The Big Picture - The Evil in ‘Longlegs’ and the Serial Killer Movie Canon

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Sean is joined by Rob Mahoney to appraise just how terrifying ‘Longlegs’ is after all the buzz (1:00). Then, they run through the canon of serial killer movies, a horror subgenre that distinguishes itself from slashers (26:00). Finally, Sean is joined by ‘Longlegs’ director Osgood Perkins to discuss his career, the particular elements of ‘Longlegs’ he was most interested in exploring, how a film like this gets received by wider audiences, and more (1:02:00). To watch episodes of ‘The Big Picture,’ head to https://www.youtube.com/@RingerMovies. Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Rob Mahoney and Osgood Perkins Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name is Dave Gonzalez, and I haven't read any of the books in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. I'm Joanna Robinson, and I've read every book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. And I'm Neil Miller, and I have also read those very heavy books. Years ago, we hosted a Game of Thrones podcast called A Storm of Spoilers, and we're thrilled to head back to Westeros to cover the second season of House of the Dragon on the Trial by Content feed. We'll be using our book knowledge to dive deep into each episode and answer your lingering questions. So send us a raven every week to trialbycontent at gmail.com. Follow and subscribe to Trial by Content on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to join us on Thursdays where these two will explain to me which Targaryen is right.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about serial killers. Don't worry, everything is fine here on the show, but we have to talk about a very important new film this week. That film is Long Legs.

Long Legs, a disturbing new thriller from Osgood Perkins. Perkins, a gifted creator of genuine discomfort and images that get seared onto your brain. I talked with him about how he does it, crafting a killer with Nicolas Cage as star, the figure that his father, Anthony Perkins' work in Psycho, casts over his career and a lot more. Oz, genuinely an amazing guest, a great talker,

very smart guy, very forthcoming about his career in Hollywood. I hope you'll stick around for our conversation. But first, another serial killer, a killer of takes, Rob Mahoney, co-host of Group Chat, co-host of the Prestige TV podcast. What else are of takes, Rob Mahoney, co-host of Group Chat, co-host of the Prestige TV podcast. What else are you doing, Rob? Mostly those things, hopefully killing this podcast. Nice. We all know to understand the killer, you must become the killer. I've been diving deep into the serial killer log and I have to say it's all very cool and great and well-adjusted over

here. I reached out to you and I said, what movie do you want to talk about on the pod in the upcoming future? You put Long Legs on the list. Yeah. On the list, we should say. There were many alternative options that would have been better for my mental health than you picking Long Legs. But I saw Long Legs and I thought of you in many ways. I felt like you were the man for the job. This is a movie that has been much anticipated, much marketed. There's been a lot of stray tweets about this being the most terrifying and upsetting movie that we have seen in years. It's a really interesting movie.

It's Perkins' fourth film. It stars Micah Monroe and the aforementioned Nicolas Cage as the titular long legs. It's a story about a serial killer and the unusual manner in which his crimes are committed and the inexplicable nature of it. And an FBI agent in the 1990s, very similar to a Clarice Starling type

from Silence of the Lambs, who has an unusual relationship to these murders and has an incredible ability to work inside of this case. The movie itself is simultaneously a standard issue serial killer thriller and also a fascinating subversion slash homage to those movies. So later in this episode, we're going to talk about our serial killer movie canon, the sort of the 10 movies that best, you know, you know, represent what these movies are trying to accomplish.

But I thought, after having seen the movie, this idea makes even more sense now because the movie is so interested in the archetypes of these stories, but not necessarily fulfilling those archetypes all the way through. So I'll start with this. Was Long Legs the most upsetting, horrifying,

difficult film you've seen in years? It was very upsetting. And in addition to being, as you said, at times a serial killer movie, at times a subversion, it's just a nonstop dread machine, which often is my favorite part of other serial killer movies is just this background sense that the characters are being watched, that you're being watched, that you're doing the watching. Serial killer movies have a way of kind of like turning the camera on you and pointing the finger at you for being involved in them and

you feel very involved with long legs whether you want to be or not like you are pulled into the feeling of this movie do you like having that feeling at the movies because i've talked about that before many times that like i'm dead inside and in order to feel things i have to go to very upsetting films so that i can feel a charge and I can remember what it was like to have been nine or 13 or 18. When you last serial killed. Well, I'm not going to say that into a microphone, but I obviously love that sensation

that you're describing. And that is a feature of the movie, though that is not the movie in its entirety. But do you like that feeling of like that ominous sense of doom that pervades a movie like this? I do like that feeling. I usually stop short of really hardcore horror. And so that's why this genre kind of works for me because there's usually some procedural trappings. It's like half solving a case or in Longlegs case, trying to understand what sort of case you're solving.

Is this a supernatural occurrence? Is this just a madman or a serial killer out there on the loose? I like having that sort of remove most of the time in terms of the really, really gnarly stuff. And so this lets me have my cake and eat it too a little bit. I can enjoy the depravity of a serial killer movie and the grisliness of some of the kills. And I think what makes Long Legs so effective is it's pretty unsparing in terms of not showing you all of the violence, but hinting at it enough that your brain starts filling in the blanks and it does a lot of the work for the movie in a way. Yeah, that's the thing is that this is not really a horror movie. No.

And even though, say, for example, the Saw franchise features a serial killer, the feature of that, those movies, are the kills. They're the set piece kills where we see someone, you know, undergoing an incredibly

grisly experience. This movie, very much like Silence of the Lambs, very much like Seven, very much like some of the signature movies that we'll talk about,

is much more oriented around understanding the case of the serial killer reverse engineering crime scenes as much as anything right and you would think that that would be kind of banal and even especially with this kind of self-consciousness that it has about the movies that have come before you would think that that would not be an effective way to tell a story like this honestly because we're a culture now increasingly that wants like more and more grizzliness and so one of the things that fascinates me about this movie is that part of it seems like the driving force of the film and i don't want to spoil it yet we will get into spoilers in about 10 minutes but that also is a wrong footing the movie for the first

hour it feels like we're watching micah monroe's character the fbi agent character solving zodiac style puzzles and getting closer and closer to understanding what's happening in this case and it feels like something we've seen before but we can't help but be curious if she's going to crack the case and then the movie sort of shifts its perspective on how we were meant to feel about that solving, which I thought made the movie less scary but more profound to me. I don't know how you felt about the decision to kind of wrong foot us that way. Yeah, I think we can get into the specifics of the ending a little later, but I love the format in that way. You're never quite sure what sort of movie you're watching or what might be around every corner. I know that's a classic horror movie thing, but there's something in Long Legs where everything feels a half tick off.

Yeah. Down to Micah Monroe's performance where she's incredibly aggressively antisocial, like has a very hard time interacting with other human beings. And all the places that she's going in this investigation are these neighborhoods where everything is dead like there is no there's no people there's no cars there's just this eerie sort of silence and in between all that you get these flashes of this weird vague disturbing kind of imagery and that's like a lot of that is looped into what micah's character is like sensing in the movie in this this feeling that if she doesn't have a kind of psychic perception, she at least has an intuition that maybe other detectives don't like, she clearly has something going on. That's helping her solve this case.

And you're getting that feet, like the hair standing on the back of your neck, feeling watching her go through it because of the way it's all presented. So one of the things that I think is such an amazing success of this movie is it takes something that Oz Perkins is really good at, which is just very simple but beautiful and symmetrical composition in a frame. There are a lot of really clearly defined, sustained images in the movie that feel like not a painting per se, but like something that draws you in closer and closer the way that abstract art might draw you closer and closer. In his previous movies, that felt a little overmanaged and a little bit too prescribed. In this movie, because of the character that we're following in Micah

Monroe, we feel like her mind is almost working in that way as we're seeing everything from her perspective when she's sitting at her desk and looking at the symbology or when she's at a crime scene and she's analyzing a room, which is an empty room with furniture opposite each other that feels matched, and something feels off and there's a tension in the sound design, but it's like, is what's off in her mind or is what's off in this room? Is what's off in this town or is this just her imagination or a flashback of some kind to a moment? It's a really perfect execution of something that Perkins was already doing well,

but he found a way to tell a story that suited that style so well so even though the movie as it goes along I think starts to not just like strain credulity of the logic of the story but

becomes like kind of bewildering at times where you're trying to really understand what is happening it works because we've been we've been set into a world where we don't

actually know what is happening you know it's hard to know what is the reality of the story. And so I was just kind of like, it's hard to know, like, how do you rate a movie like Long Legs? Well, I'm like, it fucked me up for a lot of what I was watching.

So that's definitely what it was going for. And then after I talked to Perkins, as is often the case on this show, understanding his intentionality a lot more and understanding what he was thinking about when he was making the movie deepens the movie for me. I'm reluctant to kind of share too much of what he said.

I want people to hear it for themselves. But, you know, without spoiling the movie, did you feel like it, like, sustained that feeling that we're describing and then followed through on it by finishing the kind of narrative aspects of it? It did for me. And I think some of that will depend on how you deal with different kinds of mysteries. If you're someone who needs every loop closed for you, Long Legs might not be a very satisfying experience. But I say that in a way that almost feeds into the Long Legs hype

machine. You talked about all the reviews, all the response. I think some of the reason you're getting that is because it's a very hard movie to put your finger on and a very hard movie to talk about, not just in a spoiler-free way, but in any sort of way. And because of that, it sticks with you.

Like, this movie is going to hang over you for a while in a way that might be frustrating from a certain kind of puzzle-boxy perspective if you're that kind of thinker. But if you're just there for the tension and the vibe

and trying to understand this movie on its own terms, I think it's going to hang with you in a really good way, if also one that may give you nightmares for years. Yeah. So, I mean, it literally did. And I've said that on the show before. And I want to explain specifically what I mean by that, maybe when we start spoiling a little bit.

But one of your most memorable appearances on the show was the Nicolas Cage Hall of Fame. Nick Cage, a favorite of yours, a favorite of mine, of course. I mentioned to Oz that I feel like he's on his eighth comeback now. It's like once again after Dream Scenario and a couple of other movies,

people are like, oh, Nicolas Cage is back for another round of, we forgot how great he is despite three to seven VOD movies that no one saw in between his great masterpieces. This performance I find really interesting. I've seen, it's been very divisive.

Some people think that the movie really works despite him. Some people think it really works in part because of what he's doing in the movie. What did you think of him

in the part in general and do you feel like it is hall worthy? Do we have to, you know, reanalyze our picks? Well, we need to reanalyze our picks

because we left pig out sorry by we i mean you and van we also left out national treasure i'm willing to cut anything to get pig in there and i do think this is my trouble with with the nicholas cage experience as a as a cageologist it always works for me even even when he's not in the right movie, it kind of works for me. And so I'm almost surprised to hear that this one has been divisive because I think it's very effective.

I think there's no way that any still or trailer could have done it justice. So I'm glad the marketing has been as such very careful kind of concealing what he's doing. It's a huge performance as it always is. But I think Longlegs is very smart about how much it shows to you and when. And he's really, really going for it

to the point that I would say he's unrecognizable even by Cage standards. It's kind of fascinating when we first see him and then this sort of, I don't know if it's an evolution. It's really more of a de-evolution that his character goes over from the 70s to the 90s. But that first moment when we see him in the film, this opening sequence, which is so effective and so perfectly sets the tone because it is so confounding, is you see a younger version of this damaged person and you only see him from a particular angle. He's

shot so his eyes are not revealed. And it's a very clever choice because it confuses us in terms of like, when are we? Not just where are we, but what time period, what is the milieu that we're supposed to be

understanding that we're in? And the movie like doesn't go out of its way to explain when we're flashing back or not. It doesn't try to even show like, well, this is the character that I was talking about and they're going to show up 20 years later.

It's got a very kind of elliptical sense of time. I think it's very effective. And a timelessness in the dress and the costuming and the staging where you're never quite sure if that flashback was a flashback or if that's just a cutaway to a victim now. It's really hard to know.

Yeah, and the only way that you can really know is when we start seeing Longlegs' face, it's really hard to know. Yeah, and the only way that you can really know is when we start seeing Longlegs' face. That's really the giveaway for when we're sort of understanding the time periods and, you know, what Micah Monroe's character, what she's actually interrogating and investigating. I thought Cage was really good in this,

and I only think that now because of something that Perkins said to me. And I'll just use that as an entryway into a spoiler discussion. Okay. So if you don't want to have long legs spoiled for you, thank you for coming along for the ride so far. I'd encourage you to check this out. It's a very cool movie from a very interesting filmmaker. And if you don't want to hear anything, turn the pot spoiler warning okay so here's the thing about long legs this is a movie as perkins described to me about how our interest in serial killer mythology is pathetic and and we should never be glorifying these figures and that his intention was to make long Legs a kind of weird, pathetic guy who was super into glam

rock and got interested in Satan. And as one does. As one does. Well, I won't say I'm into all of those things, but some of those things are interesting to me. And I hadn't quite, I understood what he was doing by having Cage do this kind of high-pitched man who's getting plastic surgery and attempting to be kind of beautiful by being ugly and you know listening to an anti-god and trying to follow through on his vision but also that there's like a silliness a stupidness and a grossness to creating this like mythology around a figure like that and it feels like Cage very much understood that that they were on the same page about that because there is a real silliness to his performance this like mythology around a figure like that. And it feels like Cage very much understood that, that they were on the same page

about that because there is a real silliness to his performance, you know? Oh, definitely. And even though the movie in the first 40 minutes doesn't really give you any of that silliness,

once it is revealed with his dramatic hand gestures and his very Mark Bolan inflected physicality, you realize that like the movie thinks he sucks, you know, like these guys are awful and our culture of true crime and venerating David

Fincher movies and all these things that I participate in and that we're going to talk about as we get into the thing is a bit silly and that there's actually something much deeper going on, which is that this is really a movie about families and about parenthood and about what your parents give you or don't give you, what they protect you from and what they don't protect you from. And as the movie is sort of revealing

who is ultimately responsible for these murders, because the circumstances of the murders are quite curious where we know that Longlegs is a participant in the murders, but he's not actually committing any of the crimes.

He's just kind of insinuating an idea. And that idea is then encouraging the men in those homes to kill their families. It's a very clever setup, an idea and that idea is then encouraging the men in those homes to kill their families it's a very clever setup an idea that like isn't really neatly resolved because of like a monroe's character's relationship to the story and ultimately her mother's relationship to the story and so by the time you get to the end of the movie and i said this to oz i was like long legs is kind of incidental in the movie long legs he's not really the point of the movie at all the point of the movie is something much deeper and

much more compelling you can say the same thing about silence of the lambs you know that clarice's journey is not just about hannibal lecter sure but that hannibal lecter overtook that film and its entire world because of the profundity of the performance and because of the kind of all-knowing power of hannibal and this movie dispenses with its serial killer. Actually, he dispenses with himself. He does in this dramatic and kind of funny way. That's very gross. Yeah. A kind of funny way that I don't think I'll ever forget.

Like that's that scene of cage bashing his head against the table until his nose basically caves in. Look there. This is not a perfect movie. And I think if you plotted it out, I'm sure you could find little ways in which it doesn't quite add up or the mechanics don't quite work. It requires some imagination. It requires some connecting of dots on your own. But there are these thrillers that come along that just worm their way into your subconscious.

I think about Jordan Peele's Us in this way where it's not perfect, but I think about the doubles and the golden scissors and some of the iconography of that movie. It just kind of constantly comes up for me. That's what I feel like Longlegs is going to be. And I feel like it's going to be that way because of that portrayal, because it is so wimpy. And because Longlegs himself is not physically intimidating, even from the first time he shows up up i think the only way he would be physically intimidating is as an adult to a child but once lee's mom shows up this is not a particularly scary person in a way that he's wielding a knife he's just kind of scary in a way that your brain is trying to resolve like something is unsettling here and i can't quite tell you what it is and the fact that he is so weaselly and slimy and

not like a physical threat i think feeds into that yeah he's he's ultimately a creep and a creep with some really sinister undertones and ideas but a creep and i really like what you said about how it kind of doesn't matter whether you feel like it wraps up as tightly and neatly as you want it to. We should say, making sense, very overrated. Well, and that's what I was going to say. Even in the great thrillers and horror serial killer movies that wrap up well, they don't always make sense. Us is a really good example of a movie that,

that's one of the first movies that I feel like Amanda and I on this show really dug into deeply because we knew it was a big event, Peel, that's one of the first movies that I feel like Amanda and I on this show really dug into deeply because we knew it was a big event, Peele's, you know, follow-up to Get Out and we saw it twice and we kind of talked through, like, what does this movie mean

and how do the mechanics of the doubling work and ultimately, like, just find podcast fodder, but, like, it doesn't really matter because of what you're talking about where, like,

there are images that are seared into your mind. There are ideas that kind of seep into the way that you think about genre storytelling or what they mean to just you as a person or society. Peele and Perkins are friends, no surprise. And Perkins has a very similar skill set.

Even Psycho, which stars Perkins' dad, you know, has like a legit terrible ending where like a psychiatrist explains to the police officer and the victim's sister that this is a man with a schizophrenic multiple personality disorder. And it's like, it's fucking terrible. It doesn't matter.

Like there's so much good, so much beauty and so much science and art in Psycho that it is one of these very few movies that has like a seven decade shelf life and doesn't expire and still matters to the culture, even though it resolves in such like a flimsy way. I don't think Long Life is Psycho and I'm not trying to say that either, but I like what you put your finger on there, which is sort of like, I think people initially will see this movie after all the pre-release hype and they'll be like, was that good? Like, I'm not sure if that was good,

but as I said, I mean, as I said, I would circle back to this. About a week or so after seeing the movie, my daughter woke up in the middle of the night. Happens from time to time. She's crying. She's upset. She wanted to be soothed.

Her mom goes in to soothe her. Got her back down fine. She comes back in. Her mom falls back to sleep. And I can't get back to sleep. And I'm laying in bed and I'm trying to fall asleep. And I could feel, you know, that liminal space between we're locked in and we're sleeping and we're trying really hard, but we can't. And you get that, the fluttering eyes and the body shake and that very curious position that you're in it's the sleep version of being between it's so over and we're so back yes it's between the first

and the second apron is we're really where we are here um and i'm in this space and with my eyes closed i see long legs's face and this never happens to me i never dream i i never have nightmares i'm not afraid of anything really yeah and i can see cage at that first reveal of his face and even though i know that it's ridiculous i'm very very scared and yes and terribly like awoke awoken like a fright and that's how i know the movie works you know what i mean like i don't know if that's how I know the movie worked. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know if that's like a five-star classic, but it means that they accomplished something even in doing something that is like homage and absurd and meant to be a little bit jokey and flimsy.

It's still, because of that ominous dread that you were describing, the movie is ultimately very, very successful for me. Do you have nightmares, Rob? I do. I haven't yet about Long Legs, but I wouldn't put it past me. Do you have nightmares, Rob? I do. I haven't yet about long legs, but I wouldn't put it past me. And not just him too,

but the image of the sort of black cloaked figure with the eyes poking through. That is so fucked up. That image is so fucked up. I think that's going to get me at some point. And honestly too, the other thing that this movie does so well in the dread and some of the imagery that sticks with me

is the cold detachment of a lot of just the character's facial expressions in particular alicia witt as lee's mom holy fuck didn't know she had this in her i did not know she had this in her i've enjoyed her in many things nothing quite like this and she's the key so much to obviously how you feel watching this movie is important but what you're thinking about coming away from this movie comes a lot from her character and that idea that you mentioned like what parents are willing to do for their children and the sort of suffering that can hide inside the best intentions i think she does a phenomenal job what this does well whether it's trying to be an actual serial killer movie or not is I feel like the best serial killer movies

Always you walk away from them Not quite knowing how to feel about humanity as a project just like feeling a little bit more suspect of everyone around you and her character unlocks that part of it where it's like There's a part of this in in a lot of us There's a part of that defensiveness and protectiveness and that instinct To herd your family together no matter what it does to anybody else. And what you're willing to do

to lock that part of you away, whether it requires literal Satan or not, is something worth exploring. It's really powerfully conveyed. Like that part of it actually worked very well on me. And sometimes a theme like that can feel really heavy handed.

And especially in this kind of like A24 era of elevated horror and all that stuff that we've talked about over the years. This is not that. Like it is in a way, but the movie is not insisting

on that idea. It is like, it is confronting you with it. Yes. It doesn't feel like the real killer is generational trauma. Right. There's more going on

and it's more deftly handled and more involved than that. The other thing about this movie too is that it doesn't feel like the real killer is generational trauma. There's more going on and it's more deftly handled and more involved than that. The other thing about this movie too is that it doesn't feel like, it feels like an independent movie. It's Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt. You know, it's not Denzel and Meryl Streep. It's not even like John David Washington and, you know, Florence Pugh. Like it's not. I mean, I would watch the hell out of that if anyone's offering to make it. And maybe we should make that movie. But it's not... I mean, I would watch the hell out of that if anyone's offering to make it. and maybe we should

make that movie. But it's not hip. You know what I mean? Like, that's why I think the marketing campaign and the pre-release hype is kind of fascinating because it's just like a...

It's a weird indie that has somehow found its way into the cool stream of movie podcasters talking about whether or not something, an idea works in a movie.

But it's the kind of movie that, like, if things or not something an idea works in a movie but it's the kind of movie that like if things broke a little bit left instead of right it would just be a cr classic on vod right and it isn't that in a fascinating way and so i think in a way that has me kind of like even more interested in it i'm rooting for it more and more interested about kind of like what place it takes in the culture as well i don't know if that resonates for you yeah it has to be that perfect constellation of stuff. And I think that kind of brings us back to the idea of whether Longlegs visually and audibly works or not,

like the character Longlegs. It's now become part of the marketing that they attached a microphone to Micah Monroe to measure her heartbeat when she first saw Nick Cage in costume, which is genius level shit. And also very harrowing. And I challenge anyone who goes to see this movie not to feel some version of that

during that scene in particular, when Lee is walking into the interrogation room. Classic serial killer setup. It takes twists and turns you won't expect, but just the visual of seeing him off the bat works. And there's so many things in this movie that just work in that way. It may not all be to your sensibility it may not all be to your philosophy of how you want to approach movies in the first place i just don't see how you could

come up come out of long legs without something to hold on to or something that's kind of grabbing hold of you i i think that's really more than you can ask for from a movie. Right? It holds on to you and you hold on to it is a lot these days. So I'm grateful for it. I recommend it. I think it's very good. Did Gru not hold on to you? Did you not come out of Despicable Me with real food for thought? I mean, it held on to my wallet and probably will continue to do so as I raise a child in this world and the Minions Illumination franchise grows.

Serial killer movies. How was your experience researching these films? Just great. Just lovely. I had a great time. What did you do? How did you approach it? Did you just rewatch the classics? Did you look at stuff you'd never seen before? How'd you think about it? I was mostly trying to watch things I hadn't seen before while also making time for some of the zanier half-genre entries, just as a change of pace and a palate cleanser. There's a lot of weird, kind of funny serial killer stuff out there.

And let me tell you, watching Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer and Angst back-to-back is not how I would advise anyone spends their time. And so afterwards, yeah, let's throw on virtuosity and have some fun with it. That's the thing is it's pretty, it's a pliable subgenre because you can shift tone.

Like you can play something very severe like angst or you can play something satirically comic like American Psycho or you can play something just straight up comic like virtuosity, which is maybe not trying to be as funny as it actually is,

but it's pretty damn funny. It's great, though. I did something similar. I looked at a couple things I hadn't seen in a while and a couple things I'd never seen before. You know, not a ton of discoveries. This is kind of a pet project for me, movies like this, and it's a pet project for unsurprisingly compositionally-minded obsessives,

which is what filmmakers are and, frankly, what a lot of serial killers are. There's a reason this lends itself so well perspective wise as a storytelling device. It also has roots in like classic auteur theory,

you know, Psycho and Peeping Tom by Michael Powell and M, you know, the Fritz Lang movie. Like those movies being such critical

entry points in the thriller canon has been so inspirational and so influential on so many filmmakers and you can feel people making their M, you know,

making their Psycho. In Maxine, there's like not one, not two, but like five over references to Psycho. And you're told about it, which is important.

Yeah. So, it's hard to know how to do this. Like, I think we're going to have to pick and choose different archetypes

so that we don't get overloaded. I want to give you at least one idiosyncratic pick here that you're like, I didn't know I loved this or I've always loved this even though it's not.

And I'll do the same. That's a lot of, that's very gracious of you. I appreciate you. Thank you. I'm a, I'm, I'm nothing if not gracious on this pot,

as all listeners know. Um, I do think that that tree, that, that trio plus the night of the hunter. Yeah. Um, the Charles Lawton movie.

So M night of the hunter, psycho and peeping Tom feel like the building blocks of these kinds of movies. They're each about different kinds of killers who have different kinds of victims and what they look for and what their psychology is and the way that the stories are framed and told. All four of those movies happen to be like some of the most gorgeously constructed movies.

Charles Lawton, of course, only made one movie. It's this great movie. If you haven't seen it, Robert Mitchum plays a kind of preacher, false preacher, who is a child murderer and is simultaneously incredibly entrancing and terrifying. In M, of course, Peter Lorre plays a serial killer in Germany. Psycho is Psycho and Peeping Tom is this I wanted to mention Peeping Tom because there's a documentary

coming out that I'll recommend to you and everybody else who's listening called Made in England the films of Powell and Pressburger that is narrated

by Martin Scorsese it comes out in a couple of weeks and it's my favorite kind of movie documentary where it's just like someone super smart just walks you through

the filmmaker's filmography and so through a series of clips and personal experience it's just Scorsese being like and here's what you know Powell and Pressburger's Canterbury Tales means and here's you know it's just crack for movie documentary nerds

but Peeping Tom is this really interesting artifact it's only Powell Pressburger didn't participate in that movie it's made in 1960 well after their glory days making archers films in England and it was publicly decried

derided critically reviled thought to be a disgusting portrait of a vile person and it is

it is those things it is it is those things but in a way like what why have art if you can't push the boundaries

of the way that it is told in 1960 obviously the same year that Psycho was released, it was revolutionary and discomforting. But it's a great movie. And those four movies, I feel like, are really important in the conversation. And then from there, I think we have a lot of flexibility. I have broken this into four categories. I don't know if you feel like I've missed a category or there's something critical here that isn't being discussed. I think these are fairly broken up. I guess my first question is, do we think those four building block icon picks are those absolute locks?

Well, we can talk about it. I'd love to negotiate a Hall of Fame, a Canon on this podcast. Yeah. It's going to be tough. It's tough to omit any of them, to be honest with you.

And yet, I find myself wanting to consolidate to make room for other things, potentially. Yeah, you got to make space for virtuosity. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's just call those the icons at the outset. The next set would be the new Hollywood killers. This is roughly 1969 through 1980, 1981. Yep.

Now, I don't really think that serial killer movies are slasher movies. This is, yeah, a dilemma. Should we draw some lines around this stuff? Is that helpful? Can we even do that? Yeah. Michael Myers is a serial killer.

Yes. There's no question about it. But Halloween is not a serial killer movie from my perspective no do you agree with that i agree with that and and i i find myself in similar exercises with killing spree movies or home invasion movies or like is is jalo a serial killer friendly genre or is that its own thing there's there's a lot of overlap but I'm not quite sure. It's a great question. I didn't list any

Dario Argento movies though you could very easily put Deep Red. Like Deep Red is a serial killer movie without question. That's the obvious pick for sure. But I'm not putting it here.

Maybe that's wrong. But you're right that this kind of sub-genre and sub-categorization confuses it because I think the 90s which is the next kind of or the last era and sub-categorization confuses it because I think the 90s, which is the next kind of, or the last era,

but the sort of the next era, the sort of Reagan wave of films that were sort of using like social moments to communicate through serial killers. And then the 90s wave that codified these movies

as like commercial enterprises, like vehicles for great filmmakers to draw in audiences which is very unusual given where like how Peeping Tom was received but

the slashers and the giallos are they're like playthings for movie dorks you know and Seven is a movie that everybody goes to see

on Friday night and there is a difference and so maybe that's I'm putting too fine a point on it but i feel like halloween or you know abel ferrara's killer or you know all the jamie lee curtis stuff that comes and in the aftermath of halloween and then that wave in the 80s of like pure exploitation serial killer you know everything from friday the 13th to you know butcher baker nightmare maker you know, everything from Friday the 13th to, you know, Butcher Baker, Nightmare Maker, you know what I mean?

Like, all that shit, which I love. Yeah. And we'll do an episode about at some point in the next five years that's just like, here are the 80s slashers that nobody talks about that we love. But I feel like they all are disqualified. I'm game for that.

Would you include a movie like Dirty Harry? I mean, he's investigating a serial killer. Literally inspired by the Zodiac. I think it's fair. It's, it's maybe like its focus is a little bit off where you would want to be a quote unquote serial killer movie,

but it's definitely about a serial killer. And I think maybe more so in the spirit of what we're talking about than Halloween is. Yes, I agree. Let's flag Dirty Harry. Yeah. I've also put down Clute, Alan Pakula's incredible film about a prostitute who's being pursued by a killer and the man who's trying to protect her. R.I.P. Donald Sutherland, by the way, one of his best performances.

This feels like a huge influence on Demi and Fincher and the 90s guys. I feel like they were watching this movie and Charles Schiaffi, the heavy in that movie, is giving a profoundly uncomfortable performance and seems not quite long legs evil, but pretty evil. I have a real fondness for that movie, but I don't know if it should be considered.

How are you feeling about this era? So this is where it gets complicated and part of the reason why I asked about those icons up front, because I think we should be weighting heavy 80s, 90s. That is the golden era of the genre in a lot of ways and so we can either pick enough of the founding father origin influences or do we want to thread some of the

influences through for example the 70s even when it's not as prominent like clute is probably more influential than it is popular if that makes sense definitely like it's it's not as broad as seven or silence of the Lambs, which I think both of those probably have to be locks for this sort of canon. And so for the sake of cutting somewhere, I feel like this is the natural place to trim up a little bit, unfortunately.

Not necessarily not including Clute, but that maybe there's only one inclusion from this period or something like that. What if we did something like this? Okay. What if we said, we acknowledge the greatness of The Night of the Hunter

and Peeping Tom, but we only choose M and Psycho as representative of their eras? And then in the new Hollywood, as a nod to the slasher era to come, we include Black Christmas or Halloween, these two kind of like watershed moments in modern horror, and Clute.

And then we have four, and then we have six spots for 80s and 90s. Well, the good news is they haven't made a good one of these movies aside from Long Legs in quite a long time. It's so true. I was going to ask you about that. My theory on that is just that true crime

has become so pervasive in our culture in podcasting and in documentary that we've like lost our ability to make a scary thriller about these kinds of characters. There, there have been some in recent years. Um, I made an exhaustive list on Letterboxd as is my way, uh, which I don't think I shared with you and probably should have, but I mean, you did share your outline, which is just scrawled with bloody sigils everywhere, which I appreciate. That's incredibly rude.

What is the most recent one? I mean, one thing that is happening right now is we are getting some filmmakers who were not able to tell stories like this. Like Stranger by the Lake is a movie that strikes me as like the Alain Garaud film about a gay serial killer that like is told from a different perspective than a movie you would have gotten.

It's very different from Cruising, for example, which we'll talk about shortly. There's a lot of queer undertones through a lot of these movies, but it's usually played in a way that's either insulting the killer to coax them out or it's seen as like a societal perversion. And so I think there's a lot of room within those spaces,

whether as you're saying, different kinds of filmmakers and voices making those movies in the first place, or just the way those stories are cracked and told, that could be really interesting. This is why it's such a bummer that there aren't that many of these sorts of serial killer stories anymore. I think a lot of it is, as you're saying, the true crime boom has cannibalized some of that market, if you'll pardon the pun. I think some of it is horror. There's like more slashers, more exorcisms, more monsters. And the other part of it is probably that making a really, really good one of these often means paying Denzel or Brad Pitt or like a big name actor to either be or preferably both the detective and the killer. And so maybe it's just cheaper to crank out a low

to mid-budget horror movie instead of that it's a great point i mean the last one that made i would say a profound impact is the girl with the dragon tattoo yes um which does what you're describing it cast james bond as the detective figure investigating the crime and falling into the world of the killer you know there there have been a handful of horror movies i feel like the black phone is a pretty good example of like that's not really a slasher it kind of feels like a pg-13 movie a lot of the time even though it's about a child abductor um and never even though it is a blumhouse movie and made by scott derrickson who made insidious like it is not it is a serial killer movie and it isn't.

You know what I mean? Like, it's not really about the kills, for lack of a better phrase. And that's probably the noisiest one that we've had in the last few years.

You know, I see you gesturing at the little things without saying the little things. The day and date, Denzel, Jared Leto. Jared Leto,

your favorite actor. Oh my God. Jared Leto is, he's certainly in that movie. He's in that movie. I could really do without it. There's a very upsetting one. I don't know if you've seen

the Lars von Trier film, The House that Jack Built. I have not. Starring Matt Dillon. That's very kind of classically upsetting. But I think you're right that more or less

in the last 20 years, 15, 20 years, there hasn't been one. So we have to focus then on the Reagan monsters and the 90s cruel wave these are like the two times where these movies really rise to the fore so here are the movies i wrote for the 80s i don't know if you have any additional inclusions you want to note cruising of course

friedkin's portrait of yeah you know chelsea in new york and the the uh bdsm sex scene um in the gay community at that time, and then a serial killer who's kind of making his way through that scene. A ringer staple. I would not have guessed that, but it just is. A beloved classic here at our very normal company. Yep. Manhunter, Michael Mann's first crack at the Hannibal Lecter world,

but that is really more told through the Red Dragon story. Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, you mentioned, which is a movie that is little seen, but hugely influential. And if you have seen it, you know that it I would say significantly more so than a movie like Long Legs Gets Under Your Skin.

Yes. In which Michael Rooker plays a person compelled to kill and the way that we see him go through the experiences of murdering and covering up and almost like I haven't seen this movie in a while but I feel like he's almost like trying to quit you know he's trying to like beat the beat the bug beat the machine somehow and he can't he's just a guy out there in this crazy world trying to maybe fall in love and he also may or may not have killed his mom. It's very normal stuff.

But if we're trying to capture archetypes, I do think this is one that could be useful to us. The version of the serial killer movie where you spend most, if not all of the time with the killer. Very different experience

than watching something like Zodiac. Yeah, you mentioned Gerard Cargill's angst as well. Jesus Christ. Which is very, very similar to Henry in that way, where you're spending the entirety of the 80-minute runtime almost like with the camera on top of the face of the killer. I mean, it is so awkwardly and purposefully awkwardly shot that you're meant to be unnerved by every angle and every heart palpitation. That movie opens, he gets out of prison, he goes to a coffee shop, he's having breakfast,

and there's an extended scene of him just eating a sausage while leering at these two girls at the counter that is one of the most upsetting things I've ever seen. It's literally just that. It's a fucked up classic. When Zach Kreger was on the show to talk about Barbarian, he noted that as one of the key movies that he thought about, particularly for that kind of sequence in the third act

where we see from the perspective of the older man who plays a big part in that story. I don't want to spoil it for people, but the way that that sequence is shot is very inspired by Angst. Angst and Henry are tough movies and hard to watch, and yet whenever you talk about serial killer movies, you kind of have to talk about them. And then I added two like pure Hollywood,

I don't know, like go-tos, like easy movies to watch about detectives trying to find a serial killer. The first is Tightrope, which is not the first, but one of a handful of Clint Eastwood movies in which he plays a cop. This one is very sexually charged.

I don't know if you had a chance to watch this. I haven't seen this one, but sexually charged Clint eastwood is not the flavor i'm accustomed to um in the film he explains uh how um erections work to his uh pre-teen daughter so not not an ideal scene honestly uh what you want that one wasn't great but pretty good movie but also quite lurid in that 80s way where you know a lot of strippers are being killed and, you know, but they have to take their clothes off before they, you know, like that kind of thing. Clearly very inspired by what had been happening in Slashers and bringing like Dirty Harry to a Slash. Right. starring Al Pacino, that I think that those two movies are hugely influential

on what the 90s look like. I don't know if they're good, though. Like, does it matter? Does the canon have to be good is a fair question. I think it needs to have a certain level of quality and staying power and influence,

and it's better if they're good. But maybe it's not totally off the table that a movie could be included, even if it's not the best. Well, here's the thing. I don't think we need to do Angst, because I think what you can do is you can do Black Christmas

as a movie about a serial killer, because that was not a movie that was riffing on any previous iconography. It was like Bob Clark's idea about that POV shot, you know, inspired by Peeping Tom, but setting it in a totally different world and then creating the archetype

of like the sorority killer as a representation of all slashers. Yes. So you've got Clute and Black Christmas and then in the 80s, you have to say, what do we want to represent these kinds of movies?

Is it Manhunter and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer as two sides of the coin? The cop who's obsessed and then a movie shot through the eyes of the killer? Like, is that enough? And also, do we want or need Manhunter if we know Silence of the Lambs is coming?

Very different movies, but there's a lot of overlap there. And frankly, I love Red Dragon. I think Red Dragon is really good and there's no way it makes this list because Manhunter has a case and overlap there. And frankly, like, I mean, I, I love red dragon. I think red dragon is really good and there's no way it makes this list because man hunter has a case and is better. I would put, I'm tempted to put man hunter in, but I'm feeling the crunch to come.

And I mean, we're going to have to have a conversation about like how many Fincher things make this list. And that's where the girl, the dragon tattoo comes into the conversation as maybe the latest, best version of this genre. And I don't think it can make it. I don't think so either.

My suggestion is we definitely put in Henry because Henry feels like a signature in this world. And also maybe it'll probably be the least seen of the movies that we're going through. Let's talk about that 90s wave. These are the films I wrote down just off the top of my head. Silence of the Lambs. Basic Instincts,

which people forget is effectively a serial killer movie. Yeah. Natural Born Killers. Funny Games. Michael Haneke's original, not the American remake.

Seven. The seven shit photocopy California with a K this movie. I have not seen, did not know existed. I kind of can't wait to watch it. It's honestly so fun, but it's terrible, but it's so fun.

It's about an author and an artist who are attempting to go on like a journey across the country to discover like the real America and they encounter murderous Brad Pitt and his girlfriend Juliette Lewis. This is like the same year roughly as Natural Born Killers. Wow.

Yeah. Very strange movie. Kind of effective. Dominic Senna directed it. Guy who made Gone in 60 Seconds and was part of like the that director's crew that included

like a lot of former music video directors like David Fincher he's kind of from that wave of filmmakers movie has a ton of style terrible script Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure

which just came up on this show because Adam Neiman pointed out that Chime this new Kurosawa film is one of the best things of 2024

and this is a movie that I think has been really like discovered in the last 10 years. It was issued by the criterion collection. Definitely. Anybody who wasn't really felt closely following Japanese cinema or Asian

cinema, um, really has a leg on that now. Um, and then audition, which I don't even know if audition qualifies as, as a serial killer movie, the Takashi Miike movie,

but that's a movie that when I was 18 or 19, um, qualifies as a serial killer movie, the Takashi Miike movie. But that's a movie that when I was 18 or 19, people were like, yo, you gotta fucking see this. Like the video store nerds and were like compelling you because of its outrageousness and its violence and its sense of absurdity.

I don't, you know, how we choose in the 90s is hard. Silence of the Lambs and Seven to me are locks. I think they have to be. I mean, Silence of the Lambs is just the best pure serial killer movie ever made. Seven is probably the most influential movie of all of these beyond that

in terms of what the modern version of these films look like. They've got to be there. Beyond there, yeah, I'm tempted to rule out audition on genre. I also think Basic Instinct might be too much erotic thriller, not enough serial killer.

I'm drawn towards, if we're going to include other movies of this era, natural born killers as our stand-in for the sort of murder spree version of this story. I wouldn't say it's necessarily for me, Natural Born Killers. It's a lot. It's so flawed. It's incredibly flawed.

It is an electrifying document. Yes. Like, it's Stone, I think, in his most interesting period by far. I feel like he's losing his grip on what he's trying to do, like, often in the movie, and in a way that is entertaining. And that's a movie that watching it on cable as a kid definitely opened my mind up

to what movies could be because of him changing film stocks and color. And, you know, when he starts showing us like the Rodney Dangerfield character as if he were in like a bad sitcom, that those creative decisions

and all the Robert Downey Jr. Like, you know. He is super super funny like as the weird aussie host of american psychopaths or whatever that show is called and that sense of satire but also like honestly i've always wanted to just see the quentin tarantino version of natural born killers that stone like just didn't make you know they rewrote and kind of ripped apart and kind of missed the point of what the original screenplay was obviously i'm quite biased towards tarantino when it comes to these things but i've heard him talk about that so many times now it's hard for me to like fully get on board with that movie so but you're right though that there was this wave of movies about people

traveling across the country and killing people yes and again another one where we spend time with the killers for the most part it's it very broad in its way, like obviously loud editing style, loud composition style. I would say you watched it in maybe the optimal form, which is on TV. Like it's a very channel surfy kind of experience. Yeah. It might be to the messaging. Look, far be it for me to question Oliver Stone. I'm trying to get his very delicate messaging in this movie right.

I think he might be saying that the glorification of violence is bad. I think there's a part of him too that is like, we're all murderers. Like we've all murdered our culture, you know, because of our craven desires. There's definitely a part of like, you too are watching American Psychopaths at home hosted by Ozzy Robert Downey Jr. and you're gross. Yeah. But I just think that movie is like all thumbs.

And you know, sometimes you need your thumbs to play video games, but it's just so inelegant. Yes. Inelegant is a good word. Very elegant though. And I would make a strong push

for this movie even if it needs to be my sort of fringe case. I think funny games might need to be in there. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, are they serial killers? Like, is this something that we feel like

this duo who stumble into this suburban family's home and torture them and eventually do worse? Well, spoiler alert for funny games. If you've not seen this movie and are delicate about what the ending of it might be, just jump forward like 30 seconds.

I think the fact that we see this just genuinely one of the most unsettling and upsetting movies play out with the torture of this family and their own vacation home. And then at the end of it, the two guys who are just the perfect serial killers and that they're only fucking punks with gloves on,

that's their only real attribute. They get on a boat and they go across the lake and they start the same routine with a new family. That's their only real attribute. They get on a boat and they go across the lake and they start the same routine with a new family. That's what makes me feel, okay, we're in serial killer territory at this point. Okay, so there's another movie.

Like, this is kind of a trilogy in a strange way. So Funny Games, Natural Born Killers, and American Psycho kind of operate in this triangulated fashion where they're simultaneously satires

and also very upsetting. Right. And they're simultaneously satires and also very upsetting right and they're they're kind of like you know elbowing the audience in the in the rib cage the entire time they're like you're fucking gross aren't you you're sick like consumption and desire and all of these ideas that you're interested in they make you like a little animal oh you're a man you want to fuck a woman that's's gross. You want to kill somebody. You're disgusting. And equating these ideas, smashing them together,

contradicting them. But they represent something very 90s. You know, like they are sort of like the Bex O'Dalay of serial killer movies where you're like, okay, so they pulled this from here and this from here. And I love that about them.

And I'm totally a product of that, of that generation, of that era. And to be confronted with that stuff as a teenager was very influential on me And I love that about them, and I'm totally a product of that generation, of that era. And to be confronted with that stuff as a teenager was very influential on me and the stuff that I like. I don't really know what the best version of those three things is. Can you make a serial killer movie without putting American Psycho the movie in? I feel like you kind of have to put it in, but then if you put it in, you can't put in two Fincher movies, that's for sure. You know, like, you really have to make hard choices. So is Funny Games representative enough for those,

that kind of idea that we're talking about? I would say Funny Games does capture the home invasion stuff. It captures some of what you're talking about, but also, you know, all of these movies with serial killers are playing off of, you know, human depravity and the sexuality you're talking about. It also taps into something about the way that all of this stuff is difficult to articulate, like the long legs of something being so unsettling and you can't quite say why.

Like these two guys coming into your home and being aggressively polite, but also hit you in the knee with a golf club. There's something there that I do want to capture, whether it's here or not. I wonder if American Psycho can nudge its way into a different lane, which is the sort of more gonzo satire part of this, which I do think should be represented in some way, whether it's this or Serial Mom

or some version of one of those movies. Another great example. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, okay, so... I think we need something on that end of the spectrum, whatever it is. Okay, let's just say for the sake of conversation, we're including

Funny Games and American Psycho as two different versions of a related idea. That puts us at M. Psycho Clute Henry, Silence of the Lambs, Funny Games, American Psycho Clute Henry Silence of the Lambs Funny Games American Psycho 7.

That's 8. Good lord. We have not yet discussed Zodiac or anything from the 2000s. We also haven't added I also think Memories of Murder

probably has to go in. I think it's gotta go. Gotta go. So that's Bong Joon-ho's amazing 2003 film which is very influential on Zodiac and

you know Fincher and and Bong have this like great game of pass the baton where like you can feel each other watching the other one's movies

and and being inspired by them and taking something from them and you know no surprise two of my favorites on the show. So, but if you just put memories of murder and then you're at nine.

Yeah. And we don't have a slasher. And yet, like I haven't given you even like a shot at a weird one. Like, would you be okay with only one movie from the last 20 years? I mean, I think Zodiac has to be in there too.

I think we do have to have two fans. No other filmmaker, I would say, has dedicated a larger portion of their mind space and body of work to this genre than David Fisher. Yes, we haven't even mentioned all the mind hunting that he was doing, you know, which is of course not a film, but Mindhunter sits comfortably in the lone spot

we reserve in this canon for television. No disrespect to the television series Hannibal. It's not for the Dahmer Evan Peters experiment? It's not for that? Didn't make the cut, sadly. Sorry, Dahmer. Nor did any of the Dahmer films. That's a lot. The other thing, too, is most of these movies are not about real cases.

In fact, are any of these movies about real cases? I mean, Zodiac, Memories of Murder. Zodiac, yes. I feel like a lot of them are inspired In fact, are any of these movies about real cases? I mean, Zodiac, Memories of Murder. Yes, yes. I feel like a lot of them are inspired by and they'll twist some details, they'll change some settings. But I think there's a degree to which a lot of this stuff almost has to come

from somewhere in reality. It's very hard to dream up this level of, again, depravity if you're not of it. I agree, although, but by the same token, I'm less interested in the Ted Bundy story. Oh, sure. Or the Gacy story than I am. We're pulling pieces and ideas from real life events

and integrating them into something from a different perspective. I mean, we can just be done. We can just say we've made our choices and live with our choices if you want to say do we have 10 m psycho clute henry silence of the land dropping black christmas i'm holding it for now okay funny games american psycho 7 memories of murder zodiac that's 10 i mean i don, I don't hate that 10. Pretty good.

Any honorable mentions you want to make? I mean, we could... I think we can hold off on the threatened slasher idea because I got slasher ideas for days for the pod. That's true. We'll circle back. There's space for that stuff. There is. What was your big discovery?

Anything that you saw? You texted me about Freeway. I love Freeway. I love Freeway. Sick movie. Do people know about Freeway? Tell them. There's this movie called Freeway

in which Reese Witherspoon in deep white trash Southern accent is doing an elaborate red riding hood pastiche. But imagine this. And again, I'm going to spoil this movie, but I think it's worth it to explain exactly

what's happening here. She's picked up by Kiefer Sutherland as a Big Bad Wolf highway serial killer. But she turns the tables on him, shoots him like 8 to 10 times, and the back half of the movie

is the Big Bad Wolf pressing charges against Red Riding Hood. That's what this movie is. How is that not on our canon? How is that not a part, a bigger part of American movie history? Funny, fun fact about that movie

is they made a sequel to that movie and recast the Reese Witherspoon part with Natasha Lyonne. Are you familiar with this? Freeway 2. Confessions of a Trick Baby is the subtitle. The 90s were so good, Rob.

You can't believe how great we had it another movie that I just stumbled upon on cable while sleeping in my dad's house in like 1997 and I was like is this real? is this

the girl from Man and the Moon? this is what she this is her next film? I miss that feeling I miss the feeling you were talking about earlier too about audition

of the like this is so fucked up you gotta watch it and I don't know if we have that anymore because things are so available. It's, I think there's a point where angst was hard to watch and now it's on Tubi.

Yeah, I know. I have a beautiful restoration on Blu-ray of angst. I'm like, why do I own this? This is depraved. Like if the FBI came to my home, they'd haul me off just knowing I own all these movies, but I do. Maybe so.

But I justified that most purchases today. I wrote down one line from Freeway that I wanna hit, which is this key line from Reese. home they'd haul me off just knowing i own all these movies but i do maybe so um but i justified i wrote down one line from freeway that i want to hit which is this this key line from reese you act like you're on a mission but all you want to do is get off in a sex type way and i feel like that's the mission of all these movies and also maybe in some ways the big picture podcast so do you get off in any other way do you get off in any other way besides a sex type way i don't i mean people are getting off in all kinds of ways in these movies. People are just, in memories of murder, a guy just shows up to the crime scene to crank it.

Is that a sex type way? I don't know. I'm going to leave that to the scientists. This wouldn't be an episode of The Big Picture without someone cranking it too. So really well done by you. Rob, I feel like we did a good job. I'm sure people will have their quibbles.

They'll be mad that we didn't include, I feel like we did a good job. I'm sure people will have their quibbles. You know, they'll be mad that we didn't include... I don't know. What's a critical film that we did not include in our list? Do we need Monster? Does female serial killer

representation matter? Here's the thing about Monster. Obviously, there's an amazing performance by Charlize Theron in the film. Academy Award winning

performance. I don't think that that movie is great. Like, I think we're talking about movies that are orders of magnitude better. Yes. I think it's an interesting idea and of course Eileen Wuornos is a

fascinating cultural figure. There are very few examples of female serial killers in history. Is she maybe the only one actually? A lot of female victims in these movies to the surprise of no one. It falls into that same thing I was describing where i'm less interested in docudrama of these stories than i am in the kind of creation of a world that may be inspired by but isn't representing something that actually happened yeah so for me that one is not as interesting zodiac i like so much because

it is less about the kills and it is more about the investigation which of course is like maybe the best example of that paired with memories of murder in terms of exploring who the people are who try to solve these crimes and what it does to them. But also the kills. I think that the picnic murder in Zodiac

is one of the scariest things I've ever seen. You're 100% right. I think we did well. I think this is good. I think there are plenty of good movies. I'll tweet out my letterboxd link so people can see that, you know, Jennifer 8 is on my list,

and Blink, Copycat, you know, Kiss the Girls starring Morgan Freeman, The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez, a film that takes place entirely in the mind of a serial killer. If we had more time and space, I might have made a run at The Cell as a token inclusion

cool movie you know looks amazing it does look amazing yeah Joanna Robinson's beloved Tarsam Singe Rob thank you so much

thanks for really going down the rabbit hole of depravity with me I appreciate it thank you thank you for taking me to the deepest and darkest places

of the human spirit let's go to my conversation now with Oz Perkins. Oz Perkins is here. I'm very, very excited to speak with you about your new film. You, over the last 10 or so years as a filmmaker, have had an amazing sense of composition. And it had me thinking about for you, for a movie like this, what comes first? Is it an image or is it the story? How do you think about crafting the next project you're going to do? Well, it all starts with the script, which is words. And moving words around, right, is like kind of how it ultimately

starts and i say it a lot to a lot of people and maybe it's sort of obvious at this point but i approach it like a crossword puzzle right like you see yourself sit down in front of the new york times crossword puzzle you take a look at you like fuck i don't know any of this i know none of this i don don't, I know, oh, well, actually I kind of know that Jack Kerouac wrote Big Sir. I can put that in. And in the case of this, I had Silence of the Lambs. Like I had, I had that.

I knew that I was going to, I knew that I was going to ape that and I was going to do it on purpose. It's funny, I was sitting in the waiting room and there was a book of Warhol prints and the quality of doing something pop was very foremost in my mind. Like sort of, what would be kind of a,

fun is such an inert word, but what would be sort of a punk way to approach a horror movie, right? Sort of like, what's the side door that you can come in? For me, it just started with Silence of the Lambs and sort of saying, well, what if I did that as an invitation, sort of a little piece of trickery almost, a little bit of a magic trick. You kind of invite the people in. It's like at Disneyland, you go to the Haunted Mansion, right? They get you into the

first room, they close the thing, and then the room stretches. And I'm like, that's a pretty good gag. And for me, it was like, let's start with Silence of the Lambs. We'll make it seem just like that. And then we'll take a hard turn and we'll do something different. So it started with that. That was sort of the mobilizing idea. When it comes to how things look, I know it's weird to say, but it's easy. That's the easy part. That's the easy part. And it's easy because you rely on other people and their ability and their tastes and their sensibilities and their know-how. I don't know how to do what they do. I don't know how to do, I don't know how to, you know, anything about a camera, I don't fucking know. So you find people whose taste you like. And ultimately you set out on this weird adventure to make something

that you think is cool. I know it sounds sort of floppy or kind of soft, but it really is that. You know, you figure out what it is, and then you get people together to kind of make it good. I want to ask you about both of those things, both the Silence of the Lambs thing and that idea of collaborating with people who can make the way that things look. On the latter, is it that you have been working with a similar group of people over a long period of time and that you all understand each other's sensibilities? You work with new people on each project. How do you think about curating the taste of the people who are your collaborators? In the case of Long Legs, it was the first time that I'd worked with this group of people. And as I sit here now, I've made three movies with them. We made three movies in 15 months.

And how that happened, I can't begin to tell you, but it's a true fact. And I was able to do that because we jibed so well. But in the case of Long Legs, we all met each other for the first time on this movie. Everybody was new to me. There weren't any holdovers from anything I'd done before. I think if I'm good at anything, I'm good at conveying what I like and sort of curating an experience and sort of saying, I actually think it's this. Because I think also people can get into, especially people who do a lot of work

and do a lot of turnover, you can get into, especially people who do a lot of work and do a lot of turnover, you can get into sort of habits and grooves and presumptions and sort of shortcuts. And so if this guy, Perkins, walks in and all of a sudden it's like, no, I don't think it's that. I think it's this. I don't think it's that. I think the only songs in this horror movie are going to be T-Rex. And you put that into someone's mind it's like giving them a little bit of a drug right it's like giving them just like a little bit of a

something and they're like oh i didn't huh really well in that case and it kind of blows their minds and it's not and it's on purpose you do that on purpose right you come in sideways my dp and i we never talked about horror movies there were no horror we we had no reference what we're going to reference the purge let's make a movie like the purge what a couple of jackasses we would be if that was our intention right so our intention was to make something that we thought was beautiful and so we didn't we never spoke about blumhouse movies or or contemporary horror movies or even old great ones. We talked about Gus Van Zandt movies.

We were like, that's what we like. What if we made a horror movie that felt like my own private Idaho? Like it's kind of lonely, sort of dirty, but beautiful and sad and kind of sexy, but also sad. And you just start fishing around and you start comparing things and you start talking and things take shape it's interesting though that you still had that concept of maybe wrong footing silence of the lambs using that as like an entryway but not the whole way for the story so are you sharing that with your collaborators too or is that just like a prompt to get you going i think it's obvious on the i think it's obvious on the page but i definitely say it out loud to people and and with that it's sort of if you're in my job if you're sitting in my seat and as an independent filmmaker without a studio without a streamer you have some fabulous deal like my friend Guillermo has you know like you're out there scrapping and you're just trying to rise above the fucking din of everything and it's so noisy and nobody gives a fuck about anything could

you imagine caring about like fly me to the moon could you imagine me like being like that's that rises above for me that cuts through it's so hard to do that it's so hard to poke the membrane and to get anybody's attention for 10 minutes and so the silence of the lambs thing was really just sort of that it's like what's what's the what's the admit one ticket that's going to kind of make people interested because i felt like there was probably an appetite for silence of the lambs again like an appetite for like a really kind of cool serial killer movie serial killers not cool like real life serial killers horrible awful don't don't do it don't read about it don't watch netflix's recreations like not into it but the serial killer movie of the 90s which were which

came out when i was 16 17 8 15 in that realm of like oh yeah making movies that's a thing people do got you got silence of lambs you got seven and there's never going to be better than those two unlikely and so it just became the sort of you hear people say this stupid fucking term love letter but it was like a little bit of a love letter because movies are i think love letters to other movies in a lot of ways and And I certainly think of it that way. So, yeah, it grows that way. It's interesting though because your movie is kind of iterative of those movies, but not really. No.

There's a really profound sense of dread in the movie that you have really mastered that I sensed in your first films, but you seem to have a total handle on in this film. And I'm always fascinated by people who make thrillers or horror movies or even action movies, that sense of impending doom that you can't really put words to. But when you're in a movie theater and you're like, this is working on me right now, I am afraid is not the right word, but I am anticipating and also I want to leave. And you got that. And so, you know, when you're talking to your collaborators, you're thinking about the story. Like, how do you, how do you do that? Can you, can you explain it?

I mean, the only thing I can sort of say as a, as like a bullet to answer that question is that we did it. Do you know what I mean? Like the, the big we that is working on the movie does that so you know in in post-production so much happens in post in the edit in the scoring in the color in the in the in the sound mix i mean i black coat's daughter i hated that i was i hated the movie i was like oh fuck it was my first movie is the first thing i ever did i'd never made a short or a student film or anything like black ghost daughter was my first thing out of the gate as a person making a movie i didn't know what the steps were like i had never done it before

and i hated the movie i was so sad and upset about it what a piece of shit and then we put this and then we did the mix and i loved it and all of a sudden i loved the movie all of a sudden i understood oh right oh fine it's gonna be fine and so i think that anything that's anything that's sort of an all-encompassing or or immersive aspect of the movie is the work of many many many people bringing their best ideas to it and my job as the director is to let them do that not only to let them but to encourage them. To curate the thing, keep it away from the guardrails. If something's getting crazy or it sounds like shit or stupid, you move it away.

But for the most part, if you are lucky, God, if you're lucky to have good people working with you, you let them do it. And they want to do it. They want it to be cool too. That's the best deal, right? No one's doing their homework. Oh, I'll clean my room later. It's not that for any of them, for everybody involved and people are getting younger and younger. I mean, I'm getting older, but a lot of the people in these movies are super young and they just want

to do cool things and they've got energy and they're inspired. And you just let them. And then it takes shape. And I'm there as like the parent of the thing. But it's like a field trip. You're like taking a bunch of kids on a field trip and making a movie. What about for you personally, though, having done these films, was there a moment on Long Legs where you thought to yourself, this isn't working?

It's not going well. I'm not happy with this. All the time. Every day. Every day. All the time, every day, every, every day, all the time. Because the essential truth of making a movie, as everybody listening to this podcast knows, you don't have enough fucking time. You don't have enough money. Money is, I don't know. I've never been like, I wish I had more money, but more time and, you know, obviously money buys time and that's universal not having enough time is true for david lynch is as true for you know felini and no one had enough time and so um you definitely get to the end of certain days you're like man well we just fucked that up we didn't get we were rushed we were grouchy we were

tense and we fucked it up and funny enough enough, the opening scene of Longlegs, when Longlegs comes to the snowy house, fucked it up. Like we just like this, we did fucking, we just, fuck. It was Nick's first day. It had snowed really heavily the night before, which was awesome for picture,

but complicated for all the other things. And Nick being on set was was was you know it's a big deal right and especially because he shows up in full regalia he's never met anybody doesn't want to hang out i know him okay at this point but um you know there's a vibe right it's nicholas cage don't fuck it up and we we got to the end of the day we're like we fucked it up it's crazy because obviously that sequence is end of the day, we're like, we fucked it up. It's crazy because obviously that sequence is amazing. It's one of the best parts of the movie. And it works, but the impression is certainly,

I'll never work again. Tell me about Nicolas Cage. I do like to interview filmmakers who work with Nicolas Cage. That's a theme? As often as I can, especially on exciting movies. There's a lot of us. There's a lot of us.

He works a lot. He works a lot. He works a lot. He works well. I mean, he's obviously had a, I don't know, is this like his eighth or ninth comeback, but he's been on a hot streak again of late. And even by the standards of Nicolas Cage,

making some big choices in this movie, how much of those choices are you aware of? Are you encouraging? Are you telegraphing? And how much of it is left to him? Because there's makeup, there's a voice, there's a voice there's hair there's so much that goes into this character it basically went like this i had worked hard on the script and i thought the script was really strong and the financiers thought the script was really strong strong

enough to give to someone like nicholas cage and nick reads it and says i want to do it and my first call with Nick, the first thing, because you know, you're just like, uh, uh, anything you want to do, man, step on my neck, right? Choke me out. Seriously, like write anything you want. Like rewrite it, throw away the pages.

I hate the script. The script's terrible, right? Like it's awful. Rewrite all the words. Riff and improvise all the time. I don't care. And he was very much like, no, I want to do it all just the way you wrote it. All the words just like this.

I don't take anything. And he didn't. Everything that he said in the movie was written in the script by the time he got it. And so that on the first call, when he does that to you, you know, it's like, it's like being, it's like being, it's like having, it's like Glenda, the good witch touches you with the, with the wand. It's like, oh, okay. Everything's cool. Everything's going to be fine. And, and a new kind of confidence is, is stirred in you. And he, and he, he's such a fan of movies. Like Nicolas Cage loves movies.

He loves movies. He loves actors. He loves, he's an encyclopedic, I mean, to a ridiculous extent. He's read everything. He's seen everything. He reads every review. He knows every performance. He knows everybody's name. He knows every song lyric. He's just a drop dead, finely tuned instrument. And he's super focused and deliberate. And he wants to make a cool movie. That makes sense. When you think about Nicolas Cage, you're like, what does that he wants to make a cool movie right like that makes sense when you think about nicholas cage like what does that guy want to make a cool thing and so when he gets on the phone with you and he says no i'm going to do the script the way you wrote it you get wings on all of a sudden you got wings on you and i like to like i said i like to approach things sort of from the side not not straight on and so in a call like that, I blurt out, write to him, I think it's T-Rex, Nick. Now the it in that sentence, I don't even know what that it is.

What's T-Rex? I say, I think it's T-Rex. Just so you know, Nick, I don't really know what I mean right now, but I think it's T-Rex. And he says, that's crazy. I just was teaching my kid guitar the other day and I brought him this backwards guitar solo from Cosmic Dancer. And again, it's just like signal from the universe, things are going to be cool. And then from there, you just start talking about it. What do you think this guy is? What are the references to? How does he behave? How does he move? How does he talk? It's just dialogue between two people, me and him. And so, he continues to say, to this day, we made it together, we made it together. And I'm like, well, you did it, man. I just hung out while you did it he makes voice recordings on his phone he sends

you ideas you talk about this i think it's more fey and less kind of growly i think it's less this i think it's sadder than this i think he's pathetic i think he looks this way the busted plastic surgery was written into the script so he saw saw that when he first read it. And you just kind of banter back and forth. He goes away to his spot. He records stuff and sends it to me. And I curate it. And if I hear something that sounds wrong, I say so. It's like it's the see something, say something thing.

But it's really not much more than that. It's none of my business to tell Nicolas Cage how to act. Like what folly would that be? Maybe people try it. Seems like a bad idea to me. Can I just make an observation about the movie that I think is interesting? It feels intentional, but I want to see if you agree. Even though you have this incredible Nicolas Cage performance as the titular killer, so to speak,

he kind of feels incidental to the movie and everything else that is going on in the movie and that's a fact i don't know if i've ever really seen that happen at least in a movie like this about a series of murders where like the person quote-unquote responsible is just kind of off to the side and there's something else going on under the surface that is way deeper and way darker and a little bit inexplicable that comes down to as a writer you're writing things on spec you got no one supporting you you're doing it by yourself your wife is giving you a kiss on the way out the door every day you're going to the coffee shop you're sitting there you're putting in the time and as you're sitting there the the the sort of the the the refrain that you got to keep coming

back to is how is this different how what is what is special about this how is this not a blumhouse retread like what what is this it's going to be singular what is this it's going to be iconic you know because iconic is new right like i the iconic means something that is new that's instantly classic right to me that's what iconic means and so all of the ways that you kind of try to wherever someone has gone right you try to go left killers always wear black killer always wears black oh what if he wears all white okay well that's that's interesting um what if he gives himself up okay well that's seven but we want to be referencing seven because this is a warhol pop art piece where we're referencing things that already existed and we're and we're commenting on them in a loving way

all right so he gives himself up all right so when he so when he presents himself he's going to be pathetic not strong he's not the jigsaw killer or jason you can't kill he's just a guy he's just a gross guy so when he goes into the hardware store and that's my daughter behind the counter and he tries to talk to her and she's like, dad, that gross guy's back again. To me, that's the movie. The movie is like, he's just a dude who got, you know, like fell in with the wrong crowd.

The devil. Like he was just riffing on his guitar one day and the devil starts coming through the headphones. That's exactly what it feels like. Through the amp. Like, hey there. there you know like that's how it happens at least in my sort of fantasy land so um the idea was to to say he's nothing special he's just a gross dude which at the end of the day all serial killers are just gross dudes like Like they just are. There's nothing cool, interesting about them. They just get off. That's all they do. They're just trying to have an orgasm and they do it

by killing people. It's fucking whack. And when you kind of put that forward, even in the context of a serial killer movie where the serial killer sort of historically is interesting, powerful. It's Hannibal Lecter. It's John Doe. It's these kind of omniscient, unbeatable forces. What if he's a piece of shit, which is what they actually are? And yet there's like something else going on though. Like I think there are some themes of the movie. One of the themes I think is so interesting is like what our parents do and don't show us,

what they share with us and don't share with us, what they try to protect us from and don't protect us from. So that's a big concept. But there's also a feeling, a force, something else going on in the movie that feels outside of that too. So you're debunking the romanticization of the omniscient serial killer. But there's also something else going on there. I don't know how comfortable you are talking about

what you think is going on there. Yeah, I don't mind talking about it. I mean, I think there's kind of what the movie is and there's what the movie is about, right? And they're kind of very different things. And that was unlocked for me watching Eraserhead. I had seen it a number of times as a younger person. And every time we see Eraserhead as a young person,

we're kind of like, oh man, that's crazy. So weird. What a trippy thing. Weird. I'm weirded out. That doesn't mean, that's weird. Someone's crazy here. And then I had had my first son, I believe. And I went to go, it was in New York City, and I walked down to the IFC and they were showing it. And I sat there and they started playing. I was like, oh my God. It's a movie about being a parent. It's a movie oh my God. It's a movie about being a parent.

It's a movie about fatherhood. It's a movie about what happens when you ejaculate. It's a movie about like the horror of having a baby. Oh my God, you're suddenly responsible for this monster. And it was so obvious to me. And all of it made, it was like unlocking a door and finding this whole cabinet of just like, all right, I know everything about this. It's speaking directly to me. There's sperm in this shot. There's sperm in that shot. It's a baby. The wife just

wants sleep. It all makes sense. So for me, like that was so impactful and it became just true for me that, that the movies that I was going to try to make, we're going to be about something that I thought was true and real. And I was going to code the fuck out of it. And I was going to put a code on top of it that was going to submerge that. How long ago was this? I saw that experience was probably about close to 20 years ago, probably about 18 or so years ago.

My son's turning 20 this year. He was probably about two-ish. He was in that neighborhood. So it was well before I made Black Coat's Daughter, because Black Coat's Daughter is about you lose yourat's Daughter because Black Coat's Daughter is about you lose your parents. That's what Black Coat's Daughter is about. I Am the Pretty Thing Lives in the House

is about you want to know about somebody who's gone. It's hard to know somebody who's gone. You almost want to know about someone when they're gone more than you want to know about them when they're there. But then by the time they're gone, they're gone and it's a different kind of search. Gretel and Hansel, which I didn't write, you know, was different. And I felt I missed sort of an opportunity.

I felt like I wasn't really plugged into what that was for me. And I felt like I missed the opportunity to make a movie about sort of the fact that a parent, in this case a mother can deceive a kid out of love right that can deceive a kid in their best interest and that comes down to my growing up with a famous father who is a closeted gay man and that fact didn't fit the narrative of my family of course it didn't like that's i mean I don't know how anybody has that conversation. So on a, on a sort of elemental level,

consciously, unconsciously, whatever, my mom became sort of part of the, the cover. And, you know, that's a strange thing.

It's just strange thing to live in a cover. It's not that our lives were a cover story, because that's really putting it simply, and that's also bullshit. But the fact that there was a whole other thing behind a curtain was known to my brother and me in some way or other. We had no grammar for it. We had no grammar for it we had no language for it so long legs becomes just a story about well what if there's a mom who has this huge thing that she can't tell her kid and like what's that like on the in the most kind of baroque horror movie version like what's the so what ends up happening in the picture is that it starts off as a serial killer procedural, but that's like a magic trick. It's like, look at my left hand. Like, that's not what it is. I don't give a fuck about triangles and numbers and dates and clues and shit. It's fine.

And it's helpful, super useful to engage an audience so that they're with you. It's so important to do that. But at the end of the day, it's kind of about, you know, Ruth Harker, the mom, she kind of makes a tough choice. You know, either this is going to happen or this is going to happen. And she chooses protecting her kid. Is that wrong? Of course, it's not wrong. Because kind of any of us would do it, right? It's like you're given that, I guess a bunch of people are going to but she's not gonna die it's kind of elemental right it's kind of primal and so this is just the most kind of aggravated omen-esque version of that

thank you for sharing that i find it fascinating i mean it's fine i i think the film itself like consistently choosing to tell you that the things you like about these kinds of movies is maybe not as important as you think it is, is a really clever feature and not bug, you know, like who cares about the symbology? It's not anything. I think, I think it's like, for me, I don't, there's, there's an impulse to be honest and, and maybe there's an impulse to be honest, but also hiding, right? Like I get to hide behind the camera. I get to hide behind a female protagonist. It's out that's true and i just think for the creative process and i say to every everybody who seems like they're a writer who are younger than me and are kind of trying to figure it out write about yourself like the right about you know thing

obviously that right what you know that's the oldest adage and these old adages are cool because they're true and they're useful write about yourself what else are you going to write about robots really do you know what i mean but if you write useful. Write about yourself. What else are you going to write about? Robots? Really, do you know what I mean? But if you write about robots, write about yourself as a robot. Yes. Like, how are you the robot?

It's really funny that you say that too, because I was thinking of your father recently. I saw Play It As It Lays at the New Bev. Sure. And I was like, wow, this is a fascinating performance. It is. From your father. He's really great in that movie.

And I was wondering, like, fascinating performance it is from your father he's really great in that movie yeah and i was wondering like if psycho was looming over you as you were thinking about doing this or was it in a completely different compartment of your mind psycho's a psycho's a weird one for me because it i was born almost 15 years after so it really has nothing to do with my experience but obviously growing up you understand pretty early and you get you get oh your dad's special he's this iconic thing he's done this sort of museum piece that will never fade this weird piece of eternity right not everybody can point to their dad or mom and be like my parent is a part of eternity human history and it would pop up in song lyrics and sort of bob dylan and you kind of hear his

name everywhere you mentioned gus van zandt i mean he remade it gus van zandt remade it right it's like just one of those very rare things that that lasts forever and is always good and so i was aware of that and that was obviously part of what we were all built on the family was built on and kind of dad's work and who dad was and and then so there's that there's kind of the firmament that that kind of element of like oh he's in the firmament he's he's in he's in the untouchable the olymp the olympus of of movies but as i when i was a kid growing up and coming into my own kind of consciousness and that sort of slip sliding period but but in like your teenage years, we were kind of like, not really a kid anymore, but you're kind of like nosing around adulthood and awareness and kind of like, oh, I understand

subtlety and nuance now and things. When I was that age and I was starting to make my own ridiculous movies on the weekends with my friends, my dad was doing bad movies. Like he was relegated to the thing, like they would send him to Budapest, right? Like Budapest, like that'd be like going to jail. Like now Margot Robbie makes movies in Budapest, I presume. But like in the, back in the day, in the early nineties, late eighties, they sent you to Budapest, it's like going to the Gulag, right? It's like, it's like shipping you off to go make a piece of shit in Europe. It's like where they'd sent Wells, right?

Like, Wells, you can make movies in Prague. Off you go. You never went with him when he went to do this? No. I mean, we were in school and stuff. And he was going to work. And so there was a little bit of, and my mom was down about it. She was down on these things.

And she knew they were bad. My mom had really sophisticated taste my mom was an artist too my mom was a super hip person and and there was no fooling her like oh a dr jekyll and mr hyde remake in budapest that's a good thing um and i remember going to see a screening of one of these things with her somewhere and she cried afterwards i was like whoa intense heavy she really oh man she's really hurt by this so i had this weird relationship with what my dad did and did and a weird relationship with the horror genre which was kind of like paid the bills but pretty stupid but also pretty divine in terms of his

previous work you know like and considered know, one of the great things. So that was at odds with what I was experiencing as a kid when I was conscious. And I think that push pull has always been a reality. It's been fascinating to watch it even kind of play out. And I mean, Psycho, there's another movie in theaters right now that is overtly referencing Psycho. Like it is not expiring in the culture, which is very few things are in that status of agreed we still think about it um so you were mentioning when you're sitting in the coffee shop and you're trying to come up with an idea and you're trying to go left instead of right so that you can kind of accumulate something that maybe feels potentially iconic and this movie even though it's not out yet

it feels like a lot of people are aware of it and anticipating it and are like maybe getting that thing that touching the membrane that you mentioned like maybe it's happening at least for the corner of the universe that cares about this kind of stuff is that weird that that's happening right now yeah it's weird it's weird as shit it's it's deeply weird um we were making the movie and feeling i guess pretty good about it because i felt good about the script and i think when you feel good about the script, you're a long ways there. Like you're a long ways to completion, right? Something was Mary Poppins, something that ends well is well started.

Some bastardization of that. And so I felt good about it. And then Neon came in and we showed them sort of like 10 seconds of the movie. I think we showed Nick in his costume, his makeup kind of leaning into the camera and they knew my movies and they had read the script and they just went, they just went hard all in on it. And, you know, ever since then, they've really serviced the movie for what the movie is, which is the great fear of anybody going into uh distribution right it's a movie where nicholas cage fucking kills people right if they'd pitched it like that to the to an audience we'd be in bad shape but they took it as this beautiful thing that they found and they wanted to show aspects of it like it was like like a jewel and you see this side of it and this side of it will kind of do the crime scene stuff. We'll kind of piece this out. We'll kind of present this thing. So it was a really beautiful marriage between the product and the distributor, which is rare. And they've just gone for it. And their level of commitment has been really bolstering. It's an amazing thing. And to get good reviews, you know, we're supposed to not care. We're really supposed to not care.

It really is. We're supposed to be like, all right, it's invisible. All right, it doesn't matter. It's all fake. This is all a dream. Rotten Tomatoes percentage is just a bunch of illusion. Totally. And yeah, totally.

And we all want to be told that we're good. And so I think that the response to this movie has been really wild to me. And I don't know how much of it to credit to Neon. I don't know how much of it is the movie because people do seem to like it. Or how much of it is people seeing the movie because Neon has positioned them to the movie and i guess it really doesn't matter it doesn't and frankly if it's the latter that can have a boomeranging effect where expectation grows and then there's hype and then people are let down so it's a devil's bargain it's it all is and it's just every we're all just fucking trying to turn a light on in the dark you know what i mean and so if there's someone there who wants to help you

out and sort of say like the switch is over there hey you go for it did you already have an agreement to do more movies with them like before they saw any of this because now it seems like you have this we have three movies now yeah no they no there were there were no other movies they um like i said they came in early on long legs they they bought it when we were still working on it and um we went through a process with them. We cut the movie. They gave us notes. We tested the movie.

We did notes. We tried to shape it, make it better. And then we just, during the strike, I had an opportunity to make a movie in Canada, a non-union movie. I was working as a Director's guild director, which I could do. I didn't write it. And we had all Canadian actors who were willing to work as non-American unions who did it all.

And we kind of just did it because we could. We had to. Because I called my producer when the strike was waylaying everything. We had a Stephen King movie ready to go. We were going to use all the same people who we'd used on long legs, all the same crew and everybody, everybody was ready. And all of a sudden he, we couldn't do it. Just wasn't going to happen. And so I called my producer up and I said, we got to do something, man. I'm not just going to die here. I'm not just going to sit here and die here because of, you know, writer's rooms need better deals, which is super important, but had nothing to do with me.

And so we made a movie and it turned out great. And Neon saw it and Neon bought it. And then we made The Monkey, the Stephen King movie. And Neon saw a bit of it and had felt really great about Long Legs, I guess guess and they bought it out of can they got into a bidding war and they went all in and so like i you know to have their stamp of approval to have their um brand on me is a real blessing i mean it's really it's really, it's really, it's so hard to marry what you're doing with the business, right? Like they're, they're, they're not related. What I do is not related to the business of what I do.

And so to have someone who's been in this incredible go-between in neon is, is, um, it's really ideal. I don't think it ever happens. In fact, I think it almost never happens that a filmmaker gets paired with a distributor and feel so at home. It's funny because you mentioned that you don't often feel like you need more budget, that the money is not as much of an issue when you're making a movie. The time is the thing that matters. But let's say this, let's say Long Legs is a big success relative to whatever big success is for Long Legs. And then The Monkey does great. And then you're off. I don't know what that would mean for you.

Sure. But is your hope, dream to be making a $15 million movie that has big movie stars? Yeah, because I make more money. Yeah. Is that? Yes, because I make more money because I'm not alone in this world. I have children and I have a wife and i have myself and it's an expensive fucking world out there and what a refreshing answer i mean honestly it's like it's my it's

like my job right it's like my job so it's like it's like going to a doctor and be like sorry this year you're not going to get paid you're still going to do all the work but we're just not going to pay you this year how do you feel about that it's not good they don't go for that it's not structured that way mine is a feast or famine business and so you work really really hard with getting slapped in the face and you work really really hard for not enough money and life costs money like we're all grown-ups and um you makeups. And I think one makes a bigger movie just to feel safer. Do you know? And I think it's a double-edged sword, of course, because you make a bigger movie and then there's more cooks in the kitchen and there's more pressure and things.

And I already feel a tremendous pressure. That part's not fun. Jordan Peele and I were talking when he was writing Nope and I was sort of looking, he was sharing drafts with me and I was reading, I was like, man, it's amazing. You get to do whatever you want. You can literally do whatever you want. He said, yeah, man, and it has to be the greatest movie ever fucking made.

And I was like, oh shit, yeah, that does suck. He's good though. He's the best. Do you know what the bigger thing is? I can't say. But do you know what it is? I do know what it is. Well, I do know what it is if all the things align.

There's a couple of them. And I think that's super cool. Like it's what we're all trying to do, right? It's like we're all trying to get to the place where you have a certain amount of trust, where you're not trying to sell everybody all the time. I can do it. I promise I'm good enough. I'm cool. I what you're doing. Not the other way. Not you're not, you're not out there with your hat in your hand and being like, I look,

just trust me one more time where it's actually the other way around. Right. The other way around is, is places come to you and they're like, just can we help help you? Do you trust us to help you? It's a nice, it's a nice reversal. It's,

it's weird. And you have to work hard to get there. I wish that for you uh we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen have you seen anything recently that you like oh movies that i've seen the last great movie that i've seen something different someone once said the coliseum in rome oh what movie is preferable great thing that i've seen i think the last great thing that i've seen is i saw sorcerer for the first time which i'd never seen friedkin sorcerer which i'd never seen before and such a funny kind of story around that house like he was just like he was william

friedkin and like everything like you don't fuck with friedkin like friedkin's friedkin and then he makes this movie called sorcercerer. And he's like, it's fucking awesome. And it is fucking awesome. And then Star Wars, right? And it was like, I don't want to see this dirty shit.

These guys with what sweating over things and kind of like grouse, grousing at each other a bunch. Like, I don't want to see that. I don't want to see the Wookiee. And so, and that really fucked things up for everybody. Yes.

And always, you know, sort of retreating to Friedkin's interviews where he's always really super sour about Star Wars. And it's like, dude,. And always, you know, sort of retreating to Friedkin's interviews where he's always really super sour about Star Wars. And it's like, dude, but then, you know, all things make sense. And the position I'm in now,

it certainly makes sense when you're in competition and stuff. But Sorcerer, what a mad movie. And also just having come off of making three movies and knowing how weird an experience it is, how unlikely it is to make a movie and to sort of succeed and like get all the stuff

you watch a movie like sorcerer like they got these fucking trucks on these rope bridges like who schedules that like who's up there doing that does that safe was there any like are there any parameters around this uh sorcerer check out sorcerer incredible recommendation great movie congrats on long line. This was great. Thanks, dude. I appreciate it very much. Thanks for coming on. All right.

Thank you to Oz Perkins. Thanks to Rob Mahoney. Thanks to Jack Sanders. And thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for their work on this episode. Next week, we've got a new draft coming your way. I'm not going to spoil the subject matter. See you then.