The Big Picture - The Seven "on the Bubble" Oscar Contenders. Plus: #ReleaseTheSnyderCut ... or Something | The Oscars Show

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

The Oscars are closer than you think—just 82 more days!—so Sean and Amanda take a closer look at the chances of 'Ford v. Ferrari,' 'Waves,' and five more potential contenders (2:40). Then they break down the dismal box office performance of Elizabeth Banks's 'Charlie's Angels' reboot (48:02) and discuss the unlikely boost that 'Joker' received over the weekend (59:23). Finally, Sean interviews writer-director Scott Z. Burns about his new drama 'The Report' (68:41). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Scott Z. Burns Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. The NBA is in full swing and we have coverage across all of our channels to keep you up to speed with the latest news, trends, and storylines. Make sure to check out The Mismatch with Kevin O'Connor and Chris Vernon, Group Chat with Chris Ryan and Justin Barrier, and Heat Check with John Gonzalez for daily coverage of the games across the league. And make sure to check out TheRinger.com to read Kevin O'Connor, Dan Devine, and the rest of our NBA experts break down every development.

As always, these can be found on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about releasing the Snyder Cut. Oh, Jesus. Amanda, we are here recording a podcast talking about the Snyder Cut in 2019. I am not talking about it. No, no, I'm just kidding.

We're not going to spend too much time, hopefully, on the Snyder Cut, which apparently is a thing that is in the world that Ben Affleck knows about. Later in the show, I'm going to have an interview with an author of a different kind of Snyder Cut. He's one of my favorite screenwriters. His name is Scott Z. Burns. He made his directorial debut with The Report, the story of Senate staffer Daniel Jones' years-long inquiry into the CIA's torture program. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 9-11, Burns has written some of Steven Soderbergh's most interesting films, among them Contagion and The Informant. And this year's The Laundromat, and we talked about fusing the real with the absurd. Speaking of the report,

Oscar season is getting a little narrow. There are just 82 days between now and the 92nd Annual Academy Awards, Amanda. How are you feeling about that? It's feeling very close all of a sudden. It's getting tight. Yeah, I don't know where the time went. Given the shortened season, we need to talk about some on-the-bubble Oscar contenders. Are you ready to do that? Yes. Okay, let's go to the big picture's big picture. This is a problem in the big picture. Do you know what I mean? Okay, Amanda, on Friday, the Oscars announced their producers. There are two women who I'm not terribly familiar with, but we're going to talk about them very briefly. Their names are Stephanie Allen and Lynette Howell-Taylor. They've both worked in film and television over the years.

They are unseasoned at award show production, but they have a lot of experience in the field of managing talent. What do we think about the addition of these two women? Well, managing talent is a major part of the actual awards show and also everything leading up to it. If you conceive of the Academy and the Oscars as just a bunch of egos in a room, people who have experience with that are worthwhile. I think it's also possibly to the Oscars benefit to have people who aren't kind of in the machine coming and giving a fresh look. That was my reaction as well. First timers sometimes can be perilous, but sometimes can bring something fresh. They'll have a couple of decisions in front of them, particularly some things we've talked about in the past, whether there should be a host, how long the show should

be, the way that the show is paced, where musical performances go, how many montages. There are a lot of different things that go into making and constructing an Oscars telecast. We'll keep a very close watch on that. And inside of that telecast, maybe there will be some of these movies we're going to talk about here. Maybe not. The first movie we're going to talk about opened on Friday. It's called Ford versus Ferrari. It had a very solid box office performance over the weekend. It made $31 million in America. Now, I don't want us to lose our heads about that because that actually, if you look back at, say, this time last year, Fantastic Beasts 2 opened to about $68 million. This time the year before that, movies like Thor Ragnarok were dominating at the box office.

This is a significant step down, even though $31 million is considered a success. Do you think it's box office is related at all to its award season strength? I think it has to be because we had talked a bit about Ford versus Ferrari in the sense of it's coming a bit later in the Oscar season. And the reason that it's on the bubble is because we have been talking about these movies for a while. And I think you and I and many Oscar prognosticators have a sense of not who the locks are, but kind of the front runners. And there's not as much room the closer you get to a shortened abort season, as you mentioned, for new big movies to elbow their way in. So I think anything helps. Doing well at the box office, especially, it's

like a proportionate success. It's a movie for adults, and adults went to see it, and it made like a solid amount of money, and it seems like it's not going to be a disaster. And everyone walked out and was just like, hey, great movie. Remember when they made movies with movie stars? So I think that it couldn't have gotten a Best Picture nominee without this success. I agree. If it had bombed, it would have been difficult for it to pull that nomination. I'm curious. I'm really curious about this one.

I honestly have no idea. It does seem like it's doing well with older viewers. And as we know, the Academy, for all of its efforts, is older. It's mature. It's a mature group of voters. Truly. Maybe not in their decision-making, but just in terms of the linear chronology. And the other thing about it, too, is that it's very male. I mean, the Academy is very male. The Academy is still 68% men. And this is a movie about men and dying masculinity. And it's not an assault on that idea. It's nostalgic about that idea. And so I can certainly see a world in which it's nominated. It's funny that you characterize it the way you did, because I agree with you that

it has been kind of lagging behind the marriage stories and the parasites and the once upon a time in Hollywood and the Irishman's, the sort of like locky seeming movies that we've been talking about a lot. But I feel like a movie like Little Women, which the public is not going to see for another about six weeks, somehow has more momentum than a movie like Ford vs. Ferrari, even though it premiered back in Telluride. I mean, this is a little bit about like the bubble of film discourse as well. And it's like the people who are tracking this are a lot more excited about a movie written

and directed by Greta Gerwig starring Florence Pugh and Saoirse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet and a lot of internet, younger, friendly names. And I think there is also the Little Women

is kind of geared towards women and there are a lot of women excited for this because we don't get that many movies, which we're going to have to talk more about in this episode later on, and I'm really upset. But I kind of think that because Ford vs. Ferrari is, like, this stately, traditional,

almost throwback type of Oscar movie, it's not, no one is advocating for it. It's just kind of, like, seems an inevitability. Yeah, I agree. I wonder what number it will be in terms of the 10 or the nine that are nominated. You know, if we imagine everything in terms of a preferential ballot, kind of feels like it's going to be like seven or eight for most people. Yeah. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. I should say last week on the

episode, we talked about Matt Damon. I interviewed James Mangold, the director of the film. Tremendous conversation. He's a wonderful filmmaker and a hell of a talker. And I think this is a really great movie and in a very kind of uncomplicated way. And I wonder if that will be held against it, too. You said it's a throwback. And I think that that old fashionedness is part of its appeal, but it's also part of what maybe people will not be as impressed by it as they will be impressed by, say, The Irishman, which is not just deep and old fashioned, but complex and thematically resonant in a different kind of way. Yeah, and it's not even that people won't be impressed by it. I think it's, you know, really beautifully made and all of the shots of the cars racing around, which is not something

I ever thought that I cared about. And I was like, huh, this is beautiful. But I think that so much of Oscar campaigning and voting now is about an affirmative statement. It's virtue signaling. Everyone is voting for something because they feel passionate about it. And they're saying something about movies or the industry by their vote. And I don't know what you're saying with Ford vs. Ferrari besides like, oh, I had a nice time. Yeah. I love movies. I think it's maybe as close as you can get to it. Right. And I guess the other thing too is that it's been obvious that this movie is a kind of living metaphor for the difficulty of creating great art inside of a commercial machine.

This movie was greenlit and produced by Fox. Fox was acquired by Disney. Disney, this is the lone Fox title that Disney has sort of stood behind steadfastly through the acquisition. They marketed it aggressively. They have publicly said they believe in this movie, that they like to make movies like this. Now, the reason for that, I think, is pretty clear. It's not because it's an Oscar movie. It's because it more closely resembles the sports movies that they're well known for, like, remember, the Titans or the Rookie or Miracle. It has a kind of uplifting, somewhat complex, but mostly old-fashioned vision

of sports. And so it's not surprising. I don't think it's necessarily a vote of confidence for James Mangold's vision of the way that technology can thrash us but also protect us. No, it's family-friendly, not in the four-children sense, but just Thanksgiving is a week and a half from now. I think this has to clean up among the older Thanksgiving box office because so many people are like, okay, well now I'm with family members of various ages and what can we all do together? It's a great point. There's only three other major titles coming in the next few weeks. Those are Frozen 2, of course, which opens on Friday.

And then during Thanksgiving, it's just Queen and Slim and Knives Out. It's kind of a lane here, pardon the pun, for Ford vs. Ferrari to continue to thrive. So we'll see how it does. In terms of the nominations, I feel like there is a Best Picture nomination in there, but it is definitively on the bubble for me. Best Actor, Christian Bale. Can you see this happening? He's very likable in this, but he has been nominated so many times and it's such a stacked category. And there's something so light about the performance. This is the nicest possible comparison I can give it, but he reminded me a lot of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

He's just bringing a chaotic positive energy. Sure. And I don't know that people always take that seriously as best actor bait. They want Joaquin Phoenix in the Joker. Yeah. And particularly for Bale, who we think of as transformational and so almost distraught in every role that he does. And you're right. There is a kind of a zippy effervescence, even though he's kind of a prick. Ken Miles is not the nicest guy in the world and he's got his demons. It is the lighter side of Christian Bale has demons. Yeah. What about best director James Mangold? I think this is one where he's seventh,

eighth on the list just because there are only five nominations. And it is kind of, I think it's really masterfully directed. He's in total control. And there is kind of that, you can see the filmmaking, especially in all of the cars and the speed. But it is, again, sort of, I don't even want to say old-fashioned because it does not look old-fashioned at all. It's very vibrant, but he's not really innovating. And I think best director goes to the showier. It's true. You're right. Usually something that is, I don't know, more on a shelf, I think, tends to get recognized here. However, a lot of the frontrunners in this category are doing iterations of things that they've done before. Even the masterful people.

Noah Baumbach made a movie that is a Noah Baumbach movie. It's a wonderful movie, but he's made a lot of wonderful movies. Bong Joon-ho, in his way, is making just a Bong Joon-ho movie. It's a genre exercise that also has deep themes about family and society. Right. Martin Scorsese made a gangster movie about the arc of history.

You know, all of these people are doing things that are familiar to them. Mangold's one of the few people who this is a little bit of a reach for him. You know,

if you look back at the work that he's done, he hasn't ever made anything quite like this. Maybe, I tend to agree that he's in seventh or eighth. It's a narrative thing. And

even if Noah Baumbach is just making a Noah Baumbach movie, it's possibly his greatest. And it's definitely a major work. And he's never been nominated for director before, right? No, he's not. Just for writing. And so people like the stories, especially in these. It's a knighting as much as it is a recognition of any one piece of work. So Ford versus Ferrari is probably the biggest ticket item we're going to talk about here on this list. I wanted to open with it for obvious reasons. The other, the next movie that we're going to talk about also opened this weekend, but only on four screens. Not a lot of people have seen it. It's called Waves. I interviewed the writer and director Trey Edward Schultz on the show last week. It did very well in its limited release. It really has

the, it has the sheen of an A24 release. We've come to understand over time that there is a certain kind of movie going out into the world. Now, A24 releases all kinds of movies. They released The Lighthouse. They're releasing this movie called In Fabric in December that is a horror movie about a haunted dress. But I think their brand is a movie like Waves. Yes. What do you think I mean when I say that? Well, it is both A24's brand,

and I kind of think the thing that will hold Waves back, and also which held it back for me, even though I had a very strong, it's a very visceral movie that elicits reactions, and I definitely had a reaction. But the rudest thing you can say about it is that it's playing A24 tic-tac-toe. It honestly, it's like gauzy shots of Florida

and someone in the water. There's a Frank Ocean soundtrack and then Lucas Hedges shows up. Like those are all literal things that happen in this movie. And it is so beholden to a visual and even like reference style that I think gets in its own way. Yeah, I think it certainly could get in the way of voters. The uncharitable view of it early on before most people had seen it was like, quote unquote, Yeah, I think it certainly could get in the way of voters. The uncharitable view of it early on before most people had seen it was like, quote unquote, white moonlight, which ultimately it's not.

It's a movie about a black family. That's something else that could be held against it, which is there's a white writer director. And this is a story about a black family. I would encourage people to read the pieces, the interviews with Trey where he talks about this. I think he's very thoughtful about this issue. But that is something that some people are not going to like, we're not going to relate to. And it is the thing that I loved about the movie. And I had a very, very strong reaction to it. I was really, really overwhelmed by it is it's, it's, it's gloves off and it's not, it is the, um, it is the opposite of pretension. It is, there is no attempt to mask an idea or a theme in a big genre.

There's no artifice in that respect. It's just like, this is how I feel. This is what happened. This is what happened to the actor that I collaborated with. We're putting our lives together and we're trying to put it on screen. Now, it's possible that that's not as impressive

as building the world of Parasite. I cop to that. But I do think that in this season in particular, in which people are sort of finding ways to mask the stories of their lives or what they see in the culture, somebody doing something that's just like full-blown autobiography that's like, this is what it's like when you fall in love in high school. This is what it's like when you are hated in public. This is what it's like when someone in your life dies. I was impressed by somebody saying, I'm just going to do an unvarnished version of this kind of thing. Now, in addition

to the unvarnished feelings, there's a lot of varnish on the execution. There's a lot of music. There's a lot of beautiful shot making. There's a lot of, there's a self-consciousness to some of the filmmaking, which I responded well to, but I like Terrence Malick movies. Someone like you who maybe doesn't enjoy them as much, I think also might hold something against it. I just think it is hyper-stylized. And I think also I did the rude tic-tac-toe thing, but it is part of a school of filmmaking. And you have seen a lot of these things before in different ways, and it can start to feel... It overwhelming it is like a very very intense and i found upsetting experience especially the climactic part of it where i was just like i think i was literally just like fuck you like in the screening room um and and that's an achievement to get that kind of

reaction out of anybody but i ultimately did find that it was style over substance or that just the visual priority and kind of the super hecticness of the visual style was all you could look at. It was so big and so dramatic that the rest of it didn't come together for me. Yeah. It's interesting that I can only think of comparing it to something that is exploring its ideas through genre because in a way, even though it's absent of genre, it did the same thing that a lot of the best genre movies do to me, which is that, like, I am, as I've said many times on the show, I'm completely dead inside. And so when I'm watching something and it makes me feel something, I'm like, that is an achievement. You know, if you walk out of Get Out and you felt something deeply, I was like, well, this movie must be important because I felt something about it as opposed to, you know, telegraphing the motions in the plot execution.

I completely agree. And, again, I think if you can get someone to feel anything, I think I was, like, very irritated for the rest of the day after seeing this movie. And part of that is because I had, like, the adrenaline and having gone through the experience of watching this movie, I carried it with me throughout the day. That is not something I can say about almost any movie this year. And that is because the images and the script and the music were put together in a way to, not even to provoke, though I was provoked, but to make me feel something. So that is an achievement of filmmaking. Will Oscar voters like that? I don't know.

It's really hard to say. This is an interesting one to me because I think the obvious go-to nomination here, and it will depend on how the category shakes out. It's a very competitive category that we've talked about before on this show, is Best Supporting Actor for Sterling K. Brown. What did you think about his performance

as the sort of domineering patriarch of the family at the center of the story? So, again, I mean, he has such a presence. And it's so interesting because we do associate him with things like This Is Us or other. He comes in to bring in the hammer to a degree and also subverting it because he is the dad who puts the son under a lot of pressure and so you're examining that complicated relationship they give him one speech to his daughter kind of like by a it's a lake a pond a body of water they're sitting on the bench and and you know that's the oscar real moment and

i think there's something about that was when i could see the pieces moving a little. And I was kind of like, oh, here is Sterling K. Brown to give his Oscar speech. But I think there are also a lot of people in America who love Sterling K. Brown and are very affected like anytime he gives those emotional speeches. So you could see it. It's definitely the most accessible way in. Yeah, I'm I'm a mark for it. He really works on me. He works on me in Black Panther. He works on me in The People vs. O.J. Simpson. He just he has a tonality, a presence, as you said, that I'm just like, OK, I buy it. I buy whatever it is that you're selling me. Like, I'm just I'm captivated. And that scene is

is very sort of it's like emotional exposition. Yeah. It's like, let's all put the feelings that we have about these things that have happened in this film so far on the table, which doesn't always feel like the most natural thing in the world. Very rarely in our lives do we have those conversations where we're like, here's how I actually feel about this. Look at me while I tell you how I feel about it.

And let's talk for an hour. And let's look at this lake. Right. On the other hand, if you are Sterling K. Brown delivering it, maybe you can sell me on it. It works. I could see, I could certainly see him being nominated. I could also see if they run their campaign well, him winning because it is kind of showy in the way that you need. Now he's going to be competing against people like Brad Pitt. So will Sterling K. Brown, Sterling K. Brown was out at AFI Fest doing Q and AAs this weekend.

Brad Pitt wasn't out doing that. You know, we'll see what happens in that respect. I could also see a world in which this is nominated for Best Original Screenplay. One thing that was cool that Trey talked about when he was on the show was how he wrote the script, which was he essentially built it the way you might build like a pyramid. And it's full of color-coded sections. It's got the music cues inside of it. And it seemed like a different kind of document

than what you usually see in a screenplay. It sounds like he kind of broke every rule in screenwriting. And you could make the case that he broke every rule in the movie too by just kind of going for it at every turn. And having this bifurcated storytelling approach, I think some people will appreciate and they'll see that there was a lot of storytelling approach, I think some people will appreciate, and they'll see that there was a lot of intentionality. I think some people will say, this is really overwrought and really overwritten. And maybe it's more about the filmmaking than it

is about the writing. It's hard to say. I think actually, similarly to Ford versus Ferrari, if this becomes a kind of A24 hit, I could see it carrying on. If it makes $20 million, all of a sudden maybe the Farewell gets nudged out another A24 project and something like this slides in

yeah but the Farewell and Ford vs. Ferrari are feel good movies and Waves is just very upsetting even if it completely works for you

and even if the script comes together and you're moved by the emotion it's not a feel good experience very very true it wouldn't be crazy if a movie like this got nominated for best picture I think of like Beast of the Southern Wild where you're

like, what? Who? What is this? How did that get nominated? Stuff like that does happen. Again, like super, super problematic, but manipulative and emotionally uplifting. Waves is not uplifting. It's just, I mean, I think it's supposed to be. And maybe there's like some release of, you know, teenage masculinity with like Frank Ocean blaring. But it's just like, that is not as mainstream as even Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is operating on another level. It's also a very young movie

in contrast to Ford versus Ferrari. The music cues are Frank Ocean, as you say, Kanye West, Kid Cudi. It's not Tyler, the creator. It's not. I think it's going to be too loud and too emotional spray for people. Speaking of emotional spray, Honey Boy. Gotten a bunch of people who have asked us to talk more in depth about this movie.

As far as the Oscars goes, it's very obvious that there is a Shia LaBeouf pathway to being nominated for this same category we're talking about with Sterling K. Brown. This, of course, is a sort of autobiographical tale of Shia LaBeouf's childhood as the star of a Disney Channel TV show. And his similarly domineering father guiding his life and maybe ruining his life at times. Shia plays his own father in the film. Noah Jupe plays a young Shia. Lucas Hedges plays an older version of Shia. There own father in the film. Noah Jupe plays a young Shia. Lucas Hedges plays an older version of Shia. There he is again, Luke. Honey Boy and Waves would be an interesting double feature about the problems of fatherhood in America in the 21st century. I think that this

is a very effective movie that I didn't love. And in its opening weekend a couple of weeks ago, it actually did quite well at the box office. If you look at the deep details of box office reporting, there was a big drop off this weekend in terms of how it performed. And it's going to be a little bit harder for this movie to get into Wyoming and Texas and Ohio. And that's a big part of this, too. I think this is facing a very similar issue that Waves is facing, which is, will enough people see it to care about it to create enough consciousness to make old people pop the screener and to watch it before the Oscars? I think that what this has going for it is that it's Shia LaBeouf playing his father in an autobiographical tale.

And Shia LaBeouf is extremely famous and has also just had a very public, tough time of it. And there is fascination in it. The Oscar narrative is really built in. And a lot of people are just kind of like, well, I guess I want to see what goes on here. And he is remarkable in it. It's a really unsettling film. I think it's pretty well done. And I actually admire the film for presenting it as an unresolved situation. It's not like, spoiler alert, but at the end of the character, at the end of the movie, it's not like the Lucas Hedges, older Shia character is like, I'm fixed and I have clarity

about fathers and sons and, you know, what the rest of my life will mean. It's just about his very tough experience with his family and with his career. And it's been really interesting to watch Shia promoting this movie, having seen it and knowing what his working life means to him in his head, at least expressed through the film. So I think it's uncomfortable, but also, you know, there are a lot of things that are uncomfortable in tabloids that people read all the time. I think there is just kind of like a base fascination with it that helps this movie. Yeah, I think actually this movie, Waves, and Marriage Story all have something interesting in common, which is the creators of the films are in their promotional trail have been forced to talk about the worst thing that has happened in their life over and over again. For Shia, it's a sort of abuse during his childhood

and then how that has affected his relationship to his work. For Waves, it's essentially Trey's estranged father dying and him confronting him before his death and then spending time with him. And obviously for Noah Baumbach, he went through a divorce. The whole movie is about a divorce. And all art is personal and all creative expression comes from a place of sincerity,

but this kind of literalizing of your life into a movie and then having to talk about it all the time to get an award is so weird. It's just such a, and I am guilty of having interviewed people and been like, so tell me about what's inside your soul right now in front of a microphone. But it is a bizarre process that we put people through. I sort of, I mean, they also do put it through them, put themselves through it. I mean, you have to know in this day and age when you're making a movie like this and you're going to submit yourself for awards that you're going to be talking about this a lot. And there is also distance built into all of them. I think part of the discomfort for me and the interest for me in Honey Boy is that there's not a lot of distance. It just all seems very close. And I think Noah Baumbach and Trey Edward Schultz have kind of, they've figured out their talking points. They've worked through some of it and they know what to say. And, you know, Shia is, he's an actor.

He's a raw nerve coming out to try his best to talk about it. And I've never seen anything like that. I also, it's November. I mean, I don't mean to concern troll people, but I'm just like, oh God, how is he handling this? I know, it's scary. It's a very intense thing. It's an incredible performance. The movie is absolutely worth seeing if only for the performance. And there are some interesting moves that Alma Harrell, who directed the movie, makes as well. She's a very interesting filmmaker. This is her first narrative feature film, I believe.

I don't see any nominations, but I could be wrong. I think actually Shia's reputation might ultimately hold him back from the people that he's not going to meet and be able to talk about this film with. We shall see. Out of the first three movies that we've talked about, I really only see one nomination coming out of it, which is just the best picture for Ford versus Ferrari.

Now, Ford versus Ferrari. Okay. Now, Ford versus Ferrari probably will get some below-the-line stuff. Maybe Waves gets some below-the-line stuff, but I doubt it. Mm-hmm. Honey Boy, no. This next movie is an interesting one. Now, I mentioned I've got Scott Burns on the show later. He wrote and directed The Report.

You and I have not discussed The Report. What did you make of this movie? I learned a lot. Yeah. report. You and I have not discussed the report. What did you make of this movie? I learned a lot. You know, I thought it was effective in that it had an idea. It's interesting. There is a scene in which Zero Dark Thirty is playing in the background of the movie, and that's a very intentional choice. And in a lot of ways, this movie is a corrective to Zero Dark Thirty. And it's very necessary. I think I agree with the politics personally of the report more.

And I also agree with the stakes of Zero Dark Thirty. I mean, which is, I'm trying to be honest, but it is very funny to, it's about a piece of paper and they do their best to imbue the piece of paper with importance and tension and larger significance. Well, it's about 6,700 pieces of paper for the record. And that's the edited version. I think the other one is 70,000.

But I thought it was fascinating in conversation with Zero Dark Thirty and with how we talk about the torture report and all of these issues. I thought, you know, I'm a nerd, so I love it when Adam Driver was in a room with some paper, like doing his journalism thing, his All the President's Men quality. Yeah. As a guy who loves spreadsheets, I connected with this movie in a unique way. Sure. But ultimately, at the end of the day, do spreadsheets make for good movies? It's a very, it's a good question. Now, if you look at Scott Burns's credits, all of his movies have a kind of, they're almost always about serious issues,

but they have a whimsical, almost arch and funny approach to them, whether they're, you know, categorical earth shattering disease or fraud inside corporate America. You know, he in the laundromat, it's pure comedy approach through a financial crisis that swept hundreds of thousands of people in the world. This movie is very serious. It's played very straight. There is no comedy in the movie. And I found that an interesting choice for him is for his,

I guess it's not his directorial debut necessarily, but it is his big breakout directing feat. And when I saw it in September, my reaction was this is essentially a feat of cohesion and coherence. I completely understand what happened here. I understand what the side of right is. The performances are engrossing and it is impressive. But it is ultimately a movie, like you're saying, about document analysis. And it doesn't have any of the daring do of in all the president's men because

they didn't really take anybody down. There's no Watergate payoff here. I think I walked away from the movie feeling like, wow, the world is bad. Political institutions are cynical and potentially evil and destructive, and they operate with impunity. And similar to your point about waves, I think people will have a hard time walking away from this movie being like, we should reward this because movies are so great. It's very true. The only exception to that is that at my screening, I was seated a few seats down from an older couple who I didn't know them and had no conversation with them. But from how they were interacting with the movie and commenting on it in real time, I would classify them as MSNBC moms and dads. And which, if you don't know, there's a great piece by Kat Stoffel, which is just about a certain generation of MSNBC viewer

who has made impeachment and all of these things their hobby. I'm married to one. I'm with you on this journey. Anyway, these two individuals were shocked and angry and were very much wrapped up in the moral we live in and in the time we live in and certainly in the political environment we live in, there is an older category of voters who spend a lot of time consuming this content and might also consume this. I think people will absolutely watch it. It's notable that this movie is being released by Amazon. It was in theaters on Friday, but it'll be on Amazon in about three weeks. And you could just inhale this movie at home, you know, just like brew a pot of coffee or pour yourself some brown liquor and sit down with a snack. And you'll definitely just like enjoy it. You might look at your phone six times, but you'll enjoy it. It's very well made. If Adam Driver was not in Marriage Story this year, it would be an interesting case for the subtleties of Adam Driver as a performer. Because unlike Marriage Story, in which he sings Sondheim

and, you know, screams at the top of his lungs and abuses himself physically, this is very low-key and sort of simmering and burning. And it's a different kind of talent and skill. There's just no way he's going to be nominated for this movie because of Marriage Story. Also, how far does subtle performances get you?

Oh, it depends. I mean, usually not far, but you never know. The one person who I think has a chance to be nominated is Annette Bening. I know we've been talking about this, and I saw this movie, and I was just like, with all respect to Annette Bening, who is one of our great actresses, like, what? Yeah, it's fine. And I get...

I felt this way also when I finally saw Ford vs. Ferrari, and Katrina Balfoy had been rumored for a Ford vs. Ferrari performance and she's very good in it, but what? We have to stop accepting these just like wife or the old lady who sits by and gives one semi-emotional speech validating the men as supporting actress roles. We just stop it.

Everybody stop. This is not enough. I think that Katrina Balfoy talk, which I think is dissipated now upon its release is essentially an effort to put a little bit of feminine heft behind a movie that doesn't really have any. The Annette Bening thing is different. The Annette Bening thing is like, this is one of our great actresses. She's never won. She's only going to have five or six more plum roles to get nominated for. She's playing a real person. It's a pretty adequate, if not impressive,

replication of Dianne Feinstein. She's just highlighting things on a paper the whole time. Come on. Have some respect for Annette Bening. Let her do more than use a highlighter. Yeah. If you ask me, Annette Bening should have won for The Grifters 25 years ago. She should have won for American President. She was great. Annette Bening is great. I don't see a world in which this movie gets Oscar nominations, but you never know. Maybe Best Original Screenplay. Maybe. It's funny, too, because this is running in Best Original Screenplay, and I don't understand why.

Because it's based on a Vanity Fair article and this massive document that Dan Jones put together. And yet it's running in Best Original Screenplay. Anyway. I can't. I do not understand how those rules work. I mean, maybe some of the interior life of these individuals is made up. I guess so. Okay.

One thing that I can recommend about the report as well is it is a really impressive collection of supporting actors. It's like— Everyone's in it. It's like one of those like—it's a little bit like an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Yes. You know, where it's just like, oh, that person. Oh, like, there's Maura Tierney, and there's Coreyahl and there's Ted Levine and Michael C. Hall is in this. And John Hamm.

Tim Blake Nelson, John Hamm, there he is. Like, for whatever reason, a lot of people just decided they wanted to be a part of this film, probably because it's a really good script and really good scripts don't come around very often. But it is a very fun sort of like spot the quality actor sort of movie. Speaking of spot the quality actor movies, Dark Waters. Dark Waters was the mystery movie of the Oscar season for the first few months. It was originally called Dry Run. It is a Todd Haynes movie, sort of.

Todd Haynes directed it from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa. It's similar to the report in that it's about a real-life issue, and it is docudrama. This is a strange film. I will say I really, really liked it,

but the reasons that I liked it are maybe imperceptible to most people that will watch it. And I think it's because I knew this is a Todd Haynes movie, I'm looking at what Todd Haynes does, and I'm looking at the patterns that he creates in movies and I'm reaching for them. Most people, I'm very curious to know what they think of this.

What did you think of it? I think it succeeds on a slightly broader level than just kind of being like, huh, interesting Todd Haynes take on this established genre. But I was surprised at how depressing this movie is because you do go into a movie that you know to be a docudrama about a lawyer taking on a large corporation and you expect a certain like uplifting, like moral victory. This is why I like this movie. Yeah. And obviously that has a lot to do with Todd Haynes as a director and both the images and the themes that he creates. But it just, it works on its own. You're just kind of like, wow, I am depressed. You know, I don't want to spoil anything, but just so you know,

like big corporations still win in America in 2017. It's the same takeaway as the report. Yeah. It's like, okay, political institutions are immensely powerful and they'll do whatever they want. Right. Corporate institutions are immensely powerful and they'll do whatever they want, be it DuPont or the George W. Bush administration. I thought that this movie gave me a better sense than most of the human cost of these sort of battles. It's usually the lawyer in the movie who is the hero and who has like the big speech at the end. And in this, I think the Bill Kemp performance, who plays one of the,

I guess, plaintiffs, and who kind of sets off the investigation, really sticks out for me. And he's given a lot of space, and you feel emotionally connected to him, which is not always the way in these movies. And you walk away with a sense of the issues rather than with a sense of, like, we did it. Yeah, it's not uplifting. It is fascinating and detail packed. And it has about three or four false endings where every time you think they've achieved something, that originates in West Virginia, which is where this lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo is originally from. He is a Cincinnati corporate attorney who essentially redefines his career

by fighting for the people who have been poisoned by DuPont. And because's a... Because it doesn't make anybody feel good, it's definitely not going to be nominated for a bunch of Oscars. Like, there's just no chance, even though there's a lot of crap that goes into it. There's also a couple things

that really don't work. Just like the Katrina Balfe performance, there's an Anne Hathaway performance in this movie where she plays the dutiful wife who has a big speech. And I love Anne Hathaway.

I think she's an amazing actress. She's pretty good in this. I'm not sure why she wanted to make this. I don't know why it had to be her. She's a big star. I don't understand it at all. And without giving too much away, her character is introduced as a lawyer who quit to raise a family. But as her character and Mark Ruffalo were talking about the case, I really expected her to jump in at some point and help solve the case.

Because why else does an actress as talented as Anne Hathaway take this role? And, you know, that doesn't really happen. It's an unfortunate part of the movie. I think Ruffalo is very, very good in this role and not necessarily doing, they knew! Though he literally says they knew at least six times. He does, but... He actually says they knew. But he doesn't actually do much of the speechifying in the movie.

That falls to Anne Hathaway, to Tim Robbins, to a handful of other characters. It is a much more shaded, kind of rumpled, interior kind of role for him. He's very good. It's a very crowded best actor field. I don't see it happening. I will say I would recommend it just for the Todd Haynes-ness of the movie. The sense of color and space and the dynamics that he's building inside the movie. Also the pacing, which is a little bit more patient than a lot of movies like this tend to be.

If you watch a Civil Action or Erin Brockovich or movies like this, they all have this kind of like thrumming and then a reveal and then a reveal and then a reveal. And then, oh, no, they're going to lose. Oh, just kidding. They're going to win. Like that is the pace of a movie like this. This is a little bit different. I would recommend Dark Waters.

I don't think it is really on the bubble, honestly. I think it's just kind of off the bubble at this point. So the last two movies we're going to talk about, we can't really talk about because they're not coming out until December. But I think of them as interesting entrants here. The first one is The Banker. Yes. We saw The Banker. Yes. We saw The Banker. We did.

The Banker is essentially Apple TV Plus's first Oscar bid. It is a movie that they acquired. They did not develop it. It's directed by George Nolfi, who made The Adjustment Bureau, and it stars Samuel L. Jackson

and Anthony Mackie and Nicholas Holt. Jackson and Mackie play two aspiring land barons in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s who decide that they want to buy a bank so that they can make the loan process more equitable and more available to African Americans in the South. They use Nicholas Holt as their white man, their token white man, to get the job done. It's kind of a fun movie.

Yes. Is it weird to say that? No, I thought it was pretty interesting. I mean, it's literally called The Banker, and it is about the banking system and inequality in America. And I learned a lot. It had me thinking a lot about the distribution of wealth and access to capital in this country then and now. And explains also a lot of this is just about like, again, it's about spreadsheets. It's about buying banks. It's about rearranging things.

And they managed to animate it. It's totally coherent. You know what's happening. You kind of know what the stakes are. I'll be honest. I'm a simpleton, so I didn't see one of the twists coming. And don't you love that also? When you can give yourself away to the movie so you don't see the really, really obvious twist coming. So we're going to talk about The Good Liar a little bit later in the show, but I had the same reaction. I said, that's you. And you were like, you're a fucking idiot because you didn't see that twist coming. But I know what you mean. I do like that feeling when you don't see something obvious coming. So yeah, I think it is. It's so watchable. That's what you mean. I do like that feeling when you don't see something obvious coming. So, yeah, I think it is. It's so watchable.

That's what it is. And it's a brilliant Apple TV Plus movie in this context because you really can watch it at home if you have to pause or like go do something else. You miss one piece of the banking explanation. You'll get it. Yeah, it's not. If you don't walk away understanding how banks work in America, that's OK. That's not really the purpose of the movie. It has a lot in common with the report in Dark Waters in a way.

It's like this really happened. These people struggled to make this happen. There were some serious consequences to the things that they tried to do. For whatever reason, it's a little bit sunnier. Even though I think maybe we'll talk about it more when the world sees the movie, but I not sure that it should have a sunny ending we need to talk about the the title the end yeah the title cards yeah it's um it's a curious thing I don't think this will compete for very many Oscars I do think that there would be a fun case for Samuel L. Jackson who is just doing the Capital One commercial for two hours in this movie and having a grand old time and Samuel

Jackson he seems like the kind of guy who should just have three or four Oscars. I'd be fine with that. I've never seen him in a movie and been like, he should get off screen. He's always entertaining. Always. He is on the golf course

at one point of this movie, and you just turned to me with a shitting grin, and were like, this is the best movie I've ever seen. There's so much golf in this movie. I know. I love it.

Which is honestly why I think it has a chance. I mean, if it's a movie dedicated to Samuel L. Jackson playing golf, like 40% of the Academy is like, I'm in. You absolutely love to see it. It opens in theaters on December 6th, and then I think it hits Apple TV sometime in January.

The last movie on the list, we're going to spend a lot more time on on this show, but I want to underline it before we go. Just like four of the other movies we've talked about here, this is also a docudrama based on real events. Interesting trend here. All the bubble movies

are docudramas. Bombshell. I'll say, much like most of these movies, I like this movie. And I think it's well made. Whether it is an Oscar movie has been racking my brain

ever since I saw it. It's obviously the story of Fox News and the women inside of Fox News who came forward and talked about how Roger Ailes had harassed them or abused them in some way. It features some very strong performances. It's directed by Jay Roach, who has made Game Change and Recount, along with Austin Powers and a number of other comedies, has a deft hand with the kind of almost lighthearted, serious docudrama. It's a very strange movie, though.

Not just because it makes the employees of Fox News its heroes, which I think is probably the number one thing that it has going against it. We will be talking about that at great length. But it's very strange because it is split into three parts in a way with three lead characters. Charlize Theron plays Megyn Kelly in a bizarrely accurate transformation. Alarming how good it is, especially the first 20 minutes. She is just kind of doing Megyn Kelly on Fox News in this movie. And it's honestly like it's Megyn Kelly. I haven't seen anything like it.

I agree. It seems sort of stupid to say she tricked me into thinking it was Megyn Kelly, but she did trick me. I mean, it looks like stock footage that they have inserted into the movie, especially in the beginning, as you say. The second character is, of course, Gretchen Carlson. It's played by Nicole Kidman. And I think actually a very good performance that is probably going right under the radar.

Yes. This will be the least touted of the three major ones. Maybe even the four major ones if we include John Lithgow as Roger Ailes. Which is some of the tension of the movie in a nutshell. But keep going. And the third is Margot Robbie, who plays a kind of composite figure

who is a woman who works behind the scenes at Fox News in what I think is probably her best performance. I thought she was really great. Now, I don't know if the character is as fully baked as I wanted that character to be, but she has a couple of moments that had me thinking, oh, this actually is like, maybe she actually is the second coming of Charlize or someone like that, where she's going to be able to carry the torch for movies for 20 years. And I'm not sure that I ever really felt that way about her as a performer, even in I, Tonya, even in The Wolf of Wall Street, even in some of the films that she's best known for.

What did you make of that trifecta of women? I thought they were all very good. And I just think Charlize is astonishing, even though that character is the one to me that is the most complicated. And we'll talk about it. But she's playing Megyn Kelly and she's the star of the movie. So you connect your own dots. I think that it is the type of performance that is so often rewarded at the Oscars. And especially it's a pretty weak year for actresses, as we've just talked about, because Annette Bening and Anne Hathaway are in the race. So, you know, I love them. All respect to them. It's just those are not dynamite performances, and these are

dynamite performances. And I think there's vice is the model that I'm using right now in terms of it's late in the year, it's politically charged, it's people wearing makeup. And it has a clear vision. Well, I don't – it thinks it has a clear vision of the issue. It's politics that are interesting. Yeah. But, you know, you could say the same of Vice. Absolutely. Vice definitely had a vision. Did anyone really totally understand what it was?

Or people interpreted it differently. And I think people will interpret Bombshell differently. But it is a loud, outspoken movie. And I feel with movies like this, especially if you've got three performances, then the actor performances carry it a really long way in terms of best picture as well. I agree. You know, you have made the point of saying that you're essentially voting your conscience when you vote the Oscars.

You're not voting your taste in a weird way. And this movie will be an interesting test of that. Because as I say, affirming Megyn Kelly as a cinematic hero is complicated in quote-unquote liberal Hollywood. And even though Charlize is perhaps one of, it's certainly one of the best actors of her generation, probably one of the few people, I would put her like near the top of people I just like to watch in a movie.

We did a career arc earlier this year with her. Long Shot, I think, is probably the most underrated movie of the year at this point. She's terrific all the time. She's on the campaign trail a lot. She is running. She is doing a lot of stuff right now for this movie. She's a producer of the film. I don't know if people are going to get on board with the exciting story of Fox News because all you have to do is turn on Fox News today and realize like nothing has really changed. It's the same network.

Yeah, I think that there is one Margot Robbie scene that really with John Lithgow that really transcends it. And I think people will respond to that. And that was being in a theater watching that with other people. It was silent. It's upsetting and really memorable. And I think if people think they're voting for that and people are voting for Charlize's transformation, which people love a transformation. That's how she won her last Oscar. I just I do think that it will go a long way. And I don't know how many people will be embroiled in the conflict, the self-conflict about what this movie is endorsing and what it isn't endorsing the way that you and I and Film Twitter are. I think Film Twitter will just be unreadable for three to four weeks after this comes out.

I don't know how that corresponds to Oscar voting. We're going to find out. If I had to guess, I think it's going to get all four of these nominations I've underlined. I kind of think so, too. Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Picture. I had it on Best Picture when we did our really irresponsible nominations for that reason. I just kind of think it's late in the game, but showy enough that people won't really examine it. Well put.

And in a lot of ways, I think that's the same thing that happened to Vice. We'll keep a close eye on these seven films along with many others throughout the season. Amanda, let's go to Stock Up, Stock Down. If it goes bust, you can make 10 to 1, even 20 to 1 return. And it's already slowly going bust.

Okay, I've got three sad stock downs here. We don't have to spend too much time on them, but I thought they were worth citing. Stockdown Charlie's Angels. This is a stockdown for me because I didn't even see this movie. Yeah. Nor did many people in America. You did see the movie.

I did see this movie. Why did Charlie's Angels flop as badly as it flopped? I mean, I'm... Let me just set the scene for you. I went to see Charlie. I went to a screening of Charlie's Angels. Sean bailed at the last minute, which maybe that's all you need to know. Maybe that's it right there. And I had a sense there was something in the air.

Sure. But also that I felt that it was my duty to go see it because it was a female franchise directed by Elizabeth Banks. Like, at least I should know. And you were like, I don't need to know. Which, there we go. I went to this screening and they were handing out vouchers for Charlie's Angels inspired haircuts. I'm sorry.

And they weren't even giving the free haircuts. It was like $20 off a Charlie's Angels inspired haircut. Where would one go to get the haircut? I don't know because I kind of, I saw the little handout on the desk and had an allergic reaction and backed away as soon as possible because I was so angry. Just so you know, that is not standard practice at a screening that people are handing out vouchers for haircut discounts. Don't take free stuff at screenings either. That's a tip for you out there. are a couple of young women from a Los Angeles radio station playing the Ariana Grande song that was written for this movie on loop and trying to get young women in the crowd to come

sing karaoke of an Ariana Grande song, which is just never a good idea. Unless you are Mariah Carey, you should not be karaokeing Ariana Grande or vice versa. And again, that's not common practice to turn it into like a club a club for 12-year-olds. But that is essentially the strategy of this entire movie is that we turn it into something fake fun for dumb 12-year-olds. Not even smart 12-year-olds. Dumb 12-year-olds. And I think this movie didn't work because there's franchise fatigue and people don't go to see movies to see like a reboot of Charlie's Angels that no one really remembers from 2000.

Though, you know what? I loved that movie. I had a great time and it was much better than this. But I think also this movie is so offensively low as common denominator. It's not even bad. It's coherent. You kind of understand what's happening. The plot's a little silly at times, but you know who the three characters are.

You know where they are in time. And it's not embarrassing, except that the politics and who it's aimed at are just so, so depressing. So the one positive thing that you said to me when you saw it was that Kristen Stewart is really funny in the movie. She's very funny in it. And that seems to be the only thing that people have taken away from it is Kristen Stewart is funny. Mm-hmm. Which is depressing unto itself. I'm a huge Kristen Stewart fan, and I still skip this movie. The other two women who are Charlie's angels are played by Naomi Scott, who we last saw

in Aladdin as Jasmine, and a woman named Ella Balinska, who I do this for a living, and I don't know who that is. She's a model. I mean, I don't know whether she was actually professionally a model, but it was very clear to me. And listen, I'm very pro-attractive people in movies. I mean, you know, I'm not some... That's a bold stance. I'm not like some activist for whatever, you know, I'm not as evolved as I should be on acceptance. I want to uglify movies. We need more ugly people in movies. I'm not the person to be like, these are unrealistic standards at a movie. I'm like, yes, give me unrealistic standards. And even by that, I was just like, wow, these are three skinny, skinny, super attractive women who are here just to look as hot as possible.

And you want more. So this weekend, I did something sort of depressing, which is alone on a Sunday morning morning I watched the video for the Charlie's Angels song that you were identifying. It's not just an Ariana Grande song. It also features Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey. So here's my take. Why aren't those the three stars of the Charlie's Angels movie? Shouldn't that be the movie? Wouldn't that be a more entertaining and useful movie?

That would be a good music video. And maybe Charlie's Angels in 2019 should just be a music video of Ariana Grande recreating it with Miley and Lana Del Rey. There is a great case to be made that, number one, this is a sexist TV show from the 70s that didn't need to be recreated for whatever wave of feminism that we're on. And also that no one cares about a reboot of a reboot of a TV show from the 70s. I agree with you. You know, we could all spend more time. Would I like to see like a fun movie starring three spies who happen to be women who have like taste and don't listen to top 40 pop for children? Yes, I would. But this movie is not it.

This movie made eight and a half million dollars on 3,500 screens. Another This movie made $8.5 million on 3,500 screens. Another movie that made $5.6 million on 2,500 screens is called The Good Liar. This is a sort of a cat and mouse movie starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren. Sort of. Who's the cat and who's the mouse in this movie? Well... It seems like the movie is the mouse and the audience is the cat and they just can't quite catch the mouse. Are we spoiling it? No, no. I don't want to spoil this movie for anybody who is desperate to watch it six months from now on Netflix.

But just not a very successful thriller. The problem is that, like, 70% of it is about elder care. And then it becomes, which is a serious issue. I don't mean to denigrate that issue, but you think, I really honestly did not know much about this movie when we went to see it, except it was Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, and was like con people. And I assumed because they're both British, they would be set in London or Europe and its environs. And I was like, great. I love an international spy thriller. And then it was

a lot about elder care. And then a twist that's even more depressing than elder care. Yes. I guess we shouldn't spoil anything. Very strange movie. Directed by Bill Condon, who's directed a lot of very successful films in the past, but this one just did not work for me. If you want to watch an Ian McKellen, Bill Condon movie, I would recommend Gods and Monsters.

It's a totally different kind of a film about Hollywood. Stockdown, Earthquake Bird. Did you see a single person talking about Earthquake Bird this weekend? Not besides you. Earthquake Bird is a movie starring Alicia Vikander. We got to get Alicia Vikander on the phone. We got to start helping her pick projects. I really like her.

I think she's a good actor. I don't know what's happened since she won an Oscar. It's been some dark times. There's a Tomb Raider movie in there somewhere. This is a very misbegotten thriller set in Japan that went straight to Netflix. Sheesh. Did you watch it? No, of course not.

I said that it wasn't good, so I didn't. It's not very good. And this also was directed by Wash Westmoreland, who directed Still Alice, which Julianne Moore won an Oscar for. The pedigree is here in this movie. It just really didn't work. And I think that there was a hope that maybe they could replicate the bird box experience

by putting bird in the title. It's based on a novel called Earthquake Bird. Okay. That's not the case. Yeah. And it's so interesting when, you know, Netflix is having a tremendous season. Their Oscar films are doing so well in the punditocracy

right now and they're likely to do very well when nominations begin. And by the way, nominations begin on Thursday with the Independent Spirit Awards so tune into the Big Picture

where we'll be talking about that. But this movie is not successful. And it's interesting what happens when, you know, Doctor Sleep comes out or Charlie's Angels comes out

and we're like, the fuck in studios? They don't know what they're doing. What a waste of money. What a terrible use of IP. Earthquake Bird, bad. No one's going to talk about it because it's bad, but bad.

Well, does that matter? It matters when you spend like $100 million and no one goes to see your movie because that's how you make money. But Netflix can afford to make some mistakes. They certainly can. Stock up, the Snyder Cut. Oh, yeah, yeah. Are you ready for the Snyder Cut? Here's the thing. Do you think Ben Affleck actually knows what the Snyder Cut. Oh, yeah. Are you ready for the Snyder Cut? Here's the thing. Do you think Ben Affleck actually knows what the Snyder Cut is? I know that he tweeted, but do we have any evidence that he's running his social media account?

Let's set the stage for people. Okay. So obviously, hashtag release the Snyder Cut is a phenomenon that has been going on for well over a year now. It is essentially a fan base that is eager for the version of the film Justice League that is directed by Zack Snyder but was finished by Joss Whedon to be released with Zack Snyder's vision.

His vision of the movie, his cut, his edit. They believe that there is an extant version somewhere in the world and they want to see it because they don't like what Joss Whedon did

to the DCEU. Earlier in the year, Rob Harvilla wrote a great piece about this on The Ringer. He joined me on the show. We talked about it. It has become a kind of assaultive political movement to release the Snyder Cut. For some reason, yesterday, Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck, and Ray Fisher, who plays Cyborg in the Justice League film, all tweeted, hashtag release the Snyder Cut. Isn't it because it was the two-year anniversary of Justice League? Is that what it was? I believe so.

I buy that. So it was a coordinated. My understanding is that this was a coordinated. I read something about it. It is the two-year anniversary of when it was released. It is. Great. Okay.

So the fact that these powerful people, and we should say Gal Gadot is still making Wonder Woman movies, and Ben Affleck is still making a lot of movies with Warner Brothers. The Way Back is a Warner Brothers movie. So to me, it indicates that somebody knows something, that there's something going on, that Zack Snyder retweeted all of these tweets. You know, the likelihood of Justice League, even the Snyder Cut being even halfway decent seems just absolutely minimal to me. Yeah, but that doesn't matter.

I mean, this is just a great story about how people's interest in conspiracy theories and the version of not even a movie that exists online, but the narrative around a movie are more compelling to people than an actual movie itself. That is well put. Yeah. And I mean, and we see that all the time, that there is the film that exists online and the memes and the discourse and the public conception of something. And then there is the actual piece of art. I was having a conversation this weekend with someone who went to see Joker a couple weeks ago and putting my feelings aside about Joker, this person was just like, I went to see it

and I was like, oh, I didn't think that that was that bad. Because they had heard so much about all of the problems with Joker and the violence and yada yada. And they were like, huh, that's it? Was this person an Academy voter? Because I think that's what a lot of Academy voters have been saying. I really do think that that's true as well. But this is, it's, and it's not just movies. It's how we experience all things now. There is the conversation and the hysteria and the investment is like a lot more iterative

and people can spend a lot of time tweeting about the Snyder Cut. This is a passion project for a lot of people, as Rob's piece illustrates. And you know what? Everybody's got to have something. This is a weird choice for me, personally, because I think you're right. There's no way it can be that good and then they'll be upset again. Well, or they'll convince themselves that it's wonderful. There are a lot of people in the world who love Man of Steel, who love the first Ben Affleck Batman. Who knows? We'll see what happens. I do make you this solemn promise. If this film is released, I'm in and I will live

podcast it. Please tune in to YouTube.com. Does that mean that we'll do our own director's commentary? you'll we'll watch it yeah i'll explain to you the the mythic origins of every character in justice league in real time and i'll just be like what's happening yes okay should be a good pod let's go to the big race well mama look at me now i'm'm a star. Speaking of Joker, interesting thing happened for Joker over the weekend. At Camera Image, the annual cinematography film festival,

Joker DP Lauren Schur was awarded the Golden Frog. The Golden Frog to go along with the Golden Lion, which Joker won in Venice, commemorates the best cinematography in a film in a year. So we're going to talk about best cinematography. Okay. I feel like Joker could win best cinematography. And if it does, it's going to get like a shitload of below the line nominations and a best picture nomination and a best actor nomination.

And there's going to be like eight nominations for Joker, which also has made a billion dollars. How are you feeling about that? I think that's inevitable. In our predictions, I put Joker on Best Picture. Did I not? No, you didn't. I have no recollection.

Yeah, because it does seem that there are so many people just been like, huh, looked really good. Didn't think it was that bad. And, you know, even the conversation that I had, I did my best to politely listen to this person. And then I said, I kind of agree with you. Here's my thing, though. I thought it was really dumb. And the person was like, yeah, I guess so. Classic Amanda criticism. Well, I think it is actually, like, really stupid, both in the, like, hey, that's Batman, but also in the basic, it doesn't, like, have a grasp of sociology, you know?

So I just thought it was stupid. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't look good and that it doesn't have stakes and a great performance. And also, you know, a lot of the Academy is intellectually challenged. How about that? So I think, and I do think you're right, that this is how it happens. It gets a lot of below the line stuff. And then the Joaquin performance propels it to best picture. Should we talk about the one flying the ointment there?

Sure. Do you know who else saw Joker this weekend? I believe it was the president, Donald Trump. Yes, the president did, and he reportedly enjoyed it. So now that is politicized as well. From Greta Gerwig to Donald Trump. Also Phoebe Waller-Bridge, by the way. Tough, tough loss for me. Greta and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in one week being like, Joker, it was fascinating. Here is the thing. Joker's good. It's fine. It's very well made. No, yeah, it's pretty well made.

I think the, no, it is really well made unless you, if you discount the script, which I consider writing to be a part of making a film. Okay. That's just my take. I can't dispute that inevitable fact. Yeah, but I do think Greta Gerwig and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, two brilliant women who I respect. They are actors as well as writers. And I think that the performance and the showiness of it really does speak to people who do that work. And those people are also the largest voting bloc in the Academy.

And the cinematography from Lauren Schur is interesting because this is the kind of movie that can be transformational for a career. Lauren Schur is certainly a very successful DP. He shot The Hangover and The Hangover 2 and I Love You Man and The Dictator and War Dogs, but not really a movie like this. And I wonder if his next movie is going to be like Paul Thomas Anderson's next film. It'll be interesting to see where his career goes from here or if he just keeps making Todd Phillips movies. Other potential slash likely nominees in this category, which is, of course, a little bit of a point of interest for a nerd like me.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's Robert Richardson, who has been nominated nine times and has won three times. This is a person who has been significantly involved in the careers of Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Every Quentin Tarantino movie he's shot, he's been nominated for. You can make the case that this is the most impressive work he's ever done because of the complexity of recreating 60s Hollywood. Yes.

And the way that it's meant to look and the way that color works and the sort of stillness of this movie relative to other Tarantino movies. I just need Chris here to start yelling about the fucking lights. The fucking lights. You know, Robert Richardson, I'll watch any movie he shoots. He's just an absolute genius. Like, he shot Inglourious Basterds, Django, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon. He won for Hugo and The Aviator and JFK.

He is an absolute legend of the form. Rodrigo Prieto, for the Irishman, seems likely. Also had a kind of physical challenge in integrating the de-aging technology into the camera work. He shot Silence for Scorsese, and he was nominated for that, and he was nominated for Brokeback Mountain. He's not one of my favorite stylists. I don't want to cast dispersions. I would say, actually, the look of The Irishman is not what I found most appealing about it. I think it was much more

the mood and the shape of the story and the stakes of the story. I prefer the sort of Michael Ballhouse era of Martin Scorsese cinematographers. That's just me.

The Lighthouse. Jaron Blaschke. This would be cool if this happened. I know it would be cool for everybody. I mean, this does seem like the, this and we're going to talk about 1917, which is Roger Deakins. But these movies were in large part made to be like, hey, look at this cinematography.

Yes. You know, it is a very demonstrative, athletic form of filmmaking that this category sometimes rewards. It was interesting looking at the history of this category and it is kind of the most in group of the categories. Everyone who has ever won has like 18 nominations. There is a whole section on the Wikipedia page of just like multiple winners and nominations because it's a pretty small group. So and a lot of the people that you have listed down here have never been nominated before. It's true. It's an interesting mix of zero nominations and like 14 nominations.

So next we go to Phenom Papamichael, who has been nominated one time, who I think many people believe is one of the best cinematographers. He's worked with Alexander Payne quite a bit. His work on Ford versus Ferrari is very impressive. For a similar reason you're identifying, it is a kind of athletic exposition in a way of what car racing is really like. And there's so much work done on the track and in the car, especially that scene where Henry Ford II rides with Carol Shelby after they have

built the car. That's such an intense, heart-pounding, very funny scene, very well shot. You're aware of the camera, which tends to be what people are looking for in this category. That's exactly right. That's actually what's so good about Robert Richardson's work is even though it can be very showy, you're not necessarily aware of the camera at all times, but that's a whole other conversation. 1917, you mentioned it. It's Roger Deakins. I mean, this just seems like this was created to get Deakins a second Oscar. We haven't seen the movie yet.

We're seeing it soon. No, but we have seen the footage of him running in the trench. That's true. They have been pushing Roger Deakins on us aggressively. He's got 14 nominations in his career. Only one win two years ago for Blade Runner 2049. Ridiculous. Let's just do a quick rundown of the movies that he shot.

The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, Kundun, O Brother Where Art Thou, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James, The Reader, True Grit, Skyfall, Prisoners, Unbroken, and Sicario, among many other great films that he shot for the Coen brothers and a great many geniuses. Roger Deakins, perhaps the greatest living cinematographer. The Two Popes, Cesar Charlone, zero nominations.

He won the Silver Frog at Camrymage. Frog is just a very funny choice. I would love to have like a bronzed frog on my mantle. Really? That's the animal that you would go with? What animal would you like to have? I don't know. I don't really go for animal figurines. Really? That's the animal that you would go with? What animal would you like to have? I don't know. I don't really go for animal figurines.

What? Got it. A Hidden Life, Jörg Vidmer, zero nominations. Jojo Rabbit, Mihaly Malmer Jr., zero nominations.

This is the guy who shot The Master. Oh. This guy's a genius. Parasite, Hong Kyung-pyo, zero nominations. The Lion King, caleb deschanel six nominations no wins very notable he shot the right stuff the natural flyaway home the patriot the passion of the christ never look away it's also the father

of zoe deschanel and emily deschanel um this would be an interesting nomination because this movie is digitally rendered yes and he he shot some landscapes but he shot no animals and this could signify a change i think in the way that this category rewards its its its artists and i'm very curious to see if caleb deschanel being a very well-known name right plays in his favor if this was a first-timer, I don't think there's any chance he'd be nominated or she'd be nominated, but with that name,

with Caleb Deschanel never having won, he just was nominated last year for Never Look Away, a movie that most people haven't seen, and I think he was nominated because they were like, I like that guy. That guy made the natural. He'll take it more seriously. We'll see.

The Painted Bird, which is a film I have not yet seen by Vladimir Smutny. We'll see. The Painted Bird, which is a film I have not yet seen by Vladimir Smutny. We'll see. Zero nominations for Vladimir. And then Yorick Lasso for Little Women. Zero nominations. Were you struck by the cinematography of Little Women?

There are a few very memorable scenes, yes. which speaks to me and leans into the epic quality of it at times while also managing to communicate like the four girls in a room talking all over each other energy of it. So I think it's not as obvious. It's just kind of, it's paint really, I guess. Just like the Joker painting his face. Amanda, we're going to have a lot more to say on this show later in this week. I mentioned Independent Spirit Awards will be announced. We'll also be talking about A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and the long career of Tom Hanks. We'll see you then. Now let's go to my conversation with the writer-director, Scott Z. Burns.

I'm very excited to be joined by Scott Z. Burns, who has a new film, The Report. Scott, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. Scott, this seems like the single biggest adaptation of a document in movie history. Daniel Jones's report is 6,700 pages. Is that accurate? The report that he did for the Senate Intelligence Committee was 6,700 pages. It was then reduced to 500 pages. It was what was termed an executive summary. So the document that the general public can read and that I read is 500 pages and you can find it online. Did it immediately strike you as a movie? How did this become your movie? The movie started in a very different place. I had read an article in Vanity Fair about Mitchell and Jessen, who are these two Air Force psychologists who are featured

in the film. And they're the guys who are credited with creating this program. They went to the CIA after 9-11 and said that they had a special way of getting information out of detainees. And we didn't even have any prisoners at that point, but they were able to persuade the agency to invest in this program and to give them a contract. They were not CIA officers. They were independent contractors, and they came in basically with a product, and the CIA bought it. So I started writing a movie about them,

and I was hoping that it would turn into kind of a Mike Nichols catch-22 comedy, very, very dark comedy. They sort of remind me of the semi-farsical hucksters in The Informant or the other films that you've written. They have that, even the things that they did in real life have that tone. Yeah, you know, in Joseph Heller's novel, there's language like Major Minor is the name of a character.

And when I heard even the term enhanced interrogation technique, when what you're really describing is what any human being, if they saw it, would go, oh, you're torturing that person. I was interested in sort of the use and abuse of language to conceal what was going on. And as I learned more, tried to learn more and more about it, it eventually took me to the report, which came out around that moment in time. So that was December of 2014. And once the report was out, I went online and I read it. And in the report, they're referred to by their pseudonyms that Daniel gave them, which are Swigert and Dunbar. And there isn't that much about them. So I called Senator Feinstein's office as a citizen of California and asked if I could be put in touch with the lead investigator. And eventually I was connected to Dan after a number of phone calls. Can you just tell me a bit about what that's like? Do you have to say,

I am a Hollywood screenwriter and I am interested in this? Is it I am just the citizen of this state and I have some questions? I think I did all of those things. You know how to do that. So that was where it started. And interestingly, Dan, because he was the lead investigator, was the person at the senator's office who was in charge of speaking to the press. I don't think there had been a lot of people from the creative community who had called, but I'm sure there were some. And so Daniel and I started having conversations and obviously he was limited to what is in those 500 pages. And even in those 500 pages, if you look as we cover in the movie, there are a host of redactions. And it was a struggle to really make the film

that I intended to do. There just wasn't that information. And a lot of it was going to end up being speculative. But more importantly, in my conversations with Daniel, I began to learn about his process. And I've always been fascinated by the struggles of someone trying to tell a story or someone pursuing the truth. And so I threw away the 60 or 70 pages that I had and started over. And I went to my producer, Jennifer Fox, and said, I think that there's a better story here about this guy, Daniel Jones, and his struggle to get the truth out because it's this incredible Kafkaesque odyssey this guy goes on. And he ultimately does succeed, but at great cost. And in that respect, I sort of saw him as being a descendant of a Frank Serpico

or an Aaron Brockovich or a Karen Silkwood. And I love 1970s political thrillers like The Parallax View and All the President's Men. And I wanted to try and do something that was in that tradition. There's something slightly different about him than some of those other characters that strikes me or struck me when I was watching, which is it's essentially a movie about a bureaucrat and that we don't typically see those people as heroic in any meaningful way. In fact, they're often working in opposition to somebody who's trying to reveal the truth. What did Daniel make when you first made contact with him of you trying to position him this way? He was exactly what you said. He was a bureaucrat and he is very humble. He does not really want to get into his personal life very deeply. He wants to answer your question. He is very fact-based and, you know, wants there to be evidence. He's very specific

about language. And, you know, the agreement that we made is when we're talking about the report, because he wasn't the only person I spoke to. I spoke to human rights investigators. I talked to some really amazing journalists who had covered this, most notably, probably Jane Mayer, who wrote a book called The Dark Side. But other people, you know, like Jim Risen, who had written about this for the New York Times. And I spoke to some senators. I spoke to Senator Udall, who was featured in the film, and Senator Whitehouse, and Senator Carl Levin. I wanted to speak to Senator McCain, but he had already become ill by the time we were at that point. So I spoke to people in his office about his feelings because he was really outspoken on this issue. But Dan was very matter-of-fact. And I said to him, I think your story, the story of a guy trying to tell the story is an amazing tracer bullet through this moment in history.

And I would like to do that. the duties of a staffer. Dan was limited in terms of, you don't get to come in and pound on a table in a senator's office when you're a staffer. You don't get to do some of the things that Frank Serpico might have done. So I liked that as a limitation for an actor, and it was something that Adam and I talked about quite a bit. Just the idea of being more controlled than your typical kind of, I don't know, crusading hero.

Exactly. And Adam had come from the Marines. to Juilliard. And he, I think, really understood chain of command and what your limitations are when you're trying to manage Upward in a situation. One of the funny things that happened was when we were prepping the movie, the art department would have questions about what this windowless room looked like or what the senator's office looked like. And I would encourage them to call Dan, but I also wanted to protect Dan's identity. And we made up a pseudonym for Dan, which was Neil Marcus. And I remember at one point Dan saw an email where someone referred to Neil Marcus, and he said, who is Neil Marcus?

And I said, that's you. We made up a name to protect you. And he said, well, A, I don't really need to be protected, but B, my name is already Daniel Jones. Like what could be? He's quite unsearchable. Yeah. And in a way it's sort of this incredibly fitting name for someone who, you know, there's this army of Senate staffers who go to work every day, who really do the research and the bidding of their senators. And it's this army in DC that, you know, we never hear about. And he did his job, you know, When Adam and I started working together, what I told him was, I think the arc of this character is a guy who is a carpenter, who gets a blueprint. And the blueprint is dusty and hard to make out. And you go into a room for years and you work on

building what's on the blueprint. And then you finally take a step back and you realize you built your own gallows. And I think Adam connected with that as a sort of journey that someone who is very rigorous and very earnest in their approach to work, that they would have that experience. Is it a metaphor at all for maybe a script or film that you would worked on? Maybe an entire career. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think some of, some of the choices maybe that I've, I've made, you know, I look at them now and go, why didn't I try and write something that was more obviously commercial.

I feel, and I know this will sound a little bit disingenuous, but I really do feel like stories choose me more than I choose them. You know, that was certainly the case with The Informant. You mentioned the Vanity Fair story that sort of inspired the beginning of this. Is that what you do? Do you go hunting for ideas or is it just strikes you? It just comes to you unexpectedly. No, I hunt. You do. Yeah. I mean, I, I look, I love it when the phone rings and, and someone offers me something really interesting to do. Um, I'm grateful that people want to involve me, but I guess I feel like I'm, I'm my part of my job is to, to read and look at the make this movie? Was there any, was there an anxiety maybe that might be coming with trying to not just tell this

story, which people can find if they want to, but I think one of the feats of the movie is it is so cohesive and coherent and clearly told what's happened here that I don't know that most people will have understood it until they see your movie. Um, no one ever, you know, other than maybe an agent or two, I don't think anyone ever warned me off this. Um, and you know, there was actually a manager in town, not, not my own at the time, but a manager who I heard say, someone should really talk Scott out of doing this. Go write a Bond movie, man. Yeah. And more, you know, when I spoke to the senators,

Senator Udall said to me, and so did Jane Mayer, that they thought that this was the story of an unsung American hero. And I was thrilled when I began to see it that way because I thought, oh, great, I finally have a character who is heroic, which is not something that most people think about Mark Whitaker in The Informant as being or not what Donald Crowhurst was in The Mercy. And so I was just, Jennifer Fox, our producer always says that when I met Dan, I called her up and said, oh my God, there's a hero in this story and he's really young and good looking. I felt happy that I had stumbled into a way of telling the story that involved

a proxy for the audience that was that. Yeah, he might be more good looking than Adam Driver, which is kind of strange that the way that that works out in the world. He's sort of buried in the basement just looking or pouring over data all day long. Yeah, seven years in a basement sort of piecing this thing together. And the thing that I realized was this story, you know, was sort of parsed out to the American public over seven years, and that it was very difficult for people, even journalists who I've spoken to, who said, you know, the whole story was such a sort of slow reveal that it was difficult to connect a lot of the dots.

And so coming to it when I did after the report came out, I was able to do sort of a narrative compression that allows people to understand that. And, you know, I think that there's great joy in hearing a story you've never heard before, but there may even be more joy in hearing a story that you thought you knew and finding out that it's something else. I feel like in the wrong hands, this movie could be incredibly dull and the pacing and the tone of it are really effective. And it's a little bit different, I think, from some of the scripts that you've written in terms of the tone. How did you figure out how to make it move correctly? Now I'm afraid that the other scripts are dull. No, that's not what I mean. I mean, they're just a little funnier. I'd written a play right before this called The Library that was performed in New York City. And the process in the theater is really exciting and cool to me

because you get to do table reads over and over and over again. And you learn something every time. In the middle of that process, I met Ethan Cohen, who's also from Minnesota and also writes plays. And Ethan said to me one night, it's always different, isn't it? And I said, the play. And he said, yeah, it's always different. And I said, I know.

And I said, do you know why? And he goes, I have no idea. And I don't know why either. But the act of hearing it, you know, of listening to what you wrote is sort of painful a little bit for a writer. But I would do table reads with this script and I would sit in the corner and I would try and forget everything and just go, is this boring? Because that to me is, you know is the greatest sin. And confusion is probably the second greatest sin. So those were the two things that I felt like we weren't going to make this movie until I went to a table read and it wasn't confusing and it wasn't dull. And I invited people who didn't know anything

to come and listen. And I realized that because there aren't chase scenes and set pieces in this, that it was probably going to be a little bit like a table read or a radio play, and that it had to work in that environment before it deserved to be put on its feet as a movie. The great thing when you do get to make it as a movie is you get to have actors who are spectacular and bring all sorts of gifts to the process. And I was able to, you know, get an amazing cast. And that I knew was important because it's really a series of obstacles that Dan has to overcome. And first it's, you know, the abandonment of the Republicans of this research project that he's involved in.

And then it's, you know, the resistance of the CIA. And then it's the resistance of a president who I think he probably would have anticipated would have been more friendly to this process. And then it becomes the clock. And I wanted it every successive obstacle for the audience to have a new actor who is formidable. And when you have Annette Bening and Adam Driver on one side of the ball, you know, you need people like Michael C. Hall and Ted Levine and Jon Hamm and Maura Tierney on the other side. And it really, that became sort of the fun of casting was giving Adam new people to have to figure out a way around.

Did you look at any people talking in rooms movies before this? Because it's a very specific kind of movie to make something like that work well. I watched All the President's Men over and over again. And you really understand the screenwriting adage of get in as late as you can and get out as early as you can. And that is really what I tried to do here. The other thing that I think works when people do those kinds of films is you need to end a scene with some sort of question. And then you need to have the next scene answer the question, but in a way that the audience may not have anticipated. That and, you know, Adam's gifts.

I mean, there is nothing that you can watch Adam Driver do that isn't interesting. He's amazing. And, you know, we shot this movie in only 26 days and frequently not in order. And he and I spent a lot of time really titrating his level of frustration, his level of anger to always make sure that there was a room. And, you know, that was incredible to work with somebody who has that much control over their instrument, that they could dial it up or down.

And I could say to him, I think that's going too far for right here, and we need to leave space for what's going to happen two years from now. Was there anything as the director of the movie that didn't make sense once you were shooting that you thought was going to make sense as the writer? Wow, that's a really good question. Well, not when we were shooting, but certainly when I got into the edit, I saw that some of my fascination as a writer with certain aspects of the story was slowing down the story. Like what? Certain rabbit holes that are tempting in the story about the contractors, which I think were sort of vestigial elements of the earlier script, and understanding that I had made the switch to really track Dan Jones and Adam Driver,

and that as interesting as they are as comic relief in a very sort of Shakespearean way, that less is more. And so it was cutting back on that. And Maura Tierney was such a revelation that I wanted more of her. Um, you know, the, I think the gratifying surprise was that, and it's something, it's funny, you know, years ago I had the amazing good fortune to pitch a movie to Sidney Pollack that, that ended up not happening. But we were talking about love stories and he said, you can watch someone fall in love for

three hours or you can watch them fall out of love for three hours, but you can really watch them in love only for about 30 seconds. And there was, even though this isn't a love story, it was a really interesting thought to have about what the central relationship in the movie is because it's between Adam and Senator Feinstein. And there isn't an emotional moment that really exists in nature between a senator and a staffer, certainly not that senator and not this staffer. They're both sort of equally muted in their emotional response because of their professionalism. But what I realized when I saw the two of them together was that there was all sorts of emotion flowing between them that just

comes from human chemistry and that not writing those things, not making them overt, but letting the actors, you know, have to figure out how to communicate their frustration, their anger, their, their pleading with one another, um, without it being in the text was really, that was a big revelation to me. How do you make the decision to dramatize something or make something more concise? Because there's so much information here and it's taking place over such a long period of time. I imagine you have to be cutting and massaging certain aspects of the events. Oh, for sure. You know, I mean, the decision that I had made with Daniel Jones was

anything about the report or anything about the CIA's program, I was going to try and take language directly from the report because I wanted it to be as precise as possible. And so there are huge pieces of the movie that you can actually find verbatim in the report. The personal struggle was something that I asked Dan if Adam and I could have control over because Senator Feinstein is a public person and Annette understood that she needed to do just enough so that you would understand that this is Senator Feinstein, but not so much that it would tip over the movie because other people weren't going to be doing imitations. And I think she stopped at the perfect place. And we, you know, we had a couple of conversations about that

and that was the right decision because Dan Jones is not a famous person, you know, Adam and I talked about this was a clean slate and that we needed to make a person who was obsessive and rigorous. And that that was, you know, that there was a kind of innocence and purity to that, that we were going to see him lose. I mean, in a way, that's what Frank Serpico lost when he realized that the NYPD was corrupt. So within those two worlds, in the first world, yeah, there was compression. I mean, there's a sequence in the movie that represents what Dan Jones and The Guardian called the summer of hell. And it was these series of meetings that Dan had with the CIA after he was done with the report, where they just made outrageous claims about what his findings were, which was stunning to Dan, because I think he anticipated pushback,

but not to this degree. I mean, this is a guy who's now spent five years, I think he anticipated pushback, but not to this degree. I mean, this is a guy who's now spent five years, I think, at that point, going over their own memos. It was their own words. And now they're sitting there in a room with him refuting them. And he would say, well, where's the memo that says that? And they couldn't produce it. Or he would say, but your own words

contradict your current position. So that whole sequence, you know, turns into about two and a half minutes in the middle of the movie where, you know, Senator Feinstein has sent Dan off to try and find common ground with the agency, which is what the Obama administration had hoped for. And Dan said, I thought our job was to get the truth, not to find common ground. And so that was a big act of compression. I mean, that was months and months and months of going back and forth in meetings that we had to compress into about two and a half minutes. I feel like the quote-unquote heroes are the protagonists of most of your stories are people who are operating against

vast conspiratorial forces working against them. And they're not necessarily heroic. Mark Whitaker, not necessarily heroic, but also perceived to be working against his employer and the FBI and sort of everyone all at the same time. And I feel like it's true of almost every movie that you've written. Is that a personal reflection of operating against the system? Is it just the sort of story that you like?

I like people who stand up against systems and question things. I don't think I'm that paranoid or conspiratorial, um, but I don't know that you need to be to, to get to that place. I think there are a lot of systems and institutions, you know, um, I mean, you're talking to somebody who dropped out of high school because I didn't think high school was, you know, what it represented itself to be. I was, you know, a kid who thought that, you know, the American school system was created by Henry Ford to train people to work on an

assembly line and that, you know, they were keeping us there for that reason. And that, you know, I didn't plan on working on an assembly line. So why was this the right institution for me to be in? I don't know that that theory is really entirely valid. It's compelling. I don't know if I'd ever heard that before. I think I'm right about the Henry Ford thing. I'm not entirely sure, but I remember reading that at some point and that seemed to me to be a reason to, you know, to abandon ship after 11th grade. Did that serve you well? Was that the right choice for you? It was, I think, the right choice at the time.

But it was tricky. I mean, it meant I ended up going to college a year early because the requirements to get out of high school in Minnesota were actually less than the requirements to get into college in Minnesota. So I was able to take, you know, my sort of mediocre high school career and persuade the people at the University of Minnesota to let me start, you know, start my freshman year when I was 16. It's a pretty nifty hack. I don't know if I've ever heard of that before. Yeah, it was. I don't quite know actually how I pulled it off.

I remember writing a letter to the dean of admissions and then going for a walk around the campus with him. And, you know, my father was really cool about it. He said, you know, if you can, you know, deal with being in that sort of social construct of being at a university, and the University of Minnesota is a big school, then I think you'll be able to handle the coursework. And he was right about that. I think being a 16-year-old kid at a university where most people are 18, if for no other reason, it makes it really hard to get

into a bar and see a band and get a drink, it was challenging, but probably made me sit at home and read more. Sounds like the kind of thing that one of your characters would do, if I'm being honest. Can we talk about the laundromat a little bit? Sure, I would love to. I thought it was wonderful. And I feel like it's already completely misunderstood. And I thought it was really, really funny. But also, you know, very clearly tragic. How did that come about? How did you develop that?

Because the structure of a movie like that is almost the opposite of The Report, which is so precise. And this is taking something way more episodic and sprawling and kind of spreading it out. So how did that come together? Well, part of that I think was because I had just written the report and I was very eager just as a writer to try and do something else. I think I was so exhausted from the research required to do the report that doing something more playful was really appealing to me. You know, the idea for the structure of that movie came from a film that Soderbergh and I had both loved called Wild Tales by Damien Ziffrin. Great movie. Tales by Damien Ziffrin. And yeah, when I saw that movie, I was just blown away by how funny it was and how true it was to the human experience. And I called Steven up when the Panama Papers leak happened. And I said to him, I don't really want to do, you know, something about the

journalists. I feel that we've seen a lot of those kinds of movies, and I felt like I had sort of just written an investigative procedural kind of thriller. I said I want to write kind of a comic romp, and I want to show the folly of human wealth and this tax system and this incredibly corrupt banking system that allows the richest people in the world to do whatever they want. And as I got into my research, and the other thing that I knew, which also influenced it, you know, I knew I was writing the report for me and I wanted to write something that I felt I could accomplish. That's very much like a writer.

You know, when I write for Stephen, because we've worked together for like 15 years, the sort of price of admission for me with Stephen is I have to put something in front of him that he's never done before. Otherwise, he's going to say no. And so I felt that I had an insight into the story that I hadn't seen him do and that it was going to be a bit of a Greek chorus and that it was going to take this slightly anthological kind of thing that I had seen in Wild Tales. And Steven, before I even really got halfway through the pitch, just said, yeah, do that. And so we sort of turned Mossack and Fonseca into game show hosts. But I felt dramatically that they could be guides to help you understand this very arcane, esoteric financial system that none of us understand. And midway through doing that, Jake Bernstein, who was writing a book at the same time as I was writing the script, I was like, I can't understand this like how does any and he goes well that's the point they've actually built this system so you can't understand because that's how they get away with this and that to me was so upsetting that i thought this is much darker and i started looking at these stories and eventually I found myself speaking to an economist and she

said to me, there actually is enough money in the world for there to be good schools and good roads and good airports and medical systems and cures for cancer and food for kids, it's not that we don't have enough money. It's just that the fantastically, outrageously rich don't pay their fair share. And as long as that's the case, we're going to have a world where these things happen. And Stephen likes Trojan horsing, you know, those messages into comedy because he feels that when people are laughing, their minds open up and they're more accepting. As it turns out, there is neuroscience that backs him up on that. So that was sort of where we started was this was meant to be a romp through the system that when you get to the end of it, you realize, oh my God, even though you think if you're not a billionaire that the system

has nothing to do with you, the system is actually deeply affecting your life. Because if those people were paying their fair share, your kid would go to a better school. And all of these other things that plague us would be very different. And we have this very Judeo-Christian belief that the meek are going to inherit the earth and that there is great value in a humble existence. And I just can't help but thinking that the people who most want us to believe that are the people who have incredible wealth. Yeah, I mean, the movie really underscores just how enormously creative all of those evil people are too. The fact that they continue to build systems to undermine these things is kind of fascinating. You mentioned that you have to cross the bar in a certain way with steven does he actually say no to some of your ideas i tend to think that some of his best movies are the movies that you've

written for him well thank you um because they're a very specific tone and he somehow you guys have a some something alchemical yeah i look i mean, he has the most amazing, curious mind of anybody I've ever met in my life. And I'm thrilled that I get to bounce stuff off of him. And he and I both love dramatic problem solving. It's almost exciting to him when there's a logic problem because it means we get to kind of pull something apart. I think that the no that comes to mind the most is after I think the informant. And this was an idea that may have come from him. and then i started working on it and then he said no or it may have come from michael schamberg who was our producer um contagion but we wanted to do a

film about lenny riefenstahl and the making of triumph of the will and so it was going to be a movie about a guy making or a woman making a movie sort of in the tradition of day for night or the state of things um which were movies that steven and i both really liked and so on set with lenny basically yeah or what lenny's you know i mean to you know the elevator pitch is the good news is the studio wants to make your movie. The bad news is the studio is the Nazis. And I really was excited about doing that. It's a great idea. And we, and I still hope that I do it. And he and I talked about it not long ago.

And I started doing research and was, you know, getting into it. And he called me and he said, I don't think I want to do that. And I said, why? And he goes, no one wants to see that movie. And I was like, I don't think you're right. So that was a big fat no. What about now that you've made the report,

do you feel like you will direct more frequently? Is that where you want your career to go now? and then get it out into the world and have it line up with that is really rewarding. It's something that I would encourage other writers or actors, people who feel that way about the creative process, to take a run at. So yeah, I do want to do this again. But I also love the collaboration. And so there's a handful of people, and Steven is obviously at the top of the list. And, you know, years ago, I remember Steven saying to me, if you play in a great band, you know, does it really matter if you play drums

or guitar or bass? It, you know, it feels good to be making stuff that you're proud of and the companionship and camaraderie, um, when you work with people who are generous and empathic is the best feeling in the world. So I want to offer that to the people who choose to collaborate with me because that's, that's what I was given by Stephen. I got to stand next to him for about 200 and some days on set, really close to him because the way that Stephen works, there aren't monitors. There is no video village. So I would hover just off his shoulder and watch the onboard monitor on the camera. And he's basically cutting in real time at this point too, right? Yeah. No,

we would, you know, go to a bar at night when we were shooting on location and he would have headphones on and he would cut it and then he'd slap the headphones on my head. And, you know, we would figure out, you know, if that affected the next day's work and, you know, and that's, you know, that's really why I was participating in that process was to make sure, you know, and that's, you know, that's really why I was participating in that process was to make sure, you know, did I want to change any lines going into the next day? Being given that kind of seat at the table is, you know, in speaking to other writers in town, you know, I know that that's a really extraordinary privilege. And I want to be someone who can provide people with that kind of experience as well. This is kind of a wonky question, but if you could write for any filmmaker in the history of film, who would you like to write for? That's a really good

question. Um, and you know, I guess some of them don't need people to write for them. I mean, I would, you know, I would, I'm a huge fan of the Coen brothers. Um, it would be amazing to, to be inside of that process because I think what they do is so astonishing. I would have loved to, to work with Francis Ford Coppola and understand his process. PTA is someone who I think is amazing. And again, it's a process that is very inscrutable because he seems so self-contained. The biggest bummer for me was for a minute, I was going to be able to write Charlie Wilson's War. And I ended up going way down the road and they ended up obviously going a different direction. But I would have so loved to work with Mike Nichols. I got to meet him once because he and Stephen were very close. And even to this day, I think Stephen really, really misses Mike. But just the one meeting, he was so funny

and so insightful that it would have just been extraordinary to be around that. Scott, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? What is the last great thing you've seen? That's actually easy for me. You know, when I was at Telluride this year, we were really busy, but I did get to see one other movie, and it was Parasite.

I knew you were going to say that. I was there too. And I just, I've, you know, I met director Bong a few years ago and done so beautifully and like you know this this is even wonkier i mean like i remember going to an exhibit of eric fishel paintings when i was pretty young and there were like these naked people in these suburban settings and they were so uncomfortable to look at. And that shouldn't put you off going to see the movie, because I feel in some ways like it's a really great companion piece to what we were doing in The Laundromat, because they're both movies about income inequality and about living in a world where we're going to rip each other apart eventually if we keep going

this way but it's so beautifully shot and acted and paced um i just you know i mean um i was just blown away by it and it's one of those things where as a as someone who is an aspiring filmmaker, like I was sitting there and at first I was like, this is really good. And then I was like, fuck, this is so much better than anything I could ever do. And I was jealous. And then I even got beyond that to like the place that,

you know, as a creative person, you hope you become secure enough that you can get to a place where you're just inspired and it makes you want to go home and try to do better and do more, which is, you know, the way I felt when I was a little kid and saw The Graduate. Back to Mike Nichols. That's a great place to end. Scott, thanks for doing this. Sure. Thank you to Scott Z. Burns and thank you to Amanda Dobbins, of course. Please tune into The Big Picture later this week. I'll have an interview with the director, Mariel Heller, of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and we'll be talking about Tom Hanks.