about the man, but I'd be interested in learning

more. I would love to read Donald Trump's pitchfork writing. That would be exceptional. Like, gosh, what maybe William Basinski's, theation Tapes. Have you heard those? So The Apprentice. Now, this is a fairly common mode. We have a biopic of a recently famous world leader, artist. You know, we see this all the time. Trump, obviously, probably the most provocative and divisive American leader we've had in centuries. And this movie, which takes place largely between the early 70s and the mid to late 80s, sort of ends right around the art of the deal era Trump, is a fascinating movie.

It's a character study. It's very much based on real events. On your show on the press box, you had Gabriel Sherman, longtime journalist, who has made this transition into writing movies and television. He wrote this script. I think he said, how much research did he say he did for this? Like he, some 60,000 hours. Years and years and years. And came up with it during the first Trump term, this idea that Roy Cohn, that there was a movie here with master and apprentice, with father figure and surrogate son.

Yeah. So what'd you think of this movie? Well, we'll start, you know, first of all, I think we should talk about watching this movie in 2024, which feels very, very different than watching this movie in say 2019. Because if this movie had come out during Trump's first term, I think people like us and maybe people who are just generally interested in politics and perhaps looking at the world and going, what the hell happened, would look to this movie for an explanation of Donald Trump. How did this man get this way? How did we as a country get to this place

where we elected this man? It feels different though in 2024, doesn't it? After lots of books and magazine articles and other people have tried to explain Donald Trump and how he got this way to us. Yeah. So I think what you've just located is really my issue with the movie. I think it's a movie with incredible performances with a really sharp style. Ali Abassi, who's made a couple of really interesting movies consecutively. I really liked his serial killer movie, Holy Spider, that

came out three years ago. He has an interesting approach as a person who's not born in America and is sort of attempting to recreate, honestly, the sort of dingy era of New York, where New York in the 70s is kind of down in the dumps. And in the 80s, amidst the Reagan 80s, is attempting to sort of rebuild itself. And Donald Trump is one of the chief architects of that era of New York. It's just a movie full of things that I know about already. And I know about them because I've read reams and reams of journalism about Donald Trump, not just retelling events from his life, but attempting to psychologize his rise to power in this country. For years, you and David on the press box mocked this idea of pro-wrestling and Trump is just like pro-wrestling. We've now produced a documentary at The Ringer

about how Vince McMahon has a correlation to Donald Trump. So, like, this is one of the most covered humans of the last 25 years, 50 years, 100 years. I don't think the superlatives can go all the way back. He's the most of modern media. One of the most divisive leaders in America. I think we can go with the most divisive leader in American history, sure.

So, he's got all these ignoble superlatives in his chamber. And so watching a movie like this, I felt sort of flummoxed because it's an interesting exploration of craft. But Donald Trump, I think for those who do not want him to be the president or who do not like him or do not appreciate his status in American culture. A movie like this is a kind of like the closing bell. It's kind of like the, all right, we know, you know, and I did feel watching the movie that like, it's a little bit of an, like an all right, we know. It doesn't mean that the movie is without value. And frankly, if you don't read 20,000 New Yorker stories, 20,000 more New Yorker stories or New York magazine stories, or these explorations in his life and career, which have been written kind of ad nauseum over the last nine years, then the movie might reveal a lot to you.

You know, it might reveal that Cohn, who is not a like hidden figure in history, a man who's had two documentaries about him in the last 10 years, a man who figures prominently in angels in america um a man who we understand as a part of you know the rosenberg trial understands part of the mccarthy era in american politics like this is a person whose shadow looms large in our culture that he is the person who's sort of like the dr frankenstein in the donald trump story is fascinating you get jeremy strong who's holy cow incredibly committed in this movie really is just amazing um genuinely you know kendall in in succession maybe the role he was born to play but roy cone is the role he was born to transform into like he's pretty exceptional in the movie

yes and you know i think gabe said on my podcast that he'd been trying to get a roy cone movie made for some time even before sherman brought this project to him. So that's part of this. I think it was Owen Gleiberman of Variety said he points his head down when he's playing Cohn and then points his eyes up. A little Jack Nicholson in The Shining. And it's very, very effective. He also has this kind of head bob and this way of talking. I always find when actors age during a movie, it is almost always unconvincing, but strong as Roy Cohn ages very convincingly in this movie. It's over a period of about 13 years right after Roy Cohn's death. And you feel like he is that guy. I mean, it is an amazing performance. And we talk about

sometimes you find the Oscar nominee and maybe the Oscar winner in a very imperfect movie. That feels like that could absolutely happen. I wonder supporting actors kind of a weak category this year. So it'll be interesting. You know, the movie has not had a ton of success at the outset. And I do think that there is a little bit of Trump fatigue in general in Hollywood, but the performances and Sebastian Stan too, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to him on this episode is even though I'm more mixed on this movie than his other movie, a different man that is out right, is the movie makes this great choice to very slowly allow Stan to turn into the Donald Trump that we know.

You know, in terms of his gestures, his posture, his gesticulations, the way that he moves his hands, the sort of the way that he purses his lips, the way his body kind of grows and morphs over time. All of these choices in a movie that I would say is relatively unsubtle are all pretty subtle. And this could have very easily

slipped into just pure caricature. Both of them could have slipped into pure caricature and somehow it maintains like a pretty impressive credibility, I thought. I totally agree. I mean, think of doing Trump

here in 2024. I mean, the hackiest of impressions you could possibly do. You want to do yours? You were just showing off. I don't know, Sean. I don't know. It's a very, very delicate art form. It requires a weave, I think. But just think of this. Like, we've had not only a billion people portray Trump, including very successfully on SNL just last weekend. I laughed at that sketch, the family feud thing. That was funny. But just think, we've had people make careers on not even impersonating Trump,

but mouthing along as he says the words on Instagram. It's a great point. Someday there's going to be like the hundred things that actually happened during the resistance. And I just want to make sure

that is a spot high on the list. That really happened. People became famous just for doing that. So here's Sebastian Stan wandering in here into this absolute wilderness of impersonation and impression. And it works. And whenever there's a movie about real things,

I think of those American crime story shows and things like that. I always judge it on how long does it take me to accept this person as the real genuine article. And in this movie, seconds. We see him walking down streets of burned out 70s New York. He walks into this club. He spots Roy Cohn or Roy Cohn spots him across the club. And, you know, within moments, I'm like, that is Donald Trump. For the next two hours, I will accept that this is Donald Trump. And that is a massive degree of difficulty. in the movie that Trump, while a child of privilege, the son of Fred Trump, who's effectively

a slumlord, a developer in New York in the 60s and 70s, even though he is those things, that there is something ambitious but more pure than the person that we know now. There was a moment where he could have gone left or gone right in terms of the arc of his career and him stumbling into a club on a date and being called over by Roy Cohn because the movie insinuates because he's basically a tall, beautiful blonde guy. Do you see Trump's arc that way? That there's maybe even the potential for kind of sliding doors, that there's something a little bit more innocent about him at this stage of his life? It's hard to say innocent. I mean, he's clearly looking for a father figure. You mentioned

Martin Donovan plays Fred Trump or Fred Sr., we should say, in this movie. And it has had, as the movie shows, has given Donald nothing other than basically, you know, casting him as, you know, you are an inadequate version of me. Right. Because I am this developer of Queens and of, you know, outer borough New York. Trump clearly wants to impress his father. So here comes Roy Cohn. So I see it as that. And by the way, much more effective to me, portrayal in this movie is the makers have

called this a monster movie. Here's how the monster was created to me. Teacher and student is a much more interesting way to appreciate this movie, right? Here is a guy who's looking for that figure in his life. Yeah. He finds it in Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn is a moral, shall we say, or has this very weird sort of moral calculus that he imparts to Trump. And to me, on those terms, it works

really well. And to circle back to the point we made, less an explanation of Donald Trump than spending some time in the life of young Donald Trump. Seeing that, what you talk about, here's this moment where he could go any number of directions, but turns out to go this direction. To me, on that count, the movie works very, very well. Yeah, the movie makes an effort to show us or to recreate really some true moments in Trump's life, particularly some interviews he gave in the 70s as he's sort of rising in status. In which he seems more empathetic, more warm even, like intimate, talking about the power of family and the holidays and things that we don't really hear. He feels like a person who, even though we spend so much time

attempting to psychologize him, he is kind of unable to be unlocked in any way. His last 15 years as a public person, even setting aside his presidential tenure, he had caricaturized himself very uh powerfully on television on the apprentice the tv show you know across the miss america pageants like across many movies which we can mention here that he has shown up in like he branded himself he became a character joke about that on podcasts. You kind of, you plus 10% is the podcast character.

But he's like the Trump in 1973 plus 150%. Like he is so outsized now that it's a little hard to, it's a little hard to accept, honestly, I think the humanity that I think the movie tries to imbue in him. I know why the filmmakers did it and some of the reporting and public appearances support it. But it just feels, it's not that it's too generous because I don't need the movie to just castigate him as a demon. And I think the concept of master and apprentice is right on.

But there's no attempt to kind of reconcile anything. It just shows you the experience up to a point. And then that is all that we have. So I've just, I don't know if I found myself wanting more or wanting a further exploration. Maybe The Apprentice 2 will answer all my questions. You know, maybe the legacy sequel about this presidential run will do some of that work. I don't know. What do you make of that? Well, I think you've hit on what the challenge of making this movie is, which is that Donald Trump doesn't have an interior life or doesn't have an interior life that he's willing to show people. And it's funny you mentioned Vince McMahon, because when I'm watching this, I'm like,

oh, the challenge of making a movie about Donald Trump is the same challenge of making a documentary about Vince McMahon. There is no reveal, right? Biopics are all about, I thought this, but then I thought this. I was this person, but then I changed into this person. And it's fairly likely that that didn't happen with Donald Trump, right? That he is just that guy and that the things were about winning and not losing and not being a loser, as he says in this movie and these lessons that Conan imparts to him. And to me, that is very, very challenging to make a film about that because what happens in the film? Yeah, I don't want to harp too much on the Vince McMahon thing, but there are a couple

of moments in the Vince McMahon documentary, One where he talks about very briefly, but clearly about experiencing abuse as a young person. He also is seen having deeply emotional moments with his son and talking a bit about the sort of weight of scandal in his life and what is real and what is not real. That I think shows us like significantly more than we've ever seen from Donald Trump. You know, one of the key events in this movie

is the sort of dissolution and death of Fred Trump Jr., his brother, who struggled with addiction and had a really hard time. And the movie shows us the cold manner in which Donald treated him and how he was sort of embarrassed by him and frustrated by him. He's supposed to be his older brother.

Some godfather tones there, you know, some Fredo Michael stuff going on in that part of the movie. Have we ever seen Donald Trump like address that in any sort of emotional or psychological way? Like there is something, there is something kind of frozen about Trump. There's something just pure persona that I think makes him like in some ways a fascinating subject for a movie like this and in other ways, like utterly impenetrable. Yes.

And so it, I think maybe that's what gnawed at me as I was watching it. Yeah. And I don't totally know how you get around that. And, and to me, I found this movie so much more successful when Trump and Cohn were on the screen at the same time and the stuff without Cohn, my attention began to wander a little bit. This is from you being my editor for some of it. But sometimes you have material that's really good and really evocative, and it just feels like a part of a different story. I think you need Fred Trump in this movie because you need to understand

why Trump is so attracted to Cohn, how he's filling the space in his life. I don't know that you needed Ivana so much in this movie. Fred Jr. is interesting in this movie. But again, all of that feels to me away from what I liked about this movie, which was seeing these two guys on screen together. Yeah, it is fascinating. When they're working together,

and some of that is just the chemistry that those two actors have. The movie did open. It only made $1.6 million on 1,700 screens, which is not great. I do think it's a testimony to the fact that this is a subject matter that, if it were on TV,

I think actually more people would have tuned in to a kind of event-like series starring Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan, but as a movie-going proposition in the middle of, like, horror movie season, this isn't quite the monster movie that people wanted. I thought it was fascinating that reportedly Paul Thomas Anderson and Clint Eastwood declined

to direct this movie. Clint Eastwood. What would that have been like? I mean, but I think Clint Eastwood's exploration in the last 10 or 15 years of the American character, like if you look at Gran Torino, if you look at, um, the mule, the mule, if you look at American sniper, if you look at Richard Jewell, if you look at um the mule the mule if you look at american sniper if you look at richard jewel if you look at the 1517 to paris and most people did not look at it but some did like myself you know that's five movies in the last 15 or so years that he's made that is about kind of how

america like curdled into itself you know like how people became more emotionally damaged and what that wrought on society. And so this, I could have seen the Clint Eastwood version of this. I don't know if it would have been good. Yeah. These movies are very hit or miss in the last 20 years, as you know. But slower. Yes. Paul Thomas Anderson, you know, I mean, this movie is very similar to The Master in a lot of ways.

Very much so. And so because of that, you understand what it is that they're looking for. As a PTA super fan, I'm relieved he did not make this movie. That would have not been ideal for me personally. It would have been a weird zag. Yeah.

I mean, you mentioned it's three weeks before the election. Three weeks from today before the election. Which doesn't feel right somehow. It doesn't feel right. It feels either too soon or too far away,

given how chaotic the last couple of months have been. But just seeing this movie in this context, I completely agree to you. It feels like we're all glued at home to our phones or to cable news. So if this had been on that screen, maybe we accepted a little bit more. I think so. Than schlepping out to a theater to see a Donald Trump movie

when he is running for president for the third time. Yeah, what was the Billy Ray series? Was it the Comey rule in which Brendan Gleeson portrayed Donald Trump? I don't know if that was a huge hit, that series in particular, but I thought that Brendan Gleeson performance was also quite interesting for an Irish actor to be trying to portray an American figure like that. These stories based on real life, especially those that try to have some fealty to the truth, are really hard to pull off in a movie setting. They're just, there's something kind of non-narrative about real events when they're across long stretches of time. And so I feel like the movie really struggles with that.

Would you have liked this more if it were a Roy Cohn movie rather than a Donald Trump movie? So what if we have basically the same events, but we just shift the camera a little bit, and when Cohn and Trump are together, we're with Cohn, living his life as this big socialite and gadfly and lawyer figure in New York City? I think it would have probably been more entertaining.

I don't know if it would have been more insightful. Again, for me, I don't know why, but I have seen both of the Roy Cohn documentaries. I've read a lot about Roy Cohn over the years. So it's a little bit of an issue of knowing a little bit more about it. I think some of the most interesting things that happened in Roy Cohn's life have nothing to do with Donald Trump. And so if I was going to make a Roy Cohn movie, and especially because Angels in America also captures the kind of final years of Roy Cohn's existence, I would have preferred to have seen something about the hard charging young Jewish lawyer trying the Rosenbergs or, you know, leading the pack as the kind of like hunting dog in Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare. So I don't know,

maybe it would have been better. I mean, you would have gotten more Jeremy Strong. Yeah. And Cohn talking about Trump not in Trump's presence would have been interesting. Can we give people some of the fun stuff from this movie?

Because there's a lot of fun stuff here. Roy Cohn telling Donald Trump how to dress. More Fifth Avenue, less Queens, he says. We don't want to make this seem like a slog because a lot of this movie is not a slog. It moves. It really moves. Donald Trump wearing a snowsuit in Aspen when he is courting Ivana, that really happens in this movie. And that was one of the big visual

gags for me. Cohn advising Trump on how to work the media. If there's anything, there's a lot of this movie that's interesting because Cohn's rules of politics have become Trump's rules of politics. And that's imparted in this movie, maybe a little blunt for some people the way Roy Cohn's rules of politics have become Trump's rules of politics. And that's imparted in this movie. Maybe a little blunt for some people the way Roy Cohn's like, here's what you do, Donald. Number one, number two, number three. What is the trilogy? Do you remember? I got it right here.

Attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing. Deny everything. And no matter what happens, you're always winning. Interesting. I mean, we could find those on the stump over the last couple of weeks. That reminds me a lot of Woody Johnson's ownership of the New York Jets. I was waiting to see if we'd get to the Jets or the Mets first in this podcast.

We've already mentioned the Mets, thankfully, because things are going so well here. I mean, you've got no like to stand on here with the Cowboys. I was going to say, Bobby told me we're just talking baseball day. Movies were actually happening on this podcast. That's kind of funny. Baseball season's been wonderful. Baseball season lasted longer than NFL season for me this year. Oh my God.

Look how Sean perks up. Not even talking about the movie anymore. Would you trust just your life or you and your whole family's life in Sean Mania's hands? I'm considering letting him watch Alice three times a week.

I feel like he's that, that's the safe pair of hands. Great. And then there's one day for him to start and one day for his bullpen. We're good to go. Otherwise he's free's that, that's the safe pair of hands that he has. Great, and then there's one day for him to start and one day for his bullpen. We're good to go. Otherwise, he's free.

Yeah, take care of my child. Also, some funny New York characters. We got somebody playing Ed Koch. What did you think of his Ed Koch? It was Jack Lemmon.

It's the answer to that. I mean, it was, it was very, the actor's name is, I read that, Ian Clark. But he honestly felt like he was playing Jack Lemmon. I was like, no, no, wrong person.

Much like Donald Trump, Ed Koch has a very particular aura, and it didn't seem totally accurate. No, there was Barbara Walters' character in this movie. That's right. A Mike Wallace character in this movie. We see Donald Trump watching Cone's 60 Minutes interview, which people can watch on YouTube if you're interested in that. That happened near the end of his life. So there's all that. I did like the way this movie captured Donald Trump's feeling about cities. Because Donald Trump has this kind of greedy affection for and also revulsion to

big cities. As we saw last week, when he was saying Detroit sucks while campaigning in Detroit in a state he must win in the presidential election. It's just a fascinating contradiction. I mean, his desire to pursue and contempt for New York City is like an extraordinary storyline. Like obviously his development of Atlantic City is a big part of this story. And it signals like a real shift in his perspective. He becomes unfaithful in his marriage. He starts to take diet pills.

He starts to think about plastic surgery. All of these kind of critical events in the life of an American president, which is just fascinating. Obviously, most American presidents have skeletons in their closet, but this movie is like, this guy took diet pills for five years, you know, so he didn't get too fat. It's just a fascinating reveal, I guess, or it's not a reveal. It's making manifest something you've read, which sometimes can be dull and sometimes can be downright hilarious. And in this case,

it is kind of funny as he starts to become this monster that they're talking about. Yeah. And, you know, I always find historical fiction to be the hardest genre

for people to defend because, you know, you can say, okay, this is totally fake. This is totally real. Well, we went for the middle here where it is based and Gabe Sherman told me

that he actually turned in an annotated script to the lawyers before they started shooting, saying, here's where this comes from, here's where this comes from, here's where this comes from. But of course, you have to compress events. You have to invent things to make a movie. You cannot, there are no tapes of these things happening, right? You are guessing, you are based on what you know about these people. But to me, whenever these movies come out, then you see people write off, that's, oh my God, this is not what really happened. Like, okay, okay, okay. That's the way every movie like this is.

Well, this movie has a really overdrawn production history that you got into a little bit with Gabe that I've heard Gabe talk about on other shows too, where some of the funding was located in Dan Snyder's universe. And so they needed to extricate themselves from that funding so that the movie could eventually be released.

And so you have like these conservative voices who are participating. And then I think after they were able to do that and they did get a distributor in Briarcliff and they were able to get the movie into the movie theaters, that the filmmakers for the most part have tried to walk this very narrow line of,

I'll call it gentle objectivity. When the movie premiered at Telluride, Ali Abassi introduced the movie and he said that this is just a mirror, that all this movie is, this is not a hit piece. He was very careful that it not be identified as a hit piece.

He just said, I have merely as a person who is not from this country, raised a mirror up and said, here is one of your leaders which i i guess is true but i'm not sure if that is an artistic act and that is the thing that i think i am constantly yeah rolling over in my mind i don't think like a more broad and more um finger pointing portrayal of donald trump is what i'm asking for per se i'm not asking

for anything in particular. But I think a lot of the couching around the movie unfortunately works against it in some ways. If you have to say this is a mirror, that's not ideal. Yeah, that feels like marketing to me, too. It does. You're saying we don't want 48.5% of Americans

to just cross this movie off, something they would not ever see. It'd be so fascinating to come back to your point about whether people watch this and how they watch it on streaming, right? Because they're going to be watching on streaming when Donald Trump has been elected president for the second time or when Donald Trump has gone into defeat. And then we were writing all these think pieces about, is Donald Trump gone? Will he come back into American life? You've raised an interesting question. One, do you think this movie will be on streaming before the election i don't know i mean you'd figure probably

so right what because what really is the film if you're briarcliff aren't you like let's push that button and like they made a million dollars and change this week yes i would say yes then so if you don't do that and donald trump loses election, what is the inherent value of this film just in the next 12 months? Is anyone imminent danger, you know, the clicks go up, the money goes up when he's not, or he seems like he's not. Again, Donald Trump will probably run for president again, even if he loses. That's a good point. I mean, he will probably protest the election if he loses as well. I think that's a, I think that's a 100%. Yeah. We can assume that's going to be the case. That's already happening before the election has happened. So I think we're good there. I was going to ask you this.

Will you ever be ready to watch a movie or a handsomely mounted television miniseries about Donald Trump? Yeah, I mean, I watch everything. So I'm the wrong person to ask, you know? Will you look forward to watching such a thing? I love political theater. I'm not sure if I like politics. Okay. political theater i'm not sure if i like politics okay but i like political theater and i like understanding the deeply damaged people who choose to get into this line of work i'm fascinated by

we did an election movies pod a few weeks ago and you'll have an objection to that do you hear that yeah i have a take on it too bill yelled about how dave was not an election movie. Here's my thing. It's like Dave was sort of running to be the president in his time as the stand-in president. That was my reading of that was that even though he's not necessarily being elected by the public, that he was sort of being elected

by like the Kevin Dunn character, for example, who turns on Frank Langella in the movie and sort of like trying to win him over. So in a manner of speaking, I thought it was. Not to mention Ving Rhames. He says, I would take a bullet for you. He runs over the Secret Service guy. What better? Who better?

People at The Ringer who may accuse us of being, you know, too up our own, you know, what's. I just want to note that Sean said something on the press box that Bill objected to on the BS podcast that has now been answered on The Big Pick. The human centipede has been completed. We have merely triangulated content.

That's all I can say. Here on the producorial side, we call that network effect. Yes, yes. But we were talking about Trump projects of the future. I don't know. I mean, look, I'm going to watch anything that's about an American president,

if I'm being honest with you. It's a category that I like. I think I'm slowly to watch anything that's about an American president, if I'm being honest with you. It's a category that I like. I think I'm slowly entering that phase where I want to know more and more about history. Sad dad that I am. You've become a history dad. Welcome to the club, sir. You've got a ton of books I'm sure you can recommend to me.

What about you? Do you crave Trump content? So this is what's interesting. Seeing this now, we both feel like, we both say, and I think I probably like this movie more than you do, and I would recommend this movie in case that has not come through here. If only for the performances of Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan. Sometimes there's three-star movies

on the old Ebert scale where, like, that performance is good enough that I would say go, I would say to watch this. I'm pretty much there with you. You know, I think I have more issues with the construction of the movie's idea, but I generally agree that it is worth watching. Yeah. And I really enjoyed the parts when they were on the screen together,

really, really enjoyed dropping into that world. So let's just say that it's fascinates me when we'll be ready for Trump, because maybe it's just me being a political junkie and watching Bill Clinton wander into a McDonald's in Georgia yesterday and feeling the nins vibes, you know, just coming around me and going, oh my God, it's back, baby. You know, 1992 when he was wearing those incredibly short shorts and going on the jogs and going to get his egg McMuffins in the morning.

But there will be a time, Sean, in a decade or two decades when we will be looking at this period like we do the 90s now. So rather than a new project, do you think it's plausible that this film is reclaimed? Because that feels more likely to me. That we look at it in 2033 or 2046. Donald Trump, in theory, is long dead. And we say that this is actually the most chilling portrait of a complex and at times

incredibly damaging American leader that we've ever had. Because the truth is there are not a lot of good movies about presidents. No. And not that many

about presidents at all anyway. Yeah. Right? There are not that many presidents that would ever inspire a movie. No. It's a very short list. And Abraham Lincoln

and Richard Nixon, you see, are the sort of two key recurring figures because one for one reason and one for another reason. Yeah. We got that weird Reagan movie, Bill Clinton as John Travolta, sort of semi-Bill Clinton. Yeah. You know, there's some stuff out there. There's not many you would want to watch, frankly, I don't think, unless you had the right director. I mean, Trump has had no doubt in a fascinating life, an extraordinary life. Yeah. I'm just trying to pick through a like

Trump project. I mean, I think when I was joking about terrible things that happened artistically during the resistance that seemed okay at the time, I do think we will pick through this list and be like, what was actually something that we can now look back on? Are we still in the resistance? Well, so let's say we had the high resistance and now it's kind of like the rise of Skywalker, right? Trump has returned. We may have new resistance new i don't know i knew you'd find a way to get star wars involved don't you think um but like democracy dies in darkness well that seemed kind of you know rousing at the

time we do a resistance draft of just all the great stuff i am absolutely oh my god what would be the anti-draft right what was most embarrassing that happened in the resistance. I am absolutely, oh my God, what would be the anti-draft, right? What was most embarrassing that happened in the resistance? By the way, we will not be getting a Joe Biden movie, even though Dana Carvey is ready in the bullpen with a very good Biden impression. But I mean, another person who his biography is remarkable.

That, okay, but that is, that might be a bigger hill to climb than Donald Trump just for saleability. Agreed, agreed. On the flip side, have you watched television recently? There's so much bullshit on TV right now. Most shows are terrible.

I know that we can't make a movie about Joe Biden or Donald Trump's life. Obviously, that's ridiculous. I got another embarrassing resistance thing for you. Stephen Colbert. I watched it the other day because Kamala was on. Holy God, Sean. That monologue.

It wasn't me neither. I haven't seen it like ever, maybe once in years and years. I'm watching like, this is a TV show? This is a comedy television show in 2024? The minute he turned off the Colbert character, I lost interest. So it is what it is. Anyway. That show is very popular.

It's very popular. It works. It works. It's on my list. Resistance anti-draft. Let's do popular. It works. It works. It's on my list. Resistance anti-draft. Let's do it. I'm so excited for this. I do think there is a chance this movie might be looked more fondly at years from now.

I think you're right. I think it's just the timing of it. After trying to get it made all those years, as you said, it would be received differently in 19. It would be received differently in 20. I mean, imagine if this movie was released in the aftermath of January 6th. That would have been a totally different environment for the phones to be received in. I just think there is a general Trump fatigue amongst a huge swath of the population. Yes. So because of that, this is complicated.

And it's a weird fatigue, right? Because they are fascinated by this election. You know, 60 million plus people, an NFC, AFC championship game audience for that Kamala Harris Trump debate. Even Tim Walz and J.D. Vance, something that we would look at and be like, okay, this was less interesting to a broad swath of the population. 40 million viewers for that debate. We're teetering into press box territory, but just a couple of weeks removed from the VP debate, did that have any impact on anything whatsoever?

I don't think so. I don't think so, which may be that J.D. Vance's ceiling for likability. We sort of hit it. He bumped his head on it. Yeah, and it was like, okay, well, we're all good there. But I could see people looking back at this movie fairly fondly. Any other thoughts? Anything else you want to get into? I did share with you the great Errol Morris sort of mini movie in which Donald Trump talked about Citizen Kane,

his quote-unquote favorite movie of all time. Citizen Kane was really about accumulation. And at the end of the accumulation, you see what happens, and it's not necessarily all positive. So I've never seen that. I don't think. It's amazing. It reminds me of when they would have people who had never seen Star Wars but had partners that loved Star Wars try to describe the events of Star Wars. Trump is like, here's what happens in Citizen Kane.

I'm like, oh. When he first starts talking in that clip, which if you haven't seen it, it's on YouTube. I highly encourage you to watch it. I believe it was filmed as part of a montage that was going to be made for the Academy Awards. And he happened to get, and I think, was Trump going to talk about King Kong?

I think maybe he was going to talk about King Kong. Mikhail Gorbachev was going to talk about Dr. Strangelove. Oh, that's incredible. This was the other part of the project. Pretty great casting.

I feel like I'm being pranked right now. This is a real thing? Mikhail Gorbachev was going to talk about Dr. Strangelove? This was an aborted Errol Morris project

at some point where he was going to have people talk about movies and show clips of the movies. Because he has done versions of this for the Academy before nevertheless this clip in which he talks about citizen kane which he he gets very close to getting the key themes of the movie and then veers way off course like in the first minute he's talking and you're like wow has he read

andrew saris this is so interesting He's thinking about the entire structure. Answer no, but please continue. And then just completely misunderstands the movie as this portrait of accumulation and greatness, which of course it is the opposite. It's accumulation and vacuousness, emptiness, sadness. And it's remarkable. Yes, I think Kane got the wrong woman.

I think he picked the wrong woman. I think he picked the wrong woman. I was like, oh my God, that was your takeaway from all this? A man married many times who constantly thinks he can fix his life by finding a new partner. It's an unbelievable couple of minutes of cinema. It is remarkable. It's one thing that makes, for lack of a better word, Donald Trump great, is that he just gets on camera. He just makes himself available

to talk all the time in a way that is we've certainly never seen before. You sent me the list. The best movie Donald Trump has been in is... Home Alone 2. I mean, here's the list.

Donald Trump as an actor. Two Weeks Notice. The Sandra Bullock rom-com. Celebrity. The Woody Allen black and white film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Saw that in the theater. And when Donald Trump had his cameo, I remember that being the biggest laugh in the movie. I haven't seen Celebrity in a long time.

That'll be for the Woody Allen draft, probably. 54. God. Which has been. Mike Myers as Steve Rebellion, that awful makeup. Yeah. You know that movie's been sort of reclaimed, right? Because there's a new cut. Okay cut that makes it quote unquote better.

It's going to take a lot for me to reclaim it. Yes. Zoolander. Donald Trump appears in Zoolander. Zoolander might be the best movie on this list. On the runway with Melania, doing like a red carpet interview. He appeared in not one, but two films starring Eddie Murphy. Or excuse me, starring Whoopi Goldberg.

Not a Trump fan. No, not a Trump fan. The Associate. Do you remember that, where she takes over in the boardroom? Yeah, vaguely. And then Eddie, which is the movie in which she runs the New York Knicks. Not ideal.

He appeared in The Little Rascals remake and Home Alone 2, as I mentioned. Home Alone 2, where he wanted a cameo in the movie in order to give the filmmakers, I guess Chris Columbus, permission to use the plaza. Yes. He's the, their scenes shot in Trump Plaza. And he's in it for like one and a half seconds. I do remember watching that with my kids who love Home Alone two in a way I never thought they would love Home Alone two. And then, Oh, here comes Trump. Ooh, kind of a weird moment. Then we proceed to the pigeon. What's your favorite of those movies?

That list. I think Home Alone 2 is the one I would pop in if I had to watch one. You got to revisit Celebrity. Celebrity's interesting. Kenneth Branagh. Yeah. Yeah. Again, Donald Trump

in that movie, if people haven't seen it, somebody's doing a television interview and he says he has bought St. Patrick's Cathedral as a teardown. That's a good joke.

It's a good Donald Trump gag. That's a really good joke. Okay. Well, Brian Curtis, always a pleasure. Thank you for being here. It's always a pleasure, Sean. Thank you very much. joke. Okay. Well, Brian Curtis, always a pleasure. Thank you for being here. It's always a pleasure, Sean. Thank you very much.

What movie are you coming back? Oh, I know what you're coming back for. Oh my God. I'm so excited for this. Speaking of 90s vibes. Yes. In November, the film Here is coming out. This is Robert Zemeckis' new movie that takes place all in one corner of the world, quite

literally, in prehistoric times, all the way through an American family's home, their living room. And that is the conceit for the movie. Tom Hanks, Robin Wright Penn, Robert Zemeckis, reunited. Gang's all here. The Forrest Gump team. And are you fully up to date on the Zemeckis filmography at this point? I may need to get to update on some of the more recent ones.

Okay. Those ones are not good. Yeah. So I some of the more recent ones. Okay, those ones are not good. Yeah, so I did see Welcome to Marwen. Oh, yes. Welcome to Marwen? Is that the name?

On the opening night because it seemed like such a disaster I had to be there. It was the only one in the theater. I found my ticket stuff for that weirdly

the other day and I will never forget that night for as long as I live. A truly remarkable, deranged piece of art. One of the craziest things. He has gone for it. He has not been safe in the last 20 years. Hopefully here is another example of that. One of the craziest things. Like he has gone for it.

He has not been safe in the last 20 years. Hopefully here is another example of that. We'll see you in November, Brian. Thanks, Sean. Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Sebastian Stan. Sebastian Stan is here. Star of A Different Man,

star of The Apprentice, star of a great many things. Sebastian, I want to start by asking you, what is the first thing you look for when you get a script? Well, lately it's been fear. Lately it's been fear. Lately, it's been fear. It's interesting because as it pertains to these two things, there were both things that when I read, I immediately had no idea on how I was going to do it. And yet I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And then I sort of found my way. Uh, and, and so I think, I think that kind of, uh, sort of curiosity that, that makes me, makes me really, uh, unable to, to sort of start thinking about it, um, and want to investigate is, is, is a good sign for me now, I guess. I've been really fascinated by every non-MCU role you've taken in the last five or six years. And I say that not to disparage the MCU work, but I, Tanya, Pam and Tommy, Dumb Money, The Apprentice, A Different Man. These are all kind of transformational parts. Is that something that you are very conscious of when you're looking for parts like this? Well, I, I, you know, when I was a kid, when I was really young and I started acting and I was going to theater camp and I was doing plays in high school and stuff,

the experience of acting for me was very freeing. I, I was, I was lucky in the sense that I was always encouraged as a kid. I think you're just doing it for the love of the game. You don't have the sort of narratives that get piled on, even that come with success or failure, or you don't have the projections that other people throw on you and the opinions of what they think you should be doing or not. You're just going towards what feels instinctively exciting or curious. And so in a similar way, you know, I find myself now wanting to preserve that inner child, uh, you know, desire to want to be going into something unknown. Um, I like, like every actor out there, uh, you know, you grow up and you go into the business and somebody tells you, Oh, you look like this. And so you should be playing these parts or, Oh, uh, you're like this, you're like a neurotic. So you should be playing these parts or oh uh you're like this you're like a neurotic so you should be playing this part or oh you're like the asshole looking guy right so you should be

playing this parts or you know people it's just what happens and and i just find that so limiting uh in a way and and so i just tried to um to find things things that similarly felt like a reach for me. And every time that's happened, I've walked away with a greater sense of self, but I also walked away with perhaps an understanding of human behavior or uh, with all its flaws that I, that I didn't really have before. Um, and, and in terms of the MCU, that's not to say that I felt pigeonholed by the MCU. Cause I, I didn't actually, um, I think having that character for 15 years did allow me to explore certain things with that character that only if I had experienced those things, could I then go search for the opposite? If I hadn't had that character, I don't know, maybe I would have been a romantic comedy actor or something if that even exists. I mean, I would still do a romantic comedy. I mean, I'm trying,

but like, do you know what I'm saying? It's one parallel the other. Yeah. I mean, it seems like from my vantage point, like it freed you up to take more chances to do some things that are not as expected of someone like you. It did, but there was still the challenge. These things didn't come easy. I mean, I, Tanya, I had to fight for. I had to go in the room various times. It's not like I walked in the room and they immediately thought I was the guy. The fact that Craig Gillespie came around and because of our relationship which which i felt was great was was extremely helpful and i'm i'm i'm indebted to him i and and that experience but

but i did i i did i went out for many things that i didn't get that were where the the feedback was oh you're too um you know you're too good looking or you're too, or, or too cool or whatever, you know, like, so at some point it's also about somebody taking a chance on you and, and freeing you up. But I do feel like these things are slightly connected i do feel that in some ways pam and tommy certainly helped with with the apprentice in terms of in terms of perhaps then looking at that and going even though i had met ollie before that uh even shot i i still i still think it validated perhaps for them that oh oh, maybe I can do something that I'm not necessarily, that's not necessarily who I come across as. It's interesting that you mentioned acting at a young age and theater camp and things like that.

Do you remember what kind of parts you were attracted to back then when you were a kid? Oh, my God. I mean, I got to do some crazy stuff in high school because I went to a small high school and they weren't they were basically begging people to be doing theater so i did harvey which was the jimmy stewart movie like yeah that and i i played the jimmy stewart role i did like serenade bergerac which was like an amazing play because i mean the guys got monologues and stuff and again i had a very low-key prosthetic like did it little that i know that that's what even what you call stuff that you end up using um but i also did music i did greece i did uh crazy for you i did little shop of horrors uh west side story i mean i guess some of those maybe were a little more classical like whatever leading leading, but Crazy for You. And I was obsessed with Neil Simon and stuff. I mean, all that is like, really sort of over the top comedy and big characters and stuff. It's not, you know, subtle, subtle, blue steel, you know, kind of gazing into the sunset.

These movies aren't either really. I'm curious how A Different Man came to you, because it feels like inspired casting having seen the movie now that you're in this part. But I'm not sure that if you showed me that script, I would be like, it's Sebastian Stan. He's the guy. So how did it come to you? Listen, I mean, again, I'm very fortunate to have found it. My agent, Shauna Perlman, sent me the script and she said, you should take a look at this. This is really different. This is very unique. And I read it. And obviously when you read a lot of scripts, you get better and better at sort of kind of catching what's coming in the scenes and you realize oh this is a scene that's setting up something later and so on

none of that was happening here everything i was reading this thing i was legitimately feeling unsettled and yet super drawn in because i didn't know what was going to happen. And I quite couldn't understand what some of the scenes were, were there for. Uh, and that's just the result of really incredible writing is, and, and, and the script also reminded me a little bit of those Robert Altman movies, where you have all these other characters around the main characters that seem to all have their own life off page and they and they seem real and grounded and they speak in their own way and they're not just there to to build the other characters and then these questions about a guy who he's he's just trying to do his best to live with his life. And they call him and say, hey, there might be something for you to do that's going to change your life. And he's like, really?

Like me? And then he goes and he does this thing. And little does he know that it's maybe the worst decision that he ever makes, but, but he's so driven by, um, sort of what, what, what has always been handed to him as, as his life, right? Because, because he lives in a world like the rest of us where we're constantly looking at other people to tell us who we are. Anyway, it was very relatable. And so when I met with Aaron, I was super passionate about it, but it was also the unique requirement that there's a character that starts out looking a certain way, and then actually in a reverse vanilla sky kind of

trajectory ends up looking. If you, if you want to say like everybody else or whatever, whatever is acceptable in society to, to look at quote unquote. And, and therefore it required an actor like, like to be able to kind of, you know,

that you would believe would do that. But, but then at the same time it also required the actor playing it to still even though he might look differently or look stereotypically a certain way he was still going to be the same person he was still going to have the same emotional makeup and so that was just super it was it was a little bit like hitting the jackpot for me i think in terms of you know all the challenges i've been turning the movie over in my head since i saw it and i'm trying to figure out if it is more of a nightmare or more of a surreal comedy and which of the kind of what genre it kind of slides into

and you could say it could be everything but like how do you see it when you think about the movie it's a trip right i mean it's it's it's kind of a trip it's not i think it's all those things like you said i i think what's what i love about it is that it's so it can be so interpretive based on how you look at it. It's interpretive and it can be a different experience for each person depending on what that person, through what lens that person's viewing the movie. Some people might feel liberated in some way watching the movie. Other people might feel unsettled and in a certain way, so

The movie I think actually to me It can fit a wide audience and and and everybody that's seen the movie so far Sort of from all angles, whether disabled, whether abled, have said, wow, that was a really unique movie. And I think I've never seen anything like it, or I haven't, I've never been on this journey before. I didn't know that that was going to happen. Do you think this? Do you think that?

And asking questions, which is essentially what i think you want from from movies uh you want to walk away you don't always we're taught to be wanting the answers right but i actually think sometimes it's better to walk away with further questions than just have it all handed to you on a platter which is uh i guess what you can have if you want to go to netflix you know i mean you can find that. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like, sometimes we need something easy as well. But yeah, it's an interesting point. I mean, this is this is a tricky question. But I'm going to ask it because of what you said earlier about the idea of being typecast because you look like the romantic leader, you look like the asshole.

But what is your relationship to how you look? Because I couldn't help but think about that, not just in terms of a different man, but all of these parts that you've been taking on in the last 10 years. I think I've been as equally self-judgmental and self, what's the word? I think I've been judgmental and hard on myself and like everybody else. You know, I think we all sort of have things that we pick on ourselves for. I mean, at the same time, I wouldn't ever trade anything. Like I was never someone that was desperately looking to, you know, change. So I feel settled more than ever, but I had a chaotic upbringing. You know, I, I, I, I lived in three different countries before I was 12, you know, that's like very crucial years. I was always, it seemed it was always demanded of me to sort of reinvent and reshape my identity. Where are you from? What's that accent?

When did you come here? Oh, we're moving again. So it's kind of in my dna to like want to always be searching and trying to not land at one particular thing um i think as you get older i i think i think worrying about your looks to some extent is kind of useless and pointless it just becomes a little bit of a waste of time to me i mean i'm i mean like look i'm i go i try to be healthy i try to eat healthy i go to the jail i do you know i don't smoke anymore like i i try and do what we're all trying to do is right but like but i think looks is so i don't know i mean i think and again someone's going to hear this and go oh yeah here here goes the the good- looking guy that gets to,

you know, with his privileged life, like, like gets to tell me how, how, how fine he's with himself. Look, I mean, you know, that that's, that's where we're at today. Right. So I, I don't, I can only speak from my own experience. I don't know what someone else's experience is obviously. And I'm conscious of that. And I don't try to'm conscious of that and i don't try to i don't i don't want to tell people how to be or how to feel or it's not up to me all i can say is um you know i'm i'm just as much of a uh of a of a self-seeking and self-questioning person like i think like anybody else it's just people don't perceive me that way sometimes. No,

it makes sense. The adaptability and reinvention, especially at a young age, it feels like it's coming out in the work and, and in a different man, like you have this huge challenge. You're like, you're wearing prosthetics,

you're representing neurofibromatosis alongside another actor for whom it's a reality. You've got to convey this huge emotional pain. How do you act behind prosthetics? You did it in The Apprentice 2. How do you research what's being covered in the film? How do you blend all of those things together to make a performance? These two movies have very different approaches and I had very different approaches to them. So, I mean, with A Different man, for instance, like you said, there were big shoes to fill for me.

I felt I wanted to do. Um, you know, the, the, the film justice, but also, yes, if I was going to get to play a part where I was exploring this condition, I wanted to do it in the most authentic way possible and, and, and capture the, the, the best I could. Um, I was lucky to have Adam who was a real, um, lighthouse for me in this, in this sort of experience. I mean, he really shared with me aspects of his childhood growing up, um, you know, how, how he interpreted the world and how he learned to own himself. Very different from my character, Adam actually has a great sense of self and a

great ownership of who he is. Edward is a character that doesn't. So there was a lot of research that I did going down on YouTube where I found many people with disfigurement and neurofibromatosis community there, Dr. Caleb Yochai. He came to see the film. He read the script. He gave me his input as well. We talked about what is the potential of this actually happening in life? And is that something we should do or not? Or how does the community feel?

And then it's the aspect of putting on the prosthetics and walking out into the world and experiencing firsthand how people, uh, look at you, uh, or don't look at you, how their energy shifts. Um, the real world is not, they can't lie as, as well as, as, uh, actors can in front of a camera, you know, like the real world tries their best, but you still feel a shift in people's energy. And I think walking around New York with prosthetics was the closest I could ever get to maybe what Adam or other people that look different experienced with that, that look different experience.

And it was very lonely and it was isolating and it was scary. And your body changes your, your start to kind of pull more into yourself. You're looking more down. You're not trying to address people. You don't want to bring attention to yourself, but then you are. And then there's this invasion of privacy that happens as well, which I was familiar with, because if you are recognized, you do have, there is invasion of privacy anyway. And that's one thing that Adam and Aaron had communicated to me. So a lot of things went into this

that kind of informed my performance. but at the end of the day um you have to find these people in you and there is a there is a version of edward that lives within me and there's a trump that lives in me you know i mean i will make the argument however people are going to take it and spin it for their own you know uh convenience that there is a Trump in all of us, that there's an Edward in all of us. It's the degree of suppression and the degree of comfortability that we have with accepting the aspects of ourselves that we're not proud of, that we don't all show,

that we hide from other people. And actually, there was some parallels between the two films that I found when it comes to self-abandonment and sort of the degree that people go to denial their own reality. Yeah, it feels like there's like a deep, unfulfilled melancholy in both of these characters. But one of them is protecting themselves from it it and the other is kind of accepting it of course and and and before jumping to apprentice the one thing i do want to add in finality to a different man is that there while there is while there are very important things being explored here and and asked and it is it is sad and tragic it's it's also aaron shim i don't i would i would be doing a uh uh injustice to aaron schimberg as a filmmaker and as a script to not say that it's

also because so it's so well written it's also funny and it's entertaining and it's and it's entertaining, and it is an experience, and it's a journey that is much more than just sort of a tale of, you know, a fable of sorts. It really is a unique film, and I've heard from people that always enjoy it, you know? Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that you see the two characters as linked. Which which production came first um well well my first meeting with ollie on the apprentice was in 2019 and then actually i haven't i didn't hear back uh about the apprentices till 2022 i met aaron and vanessa his wife and I read A Different Man in 2022. And we did A Different Man in 2022. And Apprentice, we tried to do the fall of 22, but we didn't get to do it until last year in November of 2023. So A Different Man came first.

Is there anything you took from A Different Man and found yourself putting in the apprentice? Uh, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I think what I do take from every experience is I think a degree of, uh, a degree of staying open to whatever it comes, uh, and whatever,

you know, it rather with, without judgment, right? Without imposing my own personal feelings on what I'm about to do. You read the script first, a few times, you have your own experience with it. You know, like everybody else, I have my thoughts, whatever. And then after that, it's my job to kind of put my own sort of biases aside and really try to come at it from a neutral place of understanding and seeing what comes up and where can I find this person. And so that's the only thing I take from job to job. I didn't, they were completely very different experiences for me. Was there anything in particular about Donald Trump that you wanted to unpack or uncover for yourself by taking this on?

Well, look, I mean, for me, right, on a personal level, I've had my own experience coming to this country when I was 12 with the American dream. And I have my own love and hate relationship with the American dream and trying to understand what the American dream is and what it does to a person. While it may make them successful, what is the cost? And why can't we ever seemingly in this country ever be satisfied with what we have? Why must we always, even when we say, oh, if I get that, then I'll do this. If I meet this person, this kind of a person, and I have that kind of a marriage, then I'll be happy. Well, actually, if I make this amount of money and then I can go and visit the planet, then I'll whatever, then I never will have to do

it again. It never ends. There's always something else. We want more. We want more. We want more. What is it about America and growing up here, as I've experienced at least, that is this need to be a hero, to be a winner, to the hero complex that's deeply embedded in the American dream? That was interesting and important to me, I felt, and worth exploring when it came to the story. Because in a way, this thing, we're taking one of the most consequential people on the planet and asking simply the question, what is it really about this man that people hate so much and people love so much? Where does the obsession come from? What happened here? And I felt like that was an

important, I thought that was essential to understanding beyond the sort of stereotypes that we see. I mean, everyone's got a strong reaction to him. Why? I think there was great value in asking that question. In terms of my research of him, I was fascinated to find out that seemingly the person that I was watching in doing interviews in 1977, particularly on the Rona Barrett show, if anyone ever takes the time to watch that in its entirety since it's's on YouTube was how different this man was than what I was seeing today. The fact that he was speaking about love and marriage and family more important than money. I mean, I mean, he says that, you know, I didn't. And, and there, the idealism, there was, there was, there were certain qualities that I can't seem to find today when I look at, but they were there.

So I think you have to have a real curiosity about the human humanity and what it is to be a human being in this world. And what is growing up in America due be a human being in this world and, and what it is to, and, and what is growing up in America due to a, to a human being. And I, and I think this is what the movie is. One of my favorite things about it and the choice that I assume that you and Ali made and talked about, but I wanted to hear you talk about is that the Trump that we see at the

beginning of the film is also not in a, in a gesturing way, in a physical way, the same person that we see in our mind's the film is also not in a gesturing way, in a physical way, the same person that we see in our mind's eye now in terms of the way he moves his hands or the way he wears his hair or his posture or the way that he communicates in close quarters with people. It seems like the movie is charting this fascinating realization of his character or whatever he represents to people over time. And it feels very subtle in the movie. Is that something you guys talked about?

And if so, how did you make sure that that played through as you were going through the production of the movie? Absolutely. I mean, we talked about it extensively and obsessively. Look, I'm not going to lie to you. Like, I mean, this is by far, it was the hardest thing that I ever felt i i had thrown myself into because there are such strong feelings towards this person and and and there's been such a degree

of of uh of versions of him we have been we've been so inundated with from SNL to a gazillion impressions that everybody has of the guy. It was, it required like a real fine, meticulous, thought out approach as to, as to, as to, as to finding what are the things about him that that are recognizable and familiar that need to be there in order for you to understand who we're talking about without without you judging immediately that that that you're not recognizing the guy at all and how do we track those in a way by protecting his humanity or discovering the humanity and what the human being so that you as an audience member can have a different relationship with him in the film, a relationship that evolves in the film rather than the relationship that you have with your phone every time you get a notification about him or you watch some impression or you're watching him now. So absolutely. I, I wanted very carefully to, to, to find, um, a subtle degree of, of, um, like I said, whether, whether it's in the voice or that he spoke very specifically, uh, there was, there was mannerisms that are recognizable. And it was like, when do you do too much? When do you do too little? When do they start picking up more? It seemed to me

that the more success that he got, the more certain things started to evolve as well. And I wasn't sure from what place, but, but I think charting the evolution of what we see today had to be like, like performing a neurosurgery operation so that in every single scene you, you could, you could see the guy enough, but but still not fall into the caricature that that we all know today and the other piece of the movie that was extremely difficult was a lot of things were improvised and so i had to study and i studied extensively a million interviews and things that I seen him do just so that when we were improvising, I could actually improvise like him because I don't speak like him. He has a very specific way of speaking, breaking up thoughts, then going quickly early years, um, sort of on Oprah as, as, as he was, as he was going towards the eighties to towards the art of the deal, he was, um, he spoke

very quickly. He spoke, uh, coherently. He was very seductive in sort of his, his delivery, but he has a very specific way of speaking. And when we were doing scenes, Ollie would come up to jeremy and i and and say hey you know maybe in the scene you guys can uh you know you can you can talk about uh what are the things you like about him or uh what how do you know roy cone that was not in the script i mean i i had to know facts about roy cone and what roy cone had done prior to 1977 or whenever i met him

um that just in case they came up in the scene i could be able to riff off nowhere as trump in the moment spontaneously then and there that that that it was that part of it the documentary style of shooting that was really fucking difficult it's a really really good performance that could have been absolutely terrible so i applaud you no i i mean i appreciate it i mean it was it was exciting because right like there were times when we were doing scenes where i didn't know what jeremy was going to ask me in the scene i mean the scenes went in so many different directions sometimes you don't see it because he could have edited the movie and it could have been seven hours

um but he and i went to places together uh that informed the relationship in such ways because we had these different takes where in one take um we were extremely friendly to each other and in the next take it was much more combative and in the next take it was about whose dick is bigger and then in the next take it was that he's my father figure right so it was just a it was it was always different and then and then it allowed ollie and the editor to have sort of a lot of options to to kind of continue to build this arc you know i was very impressed it's funny that in talking with you you mentioned that you've done musicals as a kid and you mentioned maybe i might want to do a romantic comedy because one of the things i wanted to ask you is after this heavy bout of

material is there like something you want to do that would be a little bit lighter or a different kind of a challenge at this stage of your career? Well, it's tough, you know, because I grew up sort of looking up to Sean Penn and Robert De Niro and Denzel Washington and like, you know, these these like everybody's go to guy if you're like an actor guy. Right. I mean, and these guys to me just did these crazy, these unbelievably complex characters and they got to play all these different roles. And so at 42 now, I'm thinking, fuck, I'm like really in my, this is my prime age where I feel I've got enough intel on my own emotional and mental capabilities and GPS system. And physically, I'm still like able to kind of, so I kind of want to do, you know, I want to go in there. I want to keep doing challenging stuff. But at the same time, yeah, I've been nurturing projects that are action driven.

And there's another comedic thing. I have this thing like, you know, I don't know if I'll ever get going. I have this thing that Elaine May was going to direct. And she was going to be her last film and the first film since Ishtar. It's this crazy, kooky comedy. It's supposed to be with Dakota Johnson and myself, but we've been trying to find a shadow director

for Elaine May for the insurance company. So if anybody out there is hearing this and you want to fucking shadow Elaine May for her last film, Let's go do it. I mean, the birdcage is like one of my favorite fucking movies of all time. So, and,

and that's totally a comedy in, in the, in the, you know, like when Harry Met Sally and all that great stuff. So, so I, I I'm all,

I'm all over it. It's just, it's like weirdly some things come together and other things you still wait for. Elaine May is like one of my five favorite filmmakers heartbreak kids one of my favorite movies of all time so you should make that fucking movie um i'm also 42 i'm not an actor but i know exactly what you mean where it's like i still have some juice left and i know who i am it's an interesting moment in your life yeah it is and and then there's i don't know if you feel this way and

then there's like these moments where sometimes you wake up and you go wow that's an interesting question is that a midlife crisis question but it's it's it's the level of right like it's it's the level of awareness of of death and and and uh and then and then immediately loved ones and then also of meaning, I feel like, right? It's like, we're more thinking about purpose and meaning now, I think more than ever. Are you finding that? Yeah, I think it's just, it's the thing that you hear from people, which is as you get older, you get more and more comfortable with saying, I don't know, when people ask you questions. That's it. That's like a very stoic thing by the way isn't it yes i don't know or skepticism that was another thing i've been reading recently um about and that that you

could always whatever it is you could always there's always a possibility that it that it could be great or it could be terrible i wish wish you luck making your next few parts, man. You know, it could be great or it could be terrible. Sebastian, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing that they have seen? Have you seen any good movies recently? Oh, you know, for some reason,

like this movie has been coming up. The Perfect Days. Oh yeah. The vendors movie is really, uh, is one that has stuck with me. It's such an, a beautiful movie and talk about all these things we're talking about, like in terms of,

um, life and being, being in your life and living your life rather than chasing another idea of your life. Um, that one i loved um god i think uh i need to think i i mean i think i i put i i put on licorice pizza the other day even though i've seen it i i was like i went to bed watching it again and I was like, God, this movie is so great. So there's that. Those are two great, great, great

picks. Honestly, perfect. Sebastian, this was fun. Thank you. Really appreciate it. It was, yeah. I wish they were all as easy or as fun as this. Cool, man. Well, thank you. Congratulations. Both films, really amazing work. Thank you, man. Thanks to Sebastian Stan.

Thanks to Brian Curtis. Thanks to Jack Sanders. Thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on today's episode. Later this week on the show, Chris Ryan returns. We will talk about Smile 2, Box Office Sensation, Terrifier 3, and our annual horror movie extravaganza.

We'll see you then.