The Big Picture - ‘Tony’ and the Top 5 Coming-of-Age Movies, With Matt Johnson!

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Well, there’s only one man to bring in to discuss Matt Johnson’s new biopic, ‘Tony,’ and that’s Anthony Bourdain aficionado Chris Ryan. Before diving into the movie, CR briefly gives a temperature check on the highly anticipated ‘Miami Vice’ sequel. Then, they unpack ‘Tony’ and highlight all of the reasons they found it to be deeply affecting. Later, they both share their top five “coming of age” movies of all time. Finally, Matt Johnson joins the show to tell Sean all of his secrets, because he likes him (his exact words). Johnson explains how Dominic Sessa convinced him to make the film despite his distaste for biopics in general, why he didn’t use any of his traditional filmmaking moves in the movie, and much more. (0:00) Intro (0:54) Chris Ryan joins the show! (2:07) ‘Miami Vice’ reboot temperature check (6:33) ‘Tony’ (33:00) The top five “coming of age” movies (1:00:47) Matt Johnson joins the show! Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Matt Johnson and Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennacy, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Tony. On today's episode, I'll be joined by Chris Ryan to discuss a new movie about a subject near and dear to his heart. Tony, it's the new docket drama about the early days of chef, author, and TV Trailblazer Anthony Bourdain. The new film is co-written and directed by show Favorite Matt Johnson. Matt returns to the show to talk about the task of taking on Bordane's story in life after the success of his film, Nirvana the band The Show The Movie. Matt is one of the greatest guests in the history of this show. Love hanging out with him. Learning from him, you'll want to listen to our conversation.

But first, let's talk to CR about Tony and the state of the world right now. Okay, CR. We're going to talk about Tony and our favorite coming of age films in this discussion. Yeah. You've been thinking about the Oval Office recently, and you have some thoughts you wanted to share. Fire away. Certain to measure the drapes for myself. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of talk out there.

Are you stepping in? How I could bring this country together. No kidding. I don't know why I'm doing that. Were you born in this nation? Yes, I was. I was born in Philadelphia. First generation in some ways, because my dad is from England.

So what generation was your mom? Third? Okay. Yeah. Second. Better get this right if you're going to be grilled at the podium. I think by the time I run, all this stuff is going to be moved. What's your platform? What do you stand for?

Paramount Plus for everyone. Is this going to be a landman-centric platform? Every year, every year we get to Michael, Michael Man. sequels or remakes. You know what I mean? No kidding. Even if the man is no longer with us, we just keep cranking them out? Keep thieving. Keep hunting men. You said you wanted to consider conjuring some news, even though we're recording a few days

early here. Is there anything that's been going on in the movie world that you can foresee? Well, I know that I'm on Monday's episode of The Big Picture talking with you about the end of Oak Street with Mallory Rubin and that we spoke extensively about X-Men casting. We did. Do you think that it's weird that Miami Vice 85 casting is as important to me as X-Men casting is...

No, but you know what? We've not had cause to discuss it on the show. In fact, I think that news hit while I was on vacation. Do you want to get into Miami Vice-Ey-Five-Ey-5? How you're feeling about the idea of this thing existing? First of all, Warren Buffett, as we know, has retired. As we know? But there's another Oracle of Omaha.

Uh-huh. And it's me. Because the Alden-Earon Reich stock, it never wavered. You're not from Omaha. We never blink. When we commit... Uh-huh. We commit.

Yeah, I was there with you on this one. I don't, you know, I was there when rules don't apply was released. I paid American currency to see that film. Did you watch Ironheart, though? I did watch it. Was he in Ironheart? Only the old and Aaron Wright scenes. I know he's Obadiah Stain's son.

Yes. Okay. Although his lineage is kind of obscured for some of that series. Was he introduced in Ironheart as Stained Sun? No, I think he's just like a guy and then it kind of emerges. But yeah, he's in, it's only iron art only. And will he be in the Avengers film? somehow Eldon Arnreich has returned in Tuesday.

Is he going to be a part of the MCU going forward? If they know it's good for them. If they want to catch a comet by the tail, yeah. I mean, Aaron Rake, I think, is elite, obviously. Oppenheimer into weapons. You can't do better. I know. So now he's going to be the villain in Miami Vice City 5?

No, he's just a DEA agent. So we don't know what's on. Is that the name of his character? It's DEA agent Mike something, I think, or Scott something. The amount of information you have is so poor. In these updates? This is what having 75% of a story looks like is when I'm like, I know he plays a D-AJ. I'm pretty sure it's Mike or Scott.

Okay. This is an extremely well-respected film podcast. I'd appreciate it if you could come prepared with these news updates. I happen to know firsthand that the only version of this film podcast that people respect it was when I'm on. Wow. No, not the only one. Well, it is probably the most respected. I'll give you that.

So the cast right now as it stands, it's Michael B. Jordan. It's Austin Butler. Yeah. It's, who's our female lead? Is it, is it, who is the female lead of this film? Well, there's a lot of rumors. The Tubbs' girlfriend has been cast. Is it Whitney Peak?

Yeah. Okay. And there's also talk that in the Daniel Roy script that Joseph Kaczynski is directing, that the importance of Crockett and Tubbs historically is going to be reversed. Obviously, Academy Award winner. Is this actually happening? I know with interest that they have cast his love interest first. Okay.

You know? Well, I mean, Michael B. Jordan is the bigger star. He's a bigger star than Austin Butler. There's no doubt about it. Oscar winner? It's a big tent. Yeah. You think it's okay for Austin Butler to get in there too?

Okay. Yeah. Are you okay with this movie in Heat 2 existing in the same year? This is, we were chatting about this a little bit last weekend about the power of 28. And what's going to happen to this pod? What's going to happen to America? What's going to happen to the film going populace when we have a like a, like a relatively lazy river of a 27, right?

Like we're going to be floating along. A lot of franchise stuff. Very kid-centric, I would say. You were talking sabbaticals already. Yeah, maybe I'll take 27 off. 26 for 26, 27 for 27, maybe. Yeah, maybe. And that'll be my 27 favorite episodes of the big picture.

And I'll be recapping them by myself. But 28 is so rich and so heavy with big titles. I, you know, it is very strange that the Michael Man cult has turned into a legitimate fandom and is now on the precipice of being a franchise. Obviously, you've been driving a lot of that over the years, and we appreciate the work that you and Bill have been doing in that respect. Is there any chance that this is, if not an illusion, a bubble amongst men aged 37 to 59? We have to go higher than that, because we have to include Jerry Bruckheimer in that cohort. Yeah. Well, he represents roughly 20 million Americans.

No, seriously, like, I wonder if all this zest... 80s and 90s stuff. I think that's the reason why he became such a big deal is because of a younger generation of fans discovering things like Miami Vice and collateral and an insider and Manhunter. And, you know, you go to the screenings of these movies, albeit a small sample size in Los Angeles, and they're packed. They're packed. Yeah.

Yeah. So both movies will make well over $500 million. I think so. This is the new obsession in back rooms. Okay. Cool. Would you like to speak about Tony? I would love to.

Okay. So I needed you to be on this episode. because you are, you and Andy both are the biggest Anthony Bourdain fans, allegiance that I have in my life. And this movie on paper, I think is a little concerning. Biopics in general, challenging. Matt Johnson, a very exciting but daring filmmaker, I'll say, someone taking risks. And it's tricky to take a risk with someone that people hold very close to their heart. Yeah. This movie is not.

just co-written by Johnson. Also Matthew Miller, his producing partner, Todd Bartles and Lou Howe, who I think wrote an original version of the screenplay. And it is kind of sort of based on Kitchen Confidential, the early chapters, though not really, and you can talk a little bit about that too. It stars Dominic Sessa as Bordane, Amelia Jones, Dagmara Dominicich, Rich Summer, Stavros Halkius, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas. It is about a man in 1975 and 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain who wants to be a right.

writer, but takes the summer job at a Cape Cod restaurant, learning under the tutelage of a Brazilian-born restaurateur. So maybe you could talk a little bit about not necessarily your feelings on Bourdain because there's an amazing episode of the watch that you and Andy just released last two weeks ago about your relationships to him and kind of what he represents to the culture at large. But when you heard they were making a biopic. I'll tell you what. I remember when the documentary was announced, you seemed to even a little tight when that happened. Yeah, I think When that happened, I was still sort of in, for lack of a better term, like a period of grieving about his death. So I have, you know, with boarding, with Tom Petty, with like artists that mean a lot to me.

I think when they pass, and especially when they pass tragically like those guys did, it takes a little while for me to get back into the art just for the art's sake rather than constantly thinking about how it echoes their past. passing. And I think when the documentary came out, I was like, I don't know, I just don't know if I want to participate in the, in the great sport of memorializing this guy, because the thing that I responded to so much in his work was, it was so alive, you know, even if it was cynical and even if it was looking at, you know, great injustices of the world or talking about how we needed to be better as people, like, it still was so deeply romantic with a capital R. And I'll tell you, what, you can say whatever you want

about the accuracy of this movie, the historical period detail, whether or not it feels like a Bourdain movie per se, but this movie captures his combination of romanticism and cynicism so perfectly and it has such

a great soul to it. And I really, really loved Tony. Yeah, I did too and I found it to be shockingly and warmly old fashioned. Yeah. And I, in talking to Matt, I told him like this feels like a movie that Touchstone could have released in 1997, non-prejorative. You know, that there is something traditional about pitching a story this way

about a very successful person's earliest days. But there's a tonality to it. It is very warm, very funny, but not, I wouldn't say it sugarcoats some of the uglier components of this version of this person's persona. You know, Bourdain famously struggled quite a bit, very straight talking, at times quite acidic person behind the scenes you could tell, sometimes a little tough to work with. Yeah. Challenging, but also very, very true to what he believed in.

And it's interesting to try to craft a movie that represents that when he is playing, he's portrayed as a person who doesn't really know what he believes in. This is like an amazing portrait of a person bullshitting, you know, who thinks he wants to be something and has no way of knowing how to get there. And in failing to get there, figures out who he's going to become.

Dominic Sessum, what did you think of him? I thought he was remarkable, you know, and doesn't do a pantomime of Anthony Bourdain. In fact, I don't really know outside of like some of the sort of fashion choices, there's a, you know, a moment where he's wearing like a leather jacket that feels like very Anthony Bordian coated. But like, for the most part, I think, uh, excuse doing mimicry for capturing kind of a idea about a guy.

I mean, this is the interesting thing about this movie is that I think it works just fine having nothing to do with Anthony. There are a couple of echoes in some lines of dialogue or some images that obviously project forward to the person he would become

and the figure he would become. But for the most part, if this is just Matt Johnson wanted to make a Richard Linklater Hollywood movie about a period of time that he was interested in and a job he was interested in, I think there probably would be like 100% less interest in it,

but it would be a good movie. I totally agree. There's a theory going around, and I didn't ask Matt about this and I regret it, that they didn't want to reveal that this was an Anthony Bourdain movie. Right. That there was this idea that in very Matt Johnsonian fashion, they might try to promote and release this movie without marketing it.

And then the last scene. And then the final scene of the movie, he says his full name for the first. first time and we see who he is. He's not Tony. He's Anthony Bourdain. And that's an interesting idea, like probably too clever by half, but I think that what you're describing sort of goes into the making the conception of the movie is you're probably not bringing too much of the Bordane experience. You don't feel too haunted by the Bordane experience as you're watching the movie. It's really just, it is a coming of age movie. It's a guy figuring out how he should be in the act of chasing a girl.

movies set in kitchens in restaurants are pretty hard. Most of them are quite bad. I was surprised by how graceful and easy this one was just in terms of the energy and camaraderie amongst the cooks in this kitchen. Even the sense of visual space, how we know where everyone belongs at any given time where their stations are. It's a very modest space, the Bandaris's character's restaurant. But to me, the movie is most alive, most fun.

most 1997 when it's all of those chefs in the room and Sessa is the butt of every joke and they're giving each other shit and it's interesting because like Bourdain did make hay of that a little bit in his writing but the movie's just very very

very funny in a way that you expect a Matt Johnson movie to be funny there are other times where the movie is not very funny where it's very reflective and sad what did you think about some of the kitchen aspects of it I love the fact that this place the flagship where the Bordian characters cooking, you never really have to wonder whether or not like they're ever going to make the Michelin Star Meal. I mean, the whole point of this place is it does four things and it's

supposed to turn them over quickly and we've all been in like beachside bar and grills like this where, you know, you just get the burger and keep it moving. So when you take out the tweezers, can we make the perfect foie gras thing out of it, then it just entirely becomes this is an action for actors to perform in order to communicate and, you know, communicate emotion, communicate character. So I love the fact that all of these guys cook in different ways that say so much about them, like especially the Leo Woodall character and the confidence with which he's shucking oysters and the fact that he really only has to do this one thing, which is make six and six or make, you know, mixed dozens. It allows him to kind of just

be the cool guy in the kitchen because nothing is going wrong for him. He doesn't have a broiler. He doesn't have to wash a bunch of stuff. He doesn't have to do tickets. He's just doing his thing. On the other hand, like Stavi's character

is always kicking a giant flaming broiler and screaming at lobsters and he's got the like really hard job in this kitchen. So for me it was like almost less of a food movie and more of a workplace movie.

And it really, really knows the workplace. and it really knows the geography of where these guys are standing. I know that Matt shot this, like, basically handheld with all these, like, incredible little fixes for how they were going to shoot some of this stuff. Yeah, I mean, to me, it was way more of a summer movie and way more of a workplace comedy or workplace dramedy than it was about, like, this is the thing,

the Proustian Madeline moment that made him realize he wanted to be a chef. Yeah, I think the food looks pretty good, but it's not food porn at all. You know, it is very much, like, And you even have these moments where I was wondering what you thought about this. Sessa's Bordane at times slips into a kind of Bordanian romance when he's describing things. It's like he's lunging for a kind of literary credibility and communicating about the experience of food.

And it seems a little tryhard. And there's something very interesting to me about being so comfortable doing that in a movie that is, in theory, kind of venerating this person. but actually makes him seem, it seemed like it took Tony Bourdain 20, 30 years to figure out how to be poetic about food. Yeah, and I don't think he ever became that way about his own food.

So he goes from this restaurant in Provincetown. He winds up going to the CIA in New York City is a very funny bit in the movie about whether the CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency or the Culinary Institute of America. He winds up working at LeHalle for a long time, up to being executive chef at that steakhouse in Midtown

and I was watching all these old episodes for the episode that me and Andy did of the watch and he's still in his 40s and 50s going to other places and he can't control himself

he's like oh I wish I was from San Sebastian and I would work in a tapas restaurant and I would pour this sparkling light chocolate and we would just stand here in the greatest seafood in the world and everybody's just kind of like well yeah, I mean, this is the neighborhood bar, you know? Right.

Or he's like, I wish that we would have a bushery every Wednesday with all my friends in Cajun country. And they're like, yeah, this is kind of how it is. And I think he had this incredible passion and way of describing and communicating his excitement about food, but not necessarily his own food. You know what I mean? Like, he is good at cooking, obviously, and was like an amazing, amazingly important figure in America's color.

awakening, I think. I agree. But I don't know necessarily that Anthony Bourdain would be like, this is my signature dish, or that this is a kind of food that I introduced that no one had eaten like the way that Redzeppe or whoever has.

It's like you. You're a cultural ambassador. You don't make this stuff, but you make the stuff. That's right, man. Those who can't do teach. Very true. The movie is, first of all, it's an hour and 45 minutes it flies by. And it is a series of incidents in the best way.

The long arc of the movie is around Bourdain chasing a girl to Provincetown over the summer, played by Amelia Jones. And in doing so, also, you know, lying about getting a fellowship. Yes, exactly. He's building up this idea of himself and who he is and trying to figure out how to seduce this girl that he really likes. And it's worth mentioning that Amelia plays Nancy Pekowski is our name. I think so, yeah. Which was Bordain's first wife. Right.

And most of that doesn't really matter I think most of what matters in the heart of the story is seeing moments of revelation for him and some of them are sort of like very announced for example there's a sequence

where Leo Woodall who is on fucking fire in this movie That's my Wolverine I mean he would be incredible He can do anything you want As far as I'm going Between Tuna and this Which is two completely different performance styles

Two completely different shades of charisma I'm all in on that guy. But in this movie, he plays, you know, the ghost of future present, basically. Like, he's like what could happen if he's zagged the wrong way. He plays a guy that every single man in America either knows or is. Yeah. And you got to hope it's the former. Yeah.

But it's like anybody looks like that guy. It's just a lot of guys think they look like him. Like, he is the dashing chowderhead. Yeah. Which is like maybe not. even a real person. Like maybe no one is that person. Right. But everyone thinks that they are when they're at a certain stage of their life. But for Bordane's character, he's like an active cautionary tale. He observes him, you know, not just picking up girls quite easily, not just shucking those

oysters in the way that you describe, but doing coke, scoring, heroin, like getting high beachside. And kind of like watching Sessa's character examine whether or not this would be a worthwhile path. Yes. Is a fascinating, like, emotional dynamic of the movie. because it's very clear. Well, he's being an anthropologist, which Bordane really was. And he's like, this is,

me and my Stooges T-shirt and my beer drinking and my nunchucks. But this is the real thing. This is what it looks like if you go down that road, and this is what it happens when you're, however old,

that guy is supposed to be 25, 26, and he's like, what my life is going to wind up being is I'm going to be the next guy hauling lobster cages and dealing smack on a dock somewhere in Cape Cod. Yeah, it's a fascinating counterpoint to Bandaris, who, I mean, maybe he was the Leo Wood all of his day, but like just one of my favorite screen presences of all time. And this is him so in the pocket of a thing he's so great at where he's so warm, so grounded. His voice is like fucking poetry to me. I love listening to him, just listening to him read dialogue. And this part, I think would be a shitty part, if not for a great actor. Because it's such a base.

the nice mentor guy. And he brings so much world experience for a relationship to him as an actor. Like, I loved him and I loved the two of them together in this movie. So there's basically a baton pass that happens midway through the film. The first half of it, once he gets from Provincetown, uh, Sal takes him under his wing, the Leo Wadall character. They go out.

He's, they start bar fights. They get into trouble. It's all this, like, and then we do this and then we do that. The movie has such an incredible, like, punk rock energy at that point. one of an amazing music supervision job. Needle drops. We're insane. Sal,

at some point, gets fired from the restaurant where they all work at for being late, but also for starting a fight with chef. And it's essentially a choice of, you know,

is Tony going to follow Sal into oblivion? Or is he going to stick at the restaurant? He kind of sticks at the restaurant. And there's this moment about midway through the movie as chef starts to, you know, educate Tony in the ways of not only a kitchen, but a relationship to craft and service

and doing something well, which is something that often comes up in Bourdain's writing and television where he's like doing a simple thing really well. And so there's this, my favorite moment of the movie is when he gets Tony off the hammock that he's been staying in, they go into the kitchen,

and he, I guess, dilutes salt water down to its sea salt crystals and strains tomatoes down to liquid, and they refill salt shakers with seawater salt and refill ketchup bottles with homemade ketchup. And it's like a two or three minutes scene that could have been one to ten seconds. And it just is supposed to reset the cardiac rhythm of the movie.

Yes. And it becomes about grace almost for about 40 minutes. Quite literally, there's a strain of spirituality running through the movie where chef takes Tony to church. And simultaneously when he has this severe break with Sal and they pick the fight, he says, you're the sin eater. And it is the sin eater and the shepherd. And they're kind of these two, this angel and the devil portrayal that like, it's a very kind of linear, clear structural device in the movie that is very simple, but very, very effective.

And it's actually, it does a good job of, like, distracting you away from the Bordainishness of the movie. where it's like it's actually also about these people. It's about the people that impact you, not just the person that you are, especially when what you are isn't really anything yet. I like movies like that are not about people, and we'll talk about that with some of the coming of age stuff, like these kind of portraits of people in progress

as opposed to completed. And the version of the movie that's like Bourdain, Adlaiol, like making steak, that would just be boring to me. Yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of periods of his life that I think would be fun to evoom. like Lower East Side 1980s or yeah like

rough and tumble 90s restaurant life but I think that there was something about this is the first point where Bourdain starts to really self-mythologize

and even in the book and the quote card that's in the beginning in the film he's like I was just basically a snotty nose loud mouth brat who needed to get his ass kicked

and I did and that's what the movie is about but it winds up becoming a little bit more about to what extent we all kind of shape our own character and to what extent people around us influence that. I mean, we could probably trade boring stories of throughout our lives. Like, it's not yet, it doesn't have to be like, do heroin or become a world-renowned chef. It could be like, my college roommate really liked fish, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a fish show and I said, no, thanks. And if I had gone

to that fish show, like, am I sitting here? No, I think about that all the time. I have so many formative experiences in high school of people that I met and looked up to in one direction or another. And if I had tried to more to specifically mimic their lives, some things would have gone well and some things would have gone not so well. But it is a really great snapshot of a person, like you said, anthropologically figuring out which road to go down. Now, it's interesting that like so much happens to Bordain in the intervening 15, 20 years before he becomes this well-known figure. And so it is a little tidy at times the movie. I found the ending a little tidy.

Yes. Where something very dramatic happens in the kitchen that shows that he's not ready for prime time effectively and that despite all of his kind of yearnings for creativity and to show off for this girl and to show chef that he is evolving as a man because of all the things that chef has shown him that he's not ready to do it. And then the film has this kind of like encomium final seven or eight minute sequence

with a big fish bake near the end that felt also very touchstone 1997 in me where there needed to be like a degree of warmth to the way we went out which I understand and I think is very gratifying

for audiences it did feel a little studio notish to me perhaps all the characters gather together and fist bump and the flagship is saved yeah I mean it's not so far afield from the way that you know Nirvana the band ends

where there's like restitution at the end you know like we're we're going to be okay, but that's the one thing in the movie that I felt a little soft on. I was amazed by the music choices. I was like, I feel like my dad who was alive in 1975 picked the music. You know, like there's a very level of that like tasteful rock critic plus normie. Sure. Yeah. I mean, music supervision here that is very, very good. It's hard to fuck up Calvary Cross, but when it hits in this movie. On the boat on the journey to Providence Town. And it also comes

like in that 15 minutes into the film the credits start moment. You're just like, fuck man. Matt can really throw hard. I know. It's such a great moment. And it does, it makes you I remember when the trailer came out, you were like, I don't know, Spoon, what's this about? And because they were like, Spoon is not, that's not 20-Borty.

Well, I just did, if you were going to make it, I was just like who put the Spoon song in here. I want to also just shout this out. Like, I've got mixed feelings about the over-music supervision of movies and TV shows in general and how often I find that like there will just be like a random drop where I'm like clearly this was like we have a great relationship with Universal Records who would love for us. I mean you watch any

YA show now you're just like every scene has three songs in it. The combination or the balance that Tony has between the music drops, the needle drops and Mcarroll's score, which I think is beautiful. It's so good. Almost entirely piano, very simple. And like the different way the cues kind of change color when different moments are happening in the movie. There's the entire project of making this film and the way that they make it and the way that Baumann, Michael Baumann, the cinematographer Matt Johnson chose to shoot a lot of the conversational scenes half blocked by the person who's the typical over-the-shoulder coverage. I noticed this as well. Yeah. The shadow. What do you think that was about? But I have it.

I mean, I have an idea, but what did you think behind that choice? I clock this as well. I don't know, and I wish I had asked Matt about it. I think some of it is the like you're only talking to yourself quality of the movie. I think that's probably it. I also think there's a degree to which, like, when you're young especially, but in maybe in no matter what point in your life, you're really only seeing one half of a person. And it's the half that they're showing you at any given moment.

But I thought that it really hammered home the, sure, you can argue about the, development of certain characters versus others in this film. But this is really a movie about how someone chooses to see people rather than what they're telling him and what they're showing him. Yeah. You know, and this is so much of this is, you know, the way that the camera shoots Leo Woodall throughout the first half of this movie is like, this guy is James fucking Dean. He is the coolest thing.

He can snap open a zippo. He takes notches out of door frames where he takes girls to bed. and then fills like a jar with him. He's the guy who can go out with no money in his pocket and have a night that lasts six hours long. That's who that guy is to him and the way that they kind of are always behind half of the shoulder. I thought was brilliant, but it's an idea,

and it's an intention, and it is a choice. And you do wonder how many Hollywood movies all that. They don't make very many that are about just regular human beings like this anymore, but how many Hollywood movies, if they were made with the care and creativity and interest, that this movie had would be 75% better, 50% better. You know, like, this is a guy who's essentially like, he's like, what if John Cassavetes and Ron Howard made a movie together?

Totally. That's exactly what it is. This is awesome. No, I know. It's also, like, it's good taste in terms of you've got one really, really well-known person in this movie. And everybody else is like, we know who Stavi and Leo Woodall are, but most people don't know who they are. And this is like part of the work is like, let's launch a new generation of exciting young people

that can appear in movies, you know, like we should put Amelia Jones in more movies. I really admire that. The movie does, I think, pair pretty neatly with Blackberry about this kind of like unbridled ambition without much sense of purpose. And that's a core theme of a lot of the stuff that Johnson is doing. And I feel like I tried to get to the bottom of it with him when we spoke, but he made it now. So now what do you do? And like do you kind of have to confront that once you have crossed the threshold of no longer the scrappy underdog and into, well, I have some clout. I have some juice in my life.

And a lot of the films and stuff that he's been doing is all about this kind of like outsiderdom. And you got you and Andy talked about this really interestingly, like Bordane having to confront no longer being the punk rock guy banging on the door trying to get in and being a guy who's establishment, you know, and like what does it mean to become establishment? You know, this movie stops just short of it in the best way possible by. showing us, you know, Eric Repair at the end of the film.

Very nice touch. You know, Bourdain's closest friend and a food icon as well. But I'm so curious to see where Matt goes. Like, I know some things that he's working on. Sure. But will there be like any pivot away from, like if you're making a Magic the Gathering movie,

that's a huge outsider story. There's nobody cool playing Magic the Gathering, you know? I think this happened to Tony. This is happening to Matt right now where the very thing that makes you so beloved. it by people becomes a liability. And so... And yet this has never happened to you.

Well, I don't know. I don't... Life's long. You were just tongue-tied for a minute. I don't even know what you mean, but like, Matt Johnson's like, one of the attractive qualities is that if you put him on a Q&A and a post-screening chat,

he might just be like, I hate that movie. Or, you know, I... Or this thing sucks or whatever. We talked about this, his edge lorddom and whether or not it can sustain. And Bourdain, was notorious for writing a New Yorker article that was like, here are all the things

that restaurants lie to you about. And then 20 years later, he's hosting the taste and appearing on Top Chef and doing food and wine appearances to, you know, hustle American Airlines points or whatever. And it comes for all of us.

And you just have to learn to adapt. I think what I see in both of those guys is a formal inventiveness and attention to detail and love of process that I think will serve them both that obviously served Tony very well in making multiple television shows

of great, great interest. And Matt, so far, kind of being undefeated in terms of like, you really want to see this movie, man. Like, this is gonna light you up a little bit. Yeah, it's really impressive. I think this slots in nicely

with coming of age. You know, this is a big tent, these kinds of films. How did you think about it? it when I asked you to do a list. Yeah, I think the easiest way to look at it would just be like, you know, a life-changing moment for a young person. But I tried to look at this a little bit more from the perspective of how I think they frame

Tony, which is, even though in no way does this character come off as innocent ever, a loss of innocence. And there are a couple of moments, I think, when he catches Sal shooting up, not catches, but when he watches Sal shoot up, there's obviously like a shadow that looms over. Bourdain's future drug use, but also this character being confronted with like, hey, it's not listening to the Stooges anymore, is it? Yeah.

It's like we're shooting heroin on a beach somewhere. Yep. So I tried to look at films that were about that loss of innocence. Not specifically drug use, but... I didn't intentionally do that, but when I look at my list, that's the same story. And is that just the standard archetype for these stories? Because if you don't have that loss of innocence,

are they worth making in a way? Well, I don't... I mean, I think that it's about whether or not the person is seven years old or 25 years old, it's about introducing them to the real world, right? Or what happens outside of like the imaginary kingdom that they've built for themselves, that they've maybe, you know, protected themselves with. I also thought it was interesting with the movies that I picked, which I would fully admit our favorites rather than the best.

Four of them are from my childhood. Same. And there's really nothing you can do about that. But I think that that's okay. I'm quite curious to know what teenagers make of a movie like Tony. If it appeals in any way, it being a period piece,

it being about a person that they probably just don't have much experience with. But it having a very winning movie star kind of performance at the center of it and a vibe that is like, this is the loser's version of cool. It is like the almost famously feeling of like you can be,

you can have a really exciting and cool life and not have to worry about being the coolest personal life. Yeah. And that's such a unique dynamic that I relate to for very obvious reasons. It's such a tortured thing for young people to be told they need to decide what they're going to do and have all these people in their lives giving them advice about what they should and shouldn't be doing.

We didn't really remark upon it, but a lot of my favorite moments in this movie are not overly dogmatically pointed big flashing lights. like this is the issue for this character. Yes. His mother has never explicitly described as being tyrannical with him

and has never really gotten, you know, we don't get into like the psychological background, but it's just very difficult to please, I would say, and withholds a lot of approval and affirmation. But you can see there's something wonderful

about the portrayal of the two parents, Rich Summer and Dagmar or Domichick. Like, she is incredibly intelligent and studied and particular. And he is very warm and over-eager and excited. You smash those two people together. I mean, Eileen and I talk about this all the time with Alice. You constantly have these conversations about your kids where you're sort of like, there is this kind of 50-50 alchemy that happens in a person.

Inside of them are two wolves. Quite literally. And I'm sure you feel that way about your parents. I certainly do about mine. and I think to evoke that without announcing it is very impressive and cool storytelling

alright let's do our list so just hit me with five let's just have a sincere direct brief communication method sure okay my first one is a movie I've talked about on this podcast before but my own private Idaho it came up this week on the rewatchables

it did because we were speaking of Keanu we keep trying to get Bill to go to Idaho. Yeah. Might be the last rewatchable. Bill loves Goodwill Hunting. Yeah.

Is this the film that immediately proceed? No, it's not. There's a couple in between Goodwill Hunting and my own private Idaho from Gus. Right. This is the, in some ways, not the original, but like, it's, it's the original coming of age story from the original BS, Billy Shakespeare. And it is Gus Van Sant's reimagining of Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, Part 1 and 2, and Henry the 5th. starring Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix,

I don't even think I knew about Henry the Fifth or Him or the Fourth when I saw this. I definitely did not. I didn't know that Bob was false staff. I didn't know that this was following that arc, because I was more into it as a underground dreamlike road movie about two hustlers banging around the Pacific Northwest, and one of them is Narcoleptic, and the other is about to inherit a fortune when he turns 21.

and it's an astonishing pair of, but really River Phoenix is kind of, this is if you want to know why people freak out about River Phoenix, watch my own private Idaho, and is so beautifully observed about two people who are kind of like in between childhood and adulthood

try to make sense of the world in a very finite period of time and has this baked in sort of plot mechanic, which they get from Henry IV, and Henry the 5th, which is that when you're young, you will oftentimes become acutely aware that you are not on the same schedule as everybody else,

and you are not on the same road as everybody else, and there's something really sad about that when you're like, oh, man, we're not going to the same college, are we? Or, you know, me and my high school girlfriend, we're probably going to break up. That's really weird. Not me. Yeah.

But it doesn't leave you in your childhood. You know, you realize, it happens to you. It echoes throughout your life. It happens all the time. in adulthood now. And this movie captures that. This like, these two characters who are like, we're bonded forever, right?

In Keanu's characters, just like, well, until him's 21. You know, like... Yeah, that's so funny. I feel like this movie does a really good job of showing it through time. And it reminds me of a little bit listening to you talk about seeing Pulp Fiction, where it's another movie where you're sort of like, oh, you just do anything you want with the movie. Yeah.

Like, you don't, it doesn't have to feel... The movie doesn't feel linear. It doesn't feel like it's happening in a specific set of days over time. It's just sort of like, then this thing happened, then this thing happened, then this thing happened. Was that a dream? Did they really, like, are they hooking up with this person? Or is this something that he's imagining

while he's in a booths in some adult store? Like, just a really, it changed my life when I saw it. I did not know movies could be like this. Great pick. I picked a much more conventional movie for number five. I picked a perfect world, which is Clint Eastwood's, um,

road trip crime movie about an ex-convict played by Kevin Costner who takes a young boy hostage in his attempt to get free while being chased by a... Is he a federal marshal played by Clint Eastwood? He's a Texas Ranger. Texas Ranger.

And I think this is just an amazing... It's a very entertaining movie and a very beautifully shot movie. And it's in that... It's right in the sweet spot of Clint in the 90s post-unforgiven prebridges of Madison County when he's kind of like

trying to do Americana in a number of different ways. And this is like a real demythologizing of the American criminal story. But I think the actor's name is, is it, T.J. Lowther plays Buzz, the little kid. And I was probably about this kid's age when I saw this movie. And this kid sees a lot of stuff. He sees violence. He sees sex.

He sees death. He sees things about human experience, interaction, emotion that you wouldn't see if you just spent your entire life in your mom's house. and it's really amazing how frequently he pivots to showing the kids' perspective in this movie, despite Costner giving, I think, one of his great performances and one of his most charismatic performances. He's so exciting in this movie. It's so cool.

But Eastwood didn't make a lot of movies about kids. This isn't really, like, something that he's very interested in historically. And so I find this to be, like, such a special movie. You know, there's plenty of stuff that is kind of nuts and both Lord Dern and Clint Eastwood in a trailer. chasing down this old, this convict. But the stuff between Butch and Buzz is so special to me. And so it popped into my mind when thinking of this prompt.

I just remember this film so well for being the follow-up to Unforgiven and being kind of, I don't know, like the amnesiac to Kid A or something like that. Yeah. You know, like you were like, totally. I was so excited, you know, Unforgiven was such a huge movie for me. And it took me so long to like, disqualification. the rhythms of this and the sort of what it was trying to say. And maybe I was too young at the time to really understand it.

It's one of those movies that you, I don't know, it's like watching Badlands or something where you're like, I think I get what this is about, but I don't really, I don't know if I'm going to really understand it for another 10 or 15 years. Yeah. It's interesting. I saw this before Unforgiven. And I probably, this is probably one of the first Clint Eastwood movies I saw in just this very small period of time, the age gap that you and I have, I think speaks to, this was,

this was an HBO classic, you know, so it just was on TV all the time. And so you would pop in. And it, for me, it felt like I was seeing very adult things at 11 or whatever when the movie came out that are so fascinating. It's also in the same years in the line of fire. And it's like these really interesting portraits of kind of fading masculinity, both of them, like not being able to quite. And then he was done with that topic and moved on. Oh, no, it cropped up a few times more. His final film, of course, well, I guess his second to last film is cry macho. So it's something he's interested in. I hope Clint's doing okay. You think he's out there? I think he's probably done making films. I think he's 94. Yeah. So probably. But I mean, juror number two is two years

ago. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Do you see journal number two? I did. Do you enjoy it? Opening night on HBO Max, I believe. I see. Yeah, that was a damn shame. My second film is fresh. Boazir Keene's 1994 movies starring Sean Nelson and Samuel Jackson and John Carlos Spizito about a young kid living in New York City who is something of a chess prodigy or an emerging chess prodigy, but is also a drug runner. It's very much of the moment

when there were a lot of films coming out of New York and L.A. made by young filmmakers about city stories. Whether it was like Nick Gomez with Lord Wals of Gravity, Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes brothers,

just like a ton of movies that were very of the moment and looked like life that moment. This is about a kid who learns chess from his estranged alcoholic father, one of my favorite Sam Jackson performances, and uses what he learns on the chess board

to rescue his sister. But it's also about kids who are asked to grow up way too soon and being put into worlds of adult desire and adult violence when you don't quite understand. And in some ways,

very much part and parcel with a perfect world. Completely. at the same year, just about, right? 94, 94, 93. Yeah, yeah, they're very close. My number four is Fish Tank.

It's one of the only semi-modern movies on our lists. Andrea Arnold's portrait of a teenage girl who feels adrift and outside, not unlike a Tony Bourdain type, who makes a surprising

and ultimately very, very dangerous and ugly connection with her mother's boyfriend who's played in the film by Michael Fastbender in a searing performance. Yes.

This is back on my hunger and shame shit. Yeah. I don't know if we'll ever get this guy back as a performer. Let's just make the agency brother. Yeah. Well, you haven't seen Hope yet is what I'll say. I'm excited for that. It is maybe not exactly what you're expecting.

But this is just a wildly intimate, dangerous seeming, very challenging movie that makes you question why the story specifically is being told. And then maybe like in a similar way to Tony even That there's not like an easy solution to life experience that like horrible things happen and you have to think about why they've happened And like what it means to be independent and have agency at a young point in your life versus Being taken advantage of an exploited.

Katie Jarvis in the movie is incredible in the lead part Um Andrew Arnold He's kind of got big little wise for a while right? Yeah Always really interests me. I was not super in her last. film Bird.

Did you ever see that one? I saw that one. That starred Barry Keoghan. And it was similarly about a young person in a kind of fantastical and ultimately dangerous world. And a lot of her stories are about that. You know, American Honey is sort of about that too. But just in it from a pure aesthetics perspective, like she captures being inside of these

worlds like so, so well. These kind of like intimate, often English environments that of people who are of virtually no means trying to get by and then what is this kind of fallout from not having more um and yeah so i would highly recommend this movie shot by robbie ryan one of his earliest films it's like it's a beautiful and quite sad i love a fish tank uh i'll throw in uh breaking away there's pier yates is 70s movie about town he's living in bloomington swimming at the quarry you know what are we going to do with the rest of our lives and something that takes on outsize importance

is a cycling race that comes to town where a series of like a group of Italian cyclists are gonna compete in a race as as are some university students who do nothing but torment these guys and they torment them and you know

Yates is really one of the most underrated filmmakers probably of the last but 40 or 50 years and he's anyway I would I would wonder whether or not Matt Johnson's a fan because there's like... Or of Yates' work in general

because I think they each bring like an incredible creative verve no matter what the material is. This is so different from all of his other movies though. I mean his movie, I feel like he makes typically... We did an episode of the rewatchables about this movie. This is an amazing film. His movies are usually

so conventionally entertaining and masculine and genre focused. So like bullet, The Deep Hot Rock Outland Eddie Coil

No Outland is Peter Heim's He made Krull That's right That's right Suspect Like a lot of these movies They're like

They're thrillers They're like they're They're you know Tom Selleck is an innocent man In an innocent man Like that's what he makes And this movie is so sensitive Yeah

Yeah And sort of spiritual It's kind of a sports movie But barely You know It's kind of a greasers versus Sosha's class war

but not totally it's very similar to Tony in that it's about a guy who is basically affecting the life that he wishes he could have

by putting on this Italian accent and wants to be an Italian cyclist even though he and all his buddies are basically you know walking around in jean shorts

all day long and like having milkshakes and wasting their lives just a really beautiful portrait of youth and maybe not super loss of innocence, but more just like learning that you're not always going to be young. No, yeah, I think that's well put.

My number three is Walkabout, which I just rewatched this year because it was part of the Odyssey's collection that I co-curiated on the Criterion Channel. It's basically Nick Rogue's first movie. He co-directed performance in 1970 with your boy Mick Jagger. Yeah.

But this movie's based on a 59 novel by James Vance Marshall, and it's about two very young kids, like 11 and 7, who are driven to the Australian outback by their father and his intention, he tells them that they're going to take a picnic and his intention is to shoot and kill him.

And he attempts to do so and he's unable to and he turns the gun on himself and he leaves them out in the outback by themselves to fend for themselves over time. It's a feel good movie. It's a very harrowing opening and it's a very gorgeous middle and it has some challenges as the story goes on.

Jenny Agatyr and Lucy and John are the two are the sister and brother And you know I think it's probably the official Feels like the official kickoff of the Australian New Wave And you can hear a lot about That on the blank check series about Peter Weir Since he was a participant in that too

But this movie Which also stars David Gulpel who is the Aboriginal boy who sort of like Saves them and shows them how to survive in this space who went on to have a really interesting careers and actor as well. But, you know, this is a movie about

it's metaphorical and literal at the same time. It's a little bit like, well, playtime's over. This is what it would really be like when you have to go out into the world. And you can project that onto, you graduated from college. You want to move to the big city.

What are you going to do now? Or it could just play straight up as a very ethereal, magisterial thriller about two lost kids. Yeah. But, man, I couldn't believe how beautiful it was.

It's one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen. The photography is stunning in this movie, and it still has a lot of emotional power to it as well. And I probably hadn't seen it since film school? Like, I want to say it was like 30-something years since I had seen it. And I really thought it was absolutely amazing. And I think it speaks to, like, what's so powerful about this as a microgenre or a subgenre of

film is that it allows directors to really play with ideas of perspective and point of view because you're shooting this world from an. emerging narrator, an emerging person's perspective. And I think Rogue does an incredible job of like, what would the fucking outback look like to these kids? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

This movie has a great end note, too. The way that it concludes the story is really kind of fascinating and beautiful. It's almost like once you have an experience, you can never go back in the way that you think about it, whether you've romanticized it or not, is also really interesting to me, that I think is also somewhat tied to Tony. Okay, what's number two for you? I picked two, which are two adaptations of Larry McMurtry books from his Talaya trilogy. One is HUD from 1963, which is based on Horseman Pass By, and then the last picture show.

So this is like McMurtry's basically fictionalized version of his own youth. And he would write lots of Bill Dung's Roman to make a Tony joke. He would write a lot about his own life and in and out of Archer, Texas and his adventures in Hollywood. One of my favorite coming of age novels ever written is all my friends are going to be strangers by Larg McMurtry. These are more 1950s set stories about a time in America that I think we would tell ourselves is when America was safe and America was beautiful. in America was living up to all these ideas. And McMurtry is an incredible mythbuster. And he just goes into these things.

And he's like, it wasn't like what you think it was. The good old times were, the good days were not that good. The bad days weren't that bad. HUD is slightly tweaked from the book in that it makes, it inverts certain characters. It makes certain characters bigger deals than they are in the book. But it's got my favorite Newman. it's got some of my favorite cinematography

in any movie ever from James Wong-How Patricia Neal plays Alma who's the housekeeper in this Brandon family which is this ranching family in a small town in Texas one of one of the great supporting turns in... I think the movie doesn't work without her

yeah she's unreal in this movie it's a very difficult movie to watch in some ways it is not going to make you think Paul Newman was like you don't come away from that being like man I loved HUD No, it's very similar to Fish Tank, where you've got a leading performance that is very powerful and charismatic, but a little evil. You know, that there's something that is very raw and dangerous. There's something broken about this kid.

But the real coming of age is this younger character named Norman who's trying to decide which path to take, not unlike Tony, not unlike a lot of these movies where they are just sort of at a crossroads in their life. Last Picture Show probably doesn't need to be greatly expanded on this is Peter McDonovitch's film with Timothy Bottoms and Jeff Bridges and Sybil Shepard and is just one of those great great It's just one of the most amazing portraits of youth I've ever seen Both of these movies available in beautiful 4Ks on the Criterion collection I would encourage people to check them out who never looked better I also pick two movies for number two and they're

They're paired as well, and there are two movies that I've talked about many times on the show, so I don't need to go on about them at length, but they're Rushmore and the Squid and the Whale, which are just like Tony, two portraits of the artist as a phony young man. And they're both, they seem to be, I guess this is somewhat unverified, but very autobiographical portraits of real stinkers, guys who like really think they're hot shit and are really aspirational and really ambitious, but don't have the goods dot, dot, dot, dot yet. And Rushmore is like a portrait of a wonderful, wonderfully sociopathic failing teen who wants to run everything and has a creative soul that has no idea how to succeed and even what it means to be a grownup. And the squid and the whale is about two different kids as their parents are going through a divorce.

But the Jesse Eisenberg character in particular, who's sort of the lead of the movie, is a, I will say, like very similar to Tony and a very familiar person, too. to me about a person who really wants to be praised and told is great at something, but has no ability to do anything interesting. And it's like figuring out what it actually means to be interesting in the process and is pulling all the wrong things from all the wrong influences, parents included. So that kind of speaks a little bit to that dynamic that they show of the parents and Tony too, that, you know, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are so amazing in the squid and the whale. And they're both so frenzied and toxic in their own very specific parental ways that is so

immediately identifiable to me. So I love both of those movies very much. And I don't even know if the characters actually do come of age in the movie. No, I don't even know either. You know, like Rushmore ends with this sort of like you put on the show exultation. But I'm not sure that Max Fisher is made whole by that. Darjeeling as the sequel where he comes of age. Truly, truly.

Okay, what's your number one? Stand by me. which is like I think the first time I really even was self-conscious about a coming-of-age movie just because the narration in this is so explicit. This is Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Body, stars Woolwiton and River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland, Jerry O'Connell, and Corey Feldman. And to me, it's still like a note-perfect movie about a bunch of kids spending a weekend camping in the woods to go find a dead body that they have heard about in the woods.

and is just so beautifully rendered and is so perfectly pitched at, like, the tone of deep affection and also deep humor of childhood. And I think even if you didn't grow up in Maine in the 50s, you'll recognize the beats of it. And it's just about, like, the joy and the terror that can regularly confront you when you're a kid.

Mine is similarly a movie about friendship amongst boys and the complications they're in. It's Juice, Ernest Dickerson's movie that I've definitely talked about a lot on this show. That is about four kids growing up in Harlem, all of whom are aspiring to different things in their life. It focuses mostly on Q, who's played by Omar Aps, who is an aspiring DJ. And is sort of like set right in the midst of this amazing moment in New York hip-hop. And Q gets to sort of like participate in show off. and like you see the way in which he wants to be basically like the next jamester jay type of person and he's entrenched with three other friends played by teupac um coliol kane and jermaine hopkins

who you know pock's character bishop is a legendary movie character and he is sort of the dark side he is the leo woodall he is the sal um who potentially is luring cue down a very dark and troubling path his other friends are more innocence and this movie also i think has a real kind of shakespeare and quality to it too in terms of the arc of all the characters Epps is a weird one man In 1992 I was like

Omar Epps is going to be Like Jimmy Stewart Like I really thought he was I thought he was gonna be a great American actor Yeah And he was just such an every man to me Obviously like I got really obsessed with The culture that this movie is about

When I was a kid Did you ever get turntables? I didn't I mean I didn't have money Techniques are expensive They were expensive Somebody asked me in a Substack chat what would be the number one movie prop of all time, and I said Q's techniques.

That would be like a great thing to have on display in my home. But yeah, I love this movie. And I think so many times coming of age, you think of them as like about your parents or about your siblings. But this is like a lot of times this stuff is steeped in the friends you make and what paths do you go down. I had some friends who were troubled, you know, and I hope they're okay. I don't really know many of them anymore. I have them actually right just outside the studio here. I've been doing a self-designed anti-dementia test

or dementia test for myself where I just been putting on rap songs I haven't heard in 30 years and seeing if I can still wrap them from memory. Wow. And Know the Ledge is one of those. I won't do it now, but like if you put No The Ledge on, I would know all the lyrics.

Did that with Can't Trust it, which I haven't listened to. I've been listening to a lot of public enemy lately. That's funny that you say that. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. this has gosh I'm trying to think of like

what's the best needle drop in this movie is it when they're going through the party in Cypress Hill is playing it might be that when does Nottie by Nature play I think that's right at the beginning right and it's uptown anthem right

that's the Nottie song yeah anyway this is a beautiful movie Ernest Dickerson made some cool films I think this is his debut immediately after working with Spike on three or four films in a row, but I don't think he ever got back to these heights.

Anyhow, Sierra, thanks for participating in this exercise. Let's go now to my conversation with Matt Johnson. Matt Johnson is back, and now an icon of the show, because you were also on the Canadian movie draft episode, which aired since this happened. So it's Matt Month here on the pod. You're poor viewers. I'm sorry to hear that.

No, no. You're doing great. I wanted to start because last time you were formally on the show, Nirvana was just coming out. Yeah. And we talked. I loved it. I loved our conversation.

But I'm curious how you feel about what it did when it went out into the world. It's odd because it happens so gradually. You got to remember that it got finished and released at South by Southwest 2025. And Neon waited almost a calendar year before they released it. And so when I spoke with you crazily, it was right after I had finished shooting the Bourdain. movie, but right as Nirvana the band was kind of coming out, and even within that time, Jay and I had also toured most of the United States with the film. And the feeling that we both had was, oh, wow, like a lot of Nirvana the band fans found out about these screenings. And that's what

we thought, because they were all sold out and the energy was just completely insane. I was that one of them in November in L.A. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so our perspective of this. It was like a rock concert too, and it was all the hardcore fans. My good friend from film school, Nico Pareta, who's extremely talented, well, he's prolific. I think he's made 10 features in Mexico, said that when he came out of the TIF screening.

I hadn't really seen him much since we were in undergraduates, since we were undergraduates, and he said, Matt, this was an odd experience for me. And I said, what, did you like the film? And he said, I don't know. But I felt like everybody else thought

it was a music show or like a concert. Like, that was not the, feeling of watching a movie. And Nico said a lot of, he was the first person ever cast me in a movie when we were in undergrad and he gave me a huge boost of confidence. I really owe him because I was always so so painfully shy. I never wanted to be on camera. I really was insecure about how I sounded, how I looked and he, along with, believe it or not, Dan Levy were co-stars. From Schitt's Creek. We were co-stars in his undergrad film. No kidding. And yeah, he said a number of things that have really stuck with me.

And anyway, him saying that it was like a rock concert really changed my perspective on it. And the point of the story is that we were, maybe it was because we were trying to humble ourselves, but we thought that it was all people who'd watched the TV show who were now watching the movie. And we've come to realize that, yeah, it had taken on a life of its own. And now it is completely out of control. I can't explain it. I have no idea.

Are you happy about it? Well, I'm so happy that people are connecting with it, and it seems to mean something to people. But it's strange because so much of my life has been me operating from a place of obscurity that I'm sure you can appreciate, that it is very difficult to be like, I'll use this metaphor. I find it so enjoyable. and I feel like I have an opportunity to really do something interesting when I have to host an event or give a speech at a wedding or I did the eulogy at my uncle's funeral. This is going to sound morbid and maybe crass,

but I like being in environments where people are expecting one thing and then the way that I am naturally is like, whoa. Like, oh, it's funny that, that, this person is doing this, whether it's any kind of public forum communication. And now I'm losing that ability. And I don't mean to do that literally, but I just mean that there's now an expectation of me that didn't exist before. And so it makes everything I do not harder, but I don't have the same trick that I can play, which is that nobody knows who I am. I'm this unassuming, seemingly dopey person that then,

can surprise you because your expectations were so low. And losing that. I relate to this a lot. Of course, because it's a true gift. And it's given to us by our anonymity and also by, I think, me being Canadian is a big part of it. But I thrived on it. And it was a defense mechanism because I thought, okay, I feel so much more comfortable having a very low expectation and then playing with that low expectation because it means I can kind of play a Mott and Bailey game where I can

back away if I stumble or embarrass myself. It's the way that we shoot movies. Like Jay and I or whoever I'm acting with can take huge risks knowing that no matter what the embarrassing stuff won't be there. And my way of transposing that into real life is I can set an expectation with people. And then if I don't meet that expectation, that's the joke. The joke, the joke is I'm not meeting that expectation. And so, and then we can all enjoy that. But now it's like, well, people meet me and they have a very clear expectation of how they want me to behave. Okay, that's a wonderful segue to Tony, because this is the first film that you don't appear in. Or, and also, I'm not doing any of my tricks. So do you think that that was a self-knowledge of trying

to pull back from something that was happening even at that TIF screening or even before that where you felt like maybe you were becoming a little too well known in that way or too seen. Okay. Yeah, no, you're giving me too much credit. I'll tell you, it was totally cynical. I'll tell you all my secrets since I like you. So one, I knew I was about to make this magic card movie. And I looked in the mirror and I talked to my friends and I said, well, okay, they've decided to let you make the magic card movie.

And you've never made a movie before. So you'd better go out and make one. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to make a movie where I don't get to do any of the things that I normally do, which are these same like Monta Bailey tactics of hiding my own inability to make movies inside the movie itself, which is why in Tony the camera never moves. I never zoom. I don't do any. I completely, I talked with Jared on the phone before I shot the movie. and rightfully so he was like so how are you planning to shoot this and I was like Jared when people see this movie they're going to think it was shot by a different Matt Johnson because all the stuff that we do I'm intentionally not doing any of it because one I'm very like I love David Lynch I was very inspired by the straight story I remember what as a kid even hearing about that being like whoa like why did he do that like like

we didn't have to and I don't pretend to understand is like the the reasons behind it I'm sure he's talked about it but it for me it was like okay can I do this without any of the things I normally have without any of my friends with me and really using only the tools of actors who I love and the words that I write and obviously Michael Bauman is going to make everything look our vision of it was can we make this movie feel like you're turning pages in a book, as opposed to all my other films, which is like, you're there kinetically watching everything, spying on it,

and any minute you don't know what's going to happen. And so like the beauty of turning pages in a paperback book, but I only had those tools, and that's it. And I thought, if I can do this, then maybe when I go to make much more standard movies, I'll be able to start integrating these two things together, but I wanted to start at zero. my editor Bobby Upturch loves, I'm going to forget his name, but he's an American superstar director.

He directed Mud and... Oh, David Gordon. Not David Gordon. It's not, but it's similar. It's a guy like David Gordon Green. Jeff Nichols. Yeah, Jeff Nichols. So he's a huge Jeff Nichols fan and he will always show me Nichols movies.

And I like various things about them. But what Bobby loves to talk about is how Nichols... in every film tries to teach himself a new tool. And so Bobby will show me, I think he showed me, but he was like, this is the movie where Nichols tried to teach himself how to use steady camps. And when you watch somebody's filmography from that point of view, you go,

oh, this is a clever guy. Like using every single opportunity to make a film to try to master something because, I mean, as I'm often admitting, most of us have no idea what we're doing. We're just trying to react to the movie as it's made. And so anyway, I tried to take a page out of his book and be like, okay, can I make a movie with nothing other than, as my professor Amnon Bookbinder said, the shot and the cut. I had Jeff on the show for bike riders, and he is very insightful about the process of making movies.

He must be. Smart guy. I would not have thought of you as a guy who would make a biopic. And I know that this is not a standard cradle to grave biopic, but it is still in a sense of biopic. What was your perception of them before you decided to do this? Well, I've got a secret there too. Okay. And that's that for a long time I had been thinking about like how every single one of my movies in some ways, I mean, I'm always in them.

And in some ways they're like about me, whether it's Nirvana the band or Blackberry, it's like I'm trying to reflect myself and I'm making the autobiographical in a way, but I was but I've never been able to do something that is, man, this is verging on the personal, but like I've never been able to make something that is sincerely about myself

because I'm in them and they're so, I don't want to say goofy, but like my movies are about a supersized persona that it's like my superhero identity in a way, but for me to make a movie that is really about what it was like for me as a kid and like what like the types of

stuff that that I would maybe be more insecure about talking about. I was like, well, I could never make a movie like that. And the character's name is Matt Johnson and I'm in it like I just wouldn't be brave enough. And so I had been looking for an outlet to do a real autobiography. And it was only when I met Dominic Sessa and had been pitched previously this Bourdain film and had turned it down that I was like, oh, this, here it is. I can smuggle an autobiography that is kind of half Dom's life and half my life and the places where that connects and we can kind of form a conspiracy with Anthony Bourdain and the parts of his childhood where it kind of lines up with the things that me and Dom agreed with and and this is it like I sort of recognize the opportunity for what it was

and and then I was all in and and so yes this is the long way of answering your question of um biopics are not interesting to me um there are some some of them that I that I like but I actually can't think of anywhere I'm like oh yeah God that really moved me I think because in some ways they're the original IP films like like I suppose the best of them is Citizen Kane as as far as like biopics that I really love but but well they're like some of the earliest best picture winners like Life of Emil Zola and films like that yeah yeah yeah it's perfect yeah and like coal miner's daughter there's like becomes a long tradition of it but obviously this is very different your approach I think in in all of your other films but I can

of a moment in the dirties. I can think of a moment in Blackberry and certainly in Nirvana that are kind of heart sick and a little sad and a little bit insecure. Right. And it feels like you made the whole plane out of that in this movie. You know what I mean? Like you took those little moments and you know what I'm saying? Well, I was thinking about what I actually was like when I was that age. And it is not the, what's the line in dead poets? I was not the, towering mental giant you see before you. People would, I was on the beach and people would kick copies of Byron in my face. And I was a kind of arrogant, angry, really resentful, rude.

Like I was, I'm talking about when I'm like a teenager. And of course, like I was still myself, but, but like I shudder at the way that I would try to get people to think I was good. And yeah, I thought, well, what if I make to make a movie where the character is only that? And he's not trying to make a charming film about himself. I think it's pretty brave. I mean, I wrote that this is a movie about thinking you have some big ideas about yourself and meaningful ambition when you have absolutely no sense of who you really are. Yeah.

And also realizing that with what you have in your hand at that time, you are nothing. Yeah. And all the potential that you may think you have, well, it doesn't even realize for Tony in this movie. Right? Like it's why I love the ending line so much between him and the person admitting him into the school, which I mean, I guess it would be a spoiler for me to bring up. But like he says the exact opposite of how he was behaving in the opening scene. And he seems in some ways defanged and almost, well, he's gelded in a way at the end. And yet it's true strength.

You know, you go, oh, wow, no, that's power. Good for you, kid. I'm waiting for you to introduce yourself as Matthew Johnson at a screening. You know, that's how it will really happen. The thing that, one of the things that I think works so wonderfully about the movie is the decision to effectively not explore Bordane's mythos. Like, not just not tell the later version of his story, but not even really, I think, worked too hard to psychologize the specifics of his life. Oh, go ahead. Can you tell me specifically what you mean?

Because this is an interesting line of conversation. Very easily looked at an episode of one of his television shows where he talks about something with this great depth and insight and then tried to kind of like work backwards to have a moment of realization in the movie and say like, well, if you saw episode 27, 27 to parts unknown. Oh, I understand exactly what you mean. Like, give the movie like hyperlinks. Yes. And not like Easter egging it, not really trying to gratify the many millennial men for whom Bourdain is a, you know, an icon. Right. And so the movie is called Tony and it is about a person named Anthony Bourdain.

And it seems very much like what happens in the earliest stages of that book. But it doesn't seem like you're bending over backwards to satisfy that audience either. No. Which I just thought was a very, I don't know if it was a brave choice, but it was a really smart choice. Or some would say suicidal. Well, I'd like to hear about like. Like, did you have to fight for that ability to do it that way? I got to say, I was really surprised by how much authority I was given.

And I mean authority. Like I was given like an unbelievable amount of freedom in terms of telling this story. That stunned me because we originally were not working with the estate. Like when I first like hired Dom and said, okay, this is how we're making the movie. And then we started working with A24. There was no, there wasn't even an idea because I'm used to making movies like Blackberry or this movie I'm making right now where it's the Wild West. It's like I work with lawyers to make sure that I can tell these stories, not with. the people whose lives I'm making the movies about.

And so it was a real shock that after the estate got involved, they were so, I guess the term is open-handed with how they were letting us make this movie. But to be specific about why or why not make it... The rude way of saying it is fan service, like why not make the movie that way comes from my own history with the guy which is that I

knew him only vaguely as a media personality and it's not like I had an opinion of him that was much different than my opinion of you say Gordon Ramsey you know I mean in the in the they're sort of at the same level in my in my mind

and I thought that that is something I could bring to this which is that my own curiosity about this character, his legacy, what he means to people could be an entryway for audiences to maybe find the same things

interesting about him starting from nothing that I do. And I had learned from Blackberry another movie where I had no knowledge of telecommunications, cell phones, nothing.

That is a decent recipe for an idiot like me, I should say, to be like, okay, well, I don't know anything, but these details about his life, I find fascinating and I can't explain why. And so maybe if I present those as honestly

as I can using things from my own and Domit's own history to kind of fill in the gaps, maybe other people will find them interesting too. Do you research a lot though? Like how to, well, research is a broad term. So I read everything that he wrote and I moved to Provincetown and talked to all the people there who knew him when he was young. Oh, wow. And that basically formed And that combined with the things that Dom and I were talking about, about things that we'd gone through, form the basis of the screenplay. Like everything that the characters talk about, the interactions that they have are all coming from things that Bourdain had written about, that I had then kind of double-checked with people who are there because it's so funny. I mean, it's all self-report, right? That's one of the great secrets of Anthony Bourdain.

He's like, isn't my life amazing, according to me? According to me. All you've got to do is be a good storyteller. You know this about yourself. No kidding. And look, I think this is another movie that doesn't let facts get in the way of the truth because the idea that Bourdain himself is inflating these things that happen. I'll tell you a perfect example. So I get to Provincetown and Bordane famously worked at two restaurants, one called the flagship, which is now gone, turned into like a $5 million Airbnb. And the other, a place called Cyril and Sells. So he worked in the kitchen there starting, I think he was actually a line cook there, he was dishwashing at the flagship. But the kid who watched dishes at Cyril and Sal's was a guy named Larry Luster. Turns out now Larry owns Cyril and Sal's.

Okay? This is an unbelievable story, which I won't get into. They should make a movie about Larry and his family. 50 years later. It's crazy. Wow. And he's still, he's still there. And now his kids, his sons are taking over the restaurant.

And he was just a dishwasher who came there with his brothers because his brother. because his brother worked at a, I think at Air Force or Army base nearby. And he said, hey, this is a cool town. We should go work there for the summer. Anyway, I would talk with him about things like that famous story in Kitchen Confidential where Bourdain grabs the cast iron pan, burns it. It drops to the ground. Well, it's Larry's older brother is the guy in the book who picks it up bare-handed,

showing him the boils and blisters on his hand. And he's like, what do you talk? Like, you're such a baby that you can't do this. Larry and his brother together at dinner at the lobster pot tell me, that never happened. Are you insane? I would never grab a pot with my hand. Like people come up to me all the time saying this story and I have to tell them all. I would never do that.

Yes. It's psychotic. And in that is sort of the secret of the whole movie, right? It's like you're watching the stories, the memories of a kid where, of course it's true that he burned his hand and then somebody else picked it up and put it down, and that showed him, I have a long way to go. But did it happen? Of course not. I feel like it's such a great reflection of the fact that people with the biggest egos also have the deepest crevices of insecurities. So even when you're telling a story that is embarrassing

for you, you have to exaggerate the effect in the storytelling. Well, hey, and I'm just as guilty. I'm exactly. I mean, it's what I find so relatable about it. And it's why when I'm sitting there at lunch with Dominic Sessa, with no interest at all in making a movie about Anthony Bourdain within five sentences, I'm like, not only do I have to make this movie, but I know what it's about. And then, because really, well, Dom's a young guy, right? And he had, it really just made the holdovers and was sorting himself out and realizing, oh, I have a new, I have a new identity. Like, I have a whole new identity. And, and watching him reckon with that, but with this level of maturity and sensitivity and a total lack of ego, like he's just speaking with me.

I mean, I won't embarrass him by saying the specifics of what we're talking about. But I was like, if I said to Matt Miller, my producer who was in at the lunch, I said, we could just start rolling tomorrow. Like, he's completely ready. I just need to shoot this guy in a close up, experiencing these things. And we have a movie. Part of what's so wonderful, though, about his performance and the way that you've written the character is, you don't give him a lot. You don't give him a lot of cheap, easy wins for the first 100 minutes of the movie. No.

In fact, he only loses. Yeah. But he also gets all these kinds of false victories where he thinks he's won, right? You know, like, how many times he lies and thinks he got away with it. Like, that's the whole movie. And he's like, yes, I did it. I lied to my mom. She believed me.

Yes, I did it. I lied to Nancy. And she thinks I'm here for writing. I lied my way into this kitchen. And he just keeps going down and down and down and down and down, thinking that he's going up and up and up. One of the things that, you know, you mentioned that the film has some different formal stylistic moves than your other movies.

But I also felt like, you know, it's quite contemplative and sad at times. And it also feels like if it was turned one degree to the right, it could just be New England taxi driver. You know, like it could be like the villain origin story. Of course. But where Lanz, ultimately, is like this felt like a. movie that Touchstone Pictures could have released in 1997. I was like, this is like a very classical kind of Hollywood production. I take that as a huge compliment because I was playing

around with the idea of like old school story structure. I mean, I'm sure people, this is obvious if you watch it, but I rip the whole plot off of Pinocchio. Like I'm essentially trying to remake Disney's Pinocchio almost beat for beat. Like if you line them up, you'll be like, oh, Jesus, you should be sued. But I think that's in the public domain at this point. Pinocchio. I think I've got it. I don't know. I think Disney changed a lot of shit to make it. How old is the Pinocchio? I think it's 38. I think it's the 30s, yeah. Okay. All right. Well, we'll delete this part of the show. No, no, no. Please, run it, run it. I'm not the copyright holder. Do you think Josh DeMorrow is listening to this podcast? You never know. Probably. You never know. But I was really trying to do a kind of like old school. 90s is exactly right. I mean, it's probably because I'm so.

a wash in it after having finished Nirvana of the band, but trying to put a character through like a classic hero's journey and, and, and, and had I told you that story about, um, like the, what I think the secret to writing movies is for me about, about the history of psychoanalysis. Do I talk you about this? I think we said about this off, Mike. Oh, really? I think so. Yeah.

I'll repeat it. And it's, I mean, if you, if you're a screenwriter listening to this and you find this useful. It really changed my life and I'll tell it as briefly as possible. And it's that Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung sort of had two different approaches at dream analysis. And it was that the client comes in, tells you a dream. And Sigmund Freud would say, ah, interesting dream. Let's go down from that dream into your own biographical story. So what in the dream is representing things that happened with your mother, things that happened in your own life, like these things that happened to you specifically, it's telling us secrets about your own past that your

subconscious is manifesting. And that's how we'll decode the dream and use it to help you. Whereas Carl Jung, here's the exact same dream and goes up and says, okay, so what myth, what story either from the Bible or Greek mythology, like what does it map to? And then let's look at the story of the myth and it will tell you where you are in your own story. Right? And that will provide the answer of where you need to go next. And I found that framing of movies so unbelievably powerful. Like how I said, I just took Pinocchio as the myth. And me and Dominic Sess's biographical details as the Freudian side of it.

And then in the middle, the dream is the movie. Right? And the more I apply that filter to the things I'm doing, and it may just be like a shortcut for me to make it easier for me to understand. but I find it extremely powerful because if I get lost one way, I can go the other way to help figure out where I'm supposed to go. It's so funny because I feel like one of the recurring visual sonic motif of the movie is a person being abruptly awoken with splashed water and their dream ending. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure that was, was that subconscious or the conscious speaking on the on the page?

Well, I mean, how pretentious you want me to be. I won't go there. I'll tell you. One of my favorite moments of the movies when Dominic Sessa wakes up on his own. I really like that. I do too. Yeah. Another reason why I thought of the 90s a little bit while watching this movie in a good way is I am like a card carrying Antonio Banderas. Me too. And he doesn't.

He's never gotten the credit he deserves because Hollywood basically said, okay, all right, we've got like a prototypical super charming killer. How many different ways can we, we're going to make him like a warrior. We're going to make him an assassin. Desperado assassins. Yeah, as Steve Bouchemy says, the biggest Mexican you have ever seen in your life. And I am sure like you grew up just loving this guy. And he has the Denzel Washington magic, which anything he says, doesn't matter what it is. Every line, explication or not, you're just like more. It just sounds cool.

He just has the best voice. But then for me also, I mean, I loved him in the 90s, in desperado, in Zorro. I loved all of those movies. And then getting a little older and seeing the album of our films and you're like, oh, wow, this is a very complex psychological performer as well. And I do feel like, you know, he's a little disserved over the last 10 or 15 years with the parts that he's getting. I agree completely. But he's so fucking good in this movie. And I'm telling you, it's all him.

I mean, I write all the roles for the actors. And so originally this guy was not a Roman Catholic, you know, like the details of him and. what he has interests in basically became what the character is. And I do not mean to say he's playing himself, not at all. I mean, it goes without saying. But it was the synthesis between like a kind of religious humility and this master chef kind of in hiding that that kind of unlocked this character where everything he says and does. He just seems so intentional, but also so scary. Like he doesn't, he, he so doesn't want to be caught showing off, but he's the most handsome, charming, graceful person in all of Provincetown. Yeah, but he's also a really tragic ghost of future past figure in the movie in such an amazing way.

Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people view the film and they're like, okay, so this is about Anthony Bourdain picking between a good mentor and a bad mentor. I'm like, no way. Both of these men that he's looking at are total failures. Yeah. But they're also unbelievable successes. And Bordane has got to. to figure out, well, what of each of these guys am I going to keep? Because obviously, Antonio Maderis is playing a guy who you'd view as, okay, that's a good influence. But you look at his life, you know? I was wondering about this since this is, you know, your first film that is not made in the same style as the other films that you've made. And it's with these Hollywood actors.

But it's an ensemble piece. Big time. And Leo and Stav and Antonio and other actors as well. But they're just forces of nature charisma-wise. You know, like, Leo, like, almost walks away with the movie in the middle of it. Isn't it crazy? Yeah. And, like, I've talked to people who've seen it and they feel the same way, right? So how do you, one, how do you basically make chemistry in a situation like that where you've got a small number of actors, especially in those kitchen sequences?

And two, how do you, like, make sure that the movie is balanced enough in the favor of who you need it to be? Yeah, I'll answer the second question first, which is, I have no idea. Like, that's not something that Kurt Bobby and I are conscious of really, um, Because we, I think, like most filmgoers, just try to put the cool shit on screen. And if Leo's doing the cool shit, we're like, okay, yeah, more, more, more, more. Yeah. I think it kind of works itself out if the story is working. But in terms of getting people in a room to have fun with one another, that is just the magic of casting.

I kind of have a perspective on that. I guess I should say it's more of a philosophy. It's like I'm only going to put people in my movies that I like because, well, when I'm watching even just footage, when I'm watching any of my movies, I know something is wrong when I don't like one of the characters that I put in a movie. And I don't mean like I disagree with. I mean that I don't like love them. Like when I'm watching, okay, when I'm watching Tony, I love everything Leo Woodall does.

I love him. I want him to win. I look at Dominic Sessa. I love him. I want him to win. I want Antonio Banderas to win. I want Amelia Jones to win. Like I love them.

Like I watched them and I could cry looking just at the vitality in their face as they are trying to get what they want. And so, like, the secret is, meet them there. Like, don't hire somebody to be in your movie who you do not feel that way about because you can't fake it. And so long as everybody comes there and they recognize that you really do want the best for them,

then they'll play. They'll play. Like, I mean, maybe you can make a mistake and who knows, like maybe secretly Stavros and Leo Woodall hated one another. But no. They understand, okay, we're here and the better we do,

the better we're all. going to look and everybody was on everybody's team. I also have raised the same age, all young in their career. And they had each other's back. We were trapped in Cape God, man. Like we were trapped. What was, was there one thing you would do differently if you could do it again? Because since you had not been in a situation like this before? I mean, there's hundreds of things that would do differently. But, but, you mean, my first time working in like the true American system, I was working with almost exclusively strangers. There's things that I had such a relaxed attitude about because I'm so used to,

like, my friends and I almost in a kind of autopilot. Like if you watch Nirvana the band, you don't, like it's so painfully obvious that the people who made this have, well, no regard for bureaucracy. I'll just say that.

I'll put it that way. And so, And so moving into a system where things just needed to be done a certain way, and for good reason, took so much getting used to for me. But again, it gets back to this thing I brought up at the beginning, which is I knew I needed to go through this. Like I knew I needed to go through this kind of with no safety net because I was about to be thrown into like 10 times more complicated situation. And I didn't want that to be the learning experience. I'm just a little bit about choosing music.

Sure, sure, sure. It's a lot of classical needle drops, big needle drops. Obviously, Jay has score as well, which is really nice. I know, I love Jay's score. And he wrote those original piano cues so early. He was just watching footage, well, like we always do. Kurt and Bobby will just send him dailies. And then it was, I think, the very first thing he sent me.

I was like, oh, yeah, you've created the subconscious of Anthony Bourdain. And that very first thing he wrote is in the movie. Like, he defined the tone instantly. But in terms of needle drops, this was the first time ever where, this is getting back to your hyperlinking question, where there is a personality behind. I tried to do this in BlackBerry a bit, although those guys were not really music fans, where the personality that you're making the movie about has a relationship with music already. And so the place that Kurt Bobby and I started was with Bordane's playlists from this time. and he has lists of music that he that he loves, but then there's also something very cool,

which is that he obviously is the music supervisor of his TV show. And so what we did, we just looked at every single one of the songs from this era that he put in his various shows because clearly those mean something to him. And so it was like this amazing, like we have our pick.

And so like the song that's first playing in the kitchen, I mean, I don't want to spoil the music in that, well, I mean, I guess I can talk about it what the hell the people care. I think that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. But Strawberry Letter is the song that he says, if he heard walking down the street,

thinking about Provincetown, he would just burst into tears. And it just so happens to be the song that is playing almost in the background while he's in the kitchen for the very first time washing dishes, paying no attention to it. So as many of these things

that we could take from his own preference, we put in the movie, but then, and I have to give the credit in a way that I'm, sure most people aren't used to hearing. The executive on this film from A-24, one of the executives, Noah Sacco, watched a cut of the movie and out of nowhere was like, you know, I really love classic rock from this era. Do you mind if I suggest a few songs? And the movie was basically done.

I was like, of course, of course. He sent me three songs. Every single song is in the movie and one of them is the closing credits. No kidding. Yeah. Like he just, it's the only time in my life I've ever got like feedback from a studio or a financier that was like, oh, wow, yeah. A good note. They're like unbelievable notes that I got from them. I feel like you're in a very interesting moment in your life. Oh, sure, yeah. You are from a far in demand.

And you're just talked about how, you know, whatever your imposter syndrome or your anxieties or your, you know, defensiveness or all the things that you had as a young person. And I've now really being challenged. Well, but it kind of is Bordainish. You know, where at a certain Bordane kind of crosses a Rubicon as a public figure. I know. It's so funny what happens to him. They're like, okay, guess what? You're a famous writer now.

And he looks in the mirror and goes, well, I didn't mean to do that. Yes. But so I think, I feel like you aspire to this, but also I'm curious to know, like, how you're handling it. We're like, I feel like you're on the minds of executives who want to make big movies. You're making the magic movie. you're making other stuff. Yeah. Is it everything you ever hoped and dreamed?

Are you happy? You know what? I think happiness is a bad metric because, you know, I think happy means different things to different people. I'll say I feel I've never felt more proud that I can, I don't want to say be a role model, but be like an example of not how easy it is to be a filmmaker, but how you really don't need to be some kind of genius. to do it, right?

Like, you can be... That's not helpful. People who don't listen to you on this show and think this guy's not really smart. They think the opposite of that. Well, you know what Miles Davis says about this? What's that? A genius is the person who's most like themselves.

And that's a path anybody can take. And to take your point of what studio executives, etc., whatever that grouping of people really even means, what I find that anybody who wants me to make a movie for them or wants to talk about a project is interested, in they're all interested in the same thing, which is how I would do something, right? Like whatever it is that is me,

which I even have trouble defining, how can that connect with the property they have or an IP or a story or whatever? And everybody has that. Like every film student has that because, of course, there's only one of them. And so for me, the challenge of my life was trying to figure out,

and it's a work in progress, but like, like, what is it about my own specific circumstances as a kid growing up where I did and my interest being what they were? Like, what does that mean? And it's why all of my movies are constantly trying to reexamine that as much as possible and not necessarily change it, but like keep getting closer and closer to it. Because it will be the journey of my life, as I'm sure it is with you. Not the same, but I know.

I appreciate you saying that. Sure, sure, sure. I'm curious what is a, what is the metric of success for a movie like Tony? Because it is, I feel like, you know, it's an American studio film. You've got a rising young star. You've got a legend of Hollywood in the cast. Like, is it a, is it, do you look at box office actively? Do you read the reviews of the film?

Like, do you think about it any differently than your previous work? You know, every movie, I think I've told you this before, that the great victory of every single movie is when you solve the story problems in the editing room and Kurt Bobby and I go, oh my God, I can't believe we fix this and it never gets better than that. So that, like nothing ever

even comes within like a like arm's reach of that feeling. So, but you're asking specifically like obviously like almost to cynically look at the success of a film and practically. But they're both the same. The same.

I don't mean cynically negatively negatively. I just mean in terms like But you're making a product that is going into the marketplace as well, you know? Oh, definitely. And I do think that all my work is trying to be at the crossroads of, of, like, what audiences actually do want to see. Like, I'm not, I'm making movies for people to watch and enjoy. And, and, and so I do respect the idea that, that people are going to go see this movie if they like it and they won't if they don't. I'm making a crude case for the commercialization of film. But I don't, I'll put it this way. Let's say that this movie were released and critics were all like, oh my God, this is like a pathetic, naval gazing piece of garbage.

And nobody went to go see it. That still wouldn't change the feeling that I had when I watched it with. my friends in the editing room being like, ah, we did it. So I, what I want is for really young people to watch it and feel like it's useful to them in the same way that I felt that about Nirvana the band and the dirties and all of these movies, even though I wasn't mature enough at the time to make that claim. But, but I want to keep making movies hopefully to try to, well, So it's so self-aggrandizing to say, make the world better. But, but, but that's, I think a good movie can do that.

So do I. Yeah. So do I. I think even like, like very small, independent, like, seen by 5,000 people. Really can be. And I think that it, that viewing them that way in the same way that when I was in film school and you'd be up all night and you'd be like, oh my gosh, this, this movie that I'm making now is like the most important thing I've ever done in my life, that still animates me because I still think. it's true that if you give something everything that you have and you really, really do try to make it great outside of, detached from your own ego, then it does make the world better.

And I think that's true of every vocation, every job, this podcast, like the more you put into it, like if you really, really, really do great, you lift everybody. We all get lifted. And it's why we were talking before about criticism. I think film critics are a part of that. And it's why when people don't meet that standard, they're told, I think that if you had thought about this movie more or worked harder or whatever, pick, pick your criticism, then it's not just that your movie would have been better. It's that the life of people everywhere would have been better. And that's a huge responsibility that a lot of people don't want to fess up to that the actions that you take as an individual might affect the world in some small way. But of course it's true.

It is true. you're feeling good about the state of movies. You came in and you said, it feels like something has happened. Yeah, it's like we're living through a renaissance, and it's exclusively because of, like, people 25 and under. It's crazy. It's awesome. I've been praying on this.

It's like Letterbox somehow. It's so bizarre that that the, that, that, that, that, it's, I won't even know that, I don't know that it's cool, but it's almost like, like it has movies have become a new kind of collectible you know in the way that when I was young we'd collect pogs it's like oh you're you're collecting the history of your own culture which is which is so so crazy it's a great way to describe it and and that is what it is because you people can see what you've watched yes and see what you have accomplished you literally create your own history yeah of course of course and and the closer you get to it and I'm

And of course people are like, oh, I want to watch like every weird idiosyncratic thing. And look, the challenge that everybody's going to have is you have to figure out what you like. That's hard. And it was so, it was becoming harder and harder as culture was becoming almost more rarefied. Like with the internet, it was like people could get into all these weird niches and there was nothing that created a collective viewing experience. Like that's completely gone. And yet somehow it's been reformed. where all of these niche interests are now coming together.

It's like, no, we've all now seen these weird movies. I have a strong feeling about this, which is that the homogenization of Hollywood movies between 2005 and 2020 led people. It led to like a kind of break with the contemporary culture and sent people back. Oh, wow. But they were like, I feel like I'm watching the same movie over and over again. But I know that this isn't the history of movies. What else has there been? And so once they got through every fast movie and every Marvel movie and every Jurassic

and all the franchises, they were like, there's more here. And it led to this unconscious collective realization of discovering history. They went back to the original text. Yes. And now the industry is following them in a way that I really love. Anyway, that's my hopeful outro. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? You just got off a plane.

Did you watch anything on the plane? I was so close to watching Roofman. Oh, my gosh. Oh, I liked it. Well, seeing Francis is one of my heroes. He's so great. He's one of the few filmmakers that I'd be afraid to me. He's one of these very nice guy.

You know, I say this about... Place me on the pine, so... I say this about him and very few others, but he knows secrets. And I don't know how he... He's a deep cat. I don't know how he knows them. So I will say I almost watched Roof Man. And so I'll say that's the last thing that I watched, even though I didn't actually see it.

Because the feeling of almost seeing it really filled me with a feeling of like, oh, yeah, I'm going to watch a new C in France. because I love seeing friends. I love him. No one has ever answered that question in that way. With Hegelian negation? Yeah. Johnson, you are the best. Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here and I'll see you again. Okay, thank you to Matt. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support. Next week, we're drafting again, movie flops. You feel ready for this? Yeah, I don't like targeting flops, but we're going to make it work. You don't like targeting?

Yeah, I want to celebrate the good qualities of movies, not their, economic failures. Well, that's not the only way we're grading flops. Ooh. Okay. See you then.