The Big Picture - Top Five Apocalypse Movies, Plus the Return of James Gray

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

It’s armageddon time. Or at least it feels that way these days. Sean and Amanda talk about coping with the ongoing fear and frustration by doing what they always do: talking about movies they like. In this case, they discuss their top five favorite apocalypse movies (1:15). Then, Sean is joined by James Gray for a wide-ranging conversation about working as a filmmaker during quarantine, the Hollywood history he’s been sharing with his kids, and more (54:44). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: James Gray Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you. uniquely heartwarming story of Herschel and Ben as they learn the meaning of family. Stream the new Max original and American Pickle now only on HBO Max rated PG-13. I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the end of days. Armageddon. Doomsday. The apocalypse. Locusts descending upon us. Tidal waves crashing down.

Tornadoes lifting off, and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that pervades life in 2020. Happy Friday, Amanda. How are you? I'm great, Sean. Thanks so much. Amanda, today on the show, we're going to be talking about apocalypse movies, and there are a couple of reasons for that. One, probably the most notable new movie released over this weekend is Amy Simons' She Dies Tomorrow. It's a horror film about a kind of psychological pandemic that sweeps across the lives of its characters. I spoke to Amy and we'll air that interview next week after some people have had the chance to see it. But the other reason we're talking about these movies is because I had a good long chat with our old friend James Gray, the director of The Lost City of Z and last year's Ad Astra and The Yards and many other great movies.

Earlier this summer, James's next project was announced. It's a drama called Armageddon Time that is slated to star Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Oscar Isaac, and Cate Blanchett. You really can't do much better than that with a cast. So I chatted with James about working as a filmmaker during quarantine, Hollywood history he's been sharing with his kids, some general thoughts about our daily hell. I hope you will stick around and listen to that. But first, Amanda and I have another top five. This is one of our most difficult top fives to pick because there are so many good and different kinds of movies that fall into this category.

So Amanda, when I said to you, let's do top five apocalypse movies, were you excited? Were you dreading it? What was your reaction? My instant reaction was like, eh, because when you say apocalypse movies, I think of the tidal wave and everyone running and a certain type of CGI blockbuster, which has its place.

And it has its place on my list as well. But I think I had forgotten kind of the richness of the genre because ultimately it's just about the fear of death. And many different filmmakers and many different genres can fit into the umbrella of apocalypse and have. And so there was a lot more to choose from than I like instinctively thought. Yeah, you know, when we've done top fives during quarantine, we've looked at erotic thrillers and courtroom dramas and movies set at sea.

And we've sought these kind of like these buckets and they're pretty narrow, those buckets, you know, erotic thrillers. There's only about 75 of those that were made between 1980 and 1997, but apocalypse movies. I mean, this spans the gauntlet of the whole medium. You know, this is, this is everything, every movie in its way, every piece of literature in its way is about the end, the is everything, every movie in its way, every piece of literature in its way is about the end, the end of something, the end of mortality, the end of an experience. And so apocalypse is so fungible. I had a lot of fun just thinking about what we could do here. I wouldn't say that my choices are necessarily radical because there are some that are just

undeniably important, but you know, when you think ground rules here, let's like, let's, let's set the table a little bit one of the the key circumstances that i think had to apply to this was that this is a story that has to affect a lot of people you know it can't just be about you know four people trapped in a room who you know fight to the death and and then that's an apocalypse it has to be there are personal apocalypses that we can talk about, but specifically it has to reflect something that has happened more broadly to society. What other constraints that we had to consider here? That's pretty much it, honestly.

I think both of our lists ended up affecting things. It just is on the earth as opposed to apocalypse of a society elsewhere, another planet, anything like somewhat science fiction-y. I mean, there are definitely science fiction elements of all of this, but it's life as we know it or life as people know it that is in jeopardy in some way or has been changed in some way. So it all is somewhat earthbound. I think that's right. And I think, you know, I had the same reaction when I first started chewing on this, which is, oh, you know, we should talk about Deep Impact in 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow. And there's this or the 1970s, like Irwin Allen disaster movies like Earthquake or, you know, the Poseidon Adventure, which we talked about in the At Sea episode. There's a certain kind of feeling that when you say apocalypse, you think this. But I think there's a couple of reasons why these movies persist, not just in the mega blockbuster format, but kind of across all formats. Amy Simons' movie is as small as a movie can be. She shot it in her house and she self-funded it. And it's definitely an apocalypse

movie. It's about a contagious virus of anxiety that kills everyone. So, you know, this is a very stretchable, fun way to think about things. I think our obsession with doom is one of the reasons why this goes on and on and on. I've thought about the nature of content during quarantine and the pandemic and the way that every little piece of news that is filtered to us, we hate, but also so many people are living on it in this complex way. You know, they're waiting to hear the latest data point. They're waiting to hear the latest piece of bad news, and it is kind of powering them through their frustration. So that's definitely one reason. Why else do you think that these movies persist? there's a basic psychological, you know, like the death instinct or, you know, whatever the Freud

term is of that we all are like careening towards that, towards death and have almost kind of a magnetic pull on us to some extent. I haven't actually read the Freud text. So, you know, please, please don't at me. My therapist doesn't enough. And it is also a pretty archetypal storytelling. I mean, you know, there is an apocalypse in the Bible, I think, in terms of all historic cultures and reference points. There is this fear of everything ending because ultimately their story is about survival. And one of our human instincts is to try to survive. Should we get right to our list?

Should we talk right away about these top fives? I'm going to let you go first. Why don't you give us your number five apocalypse movie? Speaking of big CGI blockbusters, I went with Independence Day. Here I am. We will be united in our common interest. Perhaps it's fate that today is the 4th of July

and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. I had to do one Roland Emmerich movie on the list, I feel, just in homage. And I thought a lot about specific apocalypse images during this exercise, more so than I normally do when talking about film, which is a visual medium, which is really stupid. I realized that. But because the apocalypse hasn't happened and because it happens so frequently in film, you do kind of have your own personal visual language of like, what does the apocalypse look like? Uh, that has been supplied to you often or supplied to me by these movies. And one of them is the laser beam coming down over the white house. I'm just like, shit, things are about to get really real. Um that is why i i chose it obviously also i needed to do

a will smith apocalypse movie he's been in a couple of them and also he's just important to me and if i had to pick some movie stars to save me will smith is on the on the the top of the list personally and one of the great anti-apocalypse speeches in cinema history, you know, the famous Bill Pullman, Bullhorn Independence Day speech, which I can't say all of my picks reflect hope. In fact, some of them like definitely don't

or reflect the opposite. But that is an interesting tension of these apocalypse movies is how are they weighted between like, wow, we're fucked versus everything's going to be okay. We'll save the day. We will survive. And this is one of my we will survive picks. Do you remember how Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith defeated the aliens and their invasion? Do you remember what they developed to beat them? Don't they build like a,

they have to fly in and break the code somehow and then leave something on the, a virus, right? That's right. It's a virus. Yes, which I feel like over and over again, so many of these movies are powered by this idea that infection can destroy, you know? And in this case, this is a rare case where the good guys get to infect the bad guys. And it's an interesting turn of play there.

I feel like, you know, Independence Day, obviously, massive blockbuster. Very memorable movie, I think, for people of our generation. It's foundational in terms of movie going. People just love to see it in theaters, and I still get a warm feeling watching it now, even though it's kind of junky, like all Roland Emmerich movies are. It's super saccharine and weird in art. Every character is an archetype and not a human being, but also just super fun. Right. And the parts that aren't actually that amazing laser beam kind of look pretty muddy and you

don't really know what's going on. And at one point I had forgotten that Bill Pullman just like gets psychically taken over by an alien. I don't even really like know what's happening. It makes no sense. But you're right. I think, again, in terms of like the foundational type of these movies, for me, it was certainly Independence Day.

So the second wave of these movies, I think, starts to come right around the George W. Bush presidency. And the 90s, we had these sort of, I don't know, I want to say almost celebratory movies reflecting on the idea of end of days, the Clintonian movies, Armageddon and Deep Impact and Volcano and Dante's Peak and, you know, that 90s time was, there was something kind of rollicking and energetic about all of these movies. They were events. They were blockbusters. My number five is Children of Men. The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet. Baby Diego was stabbed outside a bar in Buenos Aires after refusing to sign an autograph. Which was released in 2007, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Definitely

considered one of the great sort of filmmaking feats of the last 20 years. Certainly one of the best movies of the last 20 years. I think it's Cuaron's best movie. And it's functionally a story about a society that can no longer procreate and what lengths it will go to to continue life and continue to make humanity. And I would say that it's resonating pretty hard over the last few months. It's a movie that is very painful to watch and it does have glimmers of hope, but the violence and the intensity and the way that society turns on itself is such a big part of this movie. And, you know, I just haven't really been able to shake, you know, a handful of the scenes after rewatching it. Obviously the sort of the long tracking shot through the battlefield

is a very memorable moment. But to me, the craziest moment in the whole movie is in the first five minutes when Clive Owen walks into a coffee shop and he finds two dozen people watching television. And the news reports that the youngest person in society has just died and that essentially society is fucked. And Clive Owen, who is this completely dissolute character, orders a coffee, walks out, goes around the corner. The camera follows him the whole way. And just as he gets far enough away from the cafe to reflect on the moment, the cafe explodes. And we see that we're living in this kind of terroristic world, this post-apocalyptic

world. And everybody is desperate to not just survive, but to find a way to kind of thrive in misery and thrive in chaos. And it's definitely not a fun movie in the way that an Independence Day is a fun movie, but it's such a powerful film. And it's such a threaded needle of the kinds of movies that I like, which is that it is a big time auteur with a big vision, a really strong story to tell, but it's still, it's mainstream. You know, it's an entertaining movie and it's, I don't know if it's populist necessarily,

but it's for everyone. And it's not even all that hopeful. And it still has been stitched into our memory of movies, which is pretty powerful. Yeah, I mean, this is definitely on my list as well, on my short list. And I think if you hadn't picked it, I might have, but we're trying to diversify here. I think one thing that's really interesting in all of these movies is how much they reflect our worst fears and our imagination of the worst thing that could go wrong versus kind of like a predictive, protective sense of like, if we make this into a movie and we confront it,

then maybe it doesn't have to happen in real life. I feel like Children of Men is in that predictive zone. And the number of times that I've heard someone say, oh, it's just like Children of Men, like this, you know, this is coming true. Since seeing that movie, it has definitely kind of been woven into how we understand or process the world falling apart. Yeah. And this version of kind of disease that infects the movie is it feels like it could happen. It feels like we could reach a time where we develop something in our natural society that we all think is fun or good or convenient for us there's a new kind of plastic that comes into the

world and every jar of milk is delivered in this new kind of plastic and we use this plastic for five years then five years later not a single person on earth can can procreate and that's terrifying and you know that's part of what I think my list is kind of all over the place in terms of what the apocalypse means or could be. But there is something about the realistic versions of things that are particularly unnerving and powerful and make for great movies. Um, I like, I do like both a lot. I do like the independence days, but that, that there's a, you know, and there's another movie on my list from this kind of 06, 07, 08. We are in the throes of anxiety around how we may be dissembling all that we've built here together.

But that's my number five children event. If you haven't seen it, you're fucking insane. You got to go check it out. What's your number four? It's a great segue to my number four, which is a film called Contagion. Is there anyone else who might have had contact with her? This was everyone. Aaron Barnes did. which is a film called Contagion. Mr. Barnes? Yes. This is Dr. Mears from the Centers for Disease Control. Hi. Hi.

I believe you may have had contact with Beth Emhoff last week. Directed by the one and only, the true king of the Big Picture podcast, Steven Soderbergh. Your boo. My boo. If only he knew. You know, in the words of Anne Hathaway, it came true. Here we are. That's so fucked up.

Well, it is. Though I will say, Sean, so I rewatched this this week, and I know that you rewatched it a few months ago for the rewatchables that you did. I believe in March, kind of right at the beginning of COVID-19. That's right. And really before we knew a lot about COVID-19. And obviously, there's so much that we still don't know. And the world is just, and particularly the United States is a mess. But it was interesting to watch Contagion four months in

because there are some things that are just like, not even prescient, but now just immediately recognizable. Just Kate Winslet and, you know, doing all of her tracking and the social distancing and the questions that she's asking. It's, it just seems like day-to-day life at this point. It is so embedded in, in my mind as, because as you mentioned, I just read all the news reports all the time, but you know, there are some things that are, are not as similar. It turns out. And

I found in some ways a little reassuring. You know, there's a lot of talk about surfaces and contagion and that being like a point of transmission. And I did find, I mean, this is bizarre that I found myself sitting there being like, well, that doesn't really seem like COVID-19 in this way based on my understanding, but also maybe in this way. And like, number one, again, not an epidemiologist,

wear a mask, like be safe, protect others. But also it's bizarre that I'm sitting there comparing and contrasting this 2011 fictional movie with what we've been living through the last four months. It's also interesting to watch how society reacts and has reacted. And the Jude Law character is really interesting because he is, you know, a skeptical and a blogger, but not in a like, this is a hoax way. It's just some things are worse than what Contagion predicts. And some things are not as bad as what Contagion predicts, at least at this moment. And again, it's changing all the time. And then, I don't know if you remember the third act of contagion, they do get a vaccine, but then there's the lottery of the vaccine. And I found myself thinking about our current reality and our possible future in ways that I had not really

thought about the lottery system or just how it would be disseminated and how long. So it still has like a very scary future realistic element to it. But I just, it's uncanny. It's, you know, it's both uncanny how real this movie is. And by the way, just how great it is as a movie. And it gives you so much information and it focuses and it focuses on process and um and the science and explains so much so clearly um and then it's both uncanny and frustrating because if they knew enough to watch a movie or to make this movie then how do we not know enough right now to be in a slightly better position than that

we're in which is another tension of these things of trying to compare real life and the movies because at the end of the day it is just a movie but um it's impossible to call something that makes you so uncomfortable perfect but it is such a perfectly designed movie because it does it does a few things and i thought about this a little bit more even since re-watching it and talking about it on the show. It is scientifically accurate, which Scott Z. Burns and Soderbergh went to great pains to do it. But it also is that classic Soderbergh thing where it's just propulsive and eminently watchable. It's so easy to get wrapped up in the storyline. One of the movies that I watched that I'd never seen before to prepare for this was The Andromeda Strain, which is an adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel from the, I think it's from the early 70s. The Andromeda Strain is one of the most unusual

movies I've ever seen. It's a story essentially about a satellite that crash lands in a small town in New Mexico and infects all, what it crash lands with infects all the people in that town. And so a small government group goes to the town, retrieves the satellite, and starts to do tests on it. And the movie initially seems like it's building towards this kind of like alien encounter movie or some sort of military operation battling this new disease or this new life force that we don't have any reckoning with. But ultimately, acts two and three of the movie all take place inside of a lab. And it's entirely science. The whole movie is science. And in some ways, that's very interesting. And the scientists are the heroes of the movie,

which is refreshing, just as they are in Contagion. But it's also kind of boring. I mean, it's very procedural. And it feels like Soderbergh watched the Andromeda strain and then watched all the president's men and was like, how do I make a movie that's these two movies together? And it's so powerful. And there was an interview with him and Amy Simons because they have a creative collaboration in the New York Times recently. And he talked about Contagion. He was asked about the movie. And the one thing he said is the most chilling thing about the movie, which he was like, we basically fudge the facts on one aspect of this story.

And it was the speed with which we got the vaccine. Yeah. I had read that interview before I rewatched it. And that really, really inflected the third act of the movie. It's brutal. But it's but I mean it's just a brilliant brilliant film and harrowing and entertaining in the most unusual way and it features like every famous person

from the last 15 years doing their six minute bit part it's a great pick my pick is a little bit funnier than Contagion it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. For number four, I chose Dr. Strangelove. Actually, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques

and the ratio of, say, 10 females to each male... Which is also kind of a harrowing movie in its own way, but it was kind of a relief just to go back and look at a handful of scenes from the movie. It's obviously Stanley Kubrick's 1964 nuclear age, anxiety, comedy, drama, farce written by Terry Southern and features one of the great performances ever by Peter Sellers, which we mentioned last week on the show. We were talking about an American pickle. and you know it's a three-part story about a um a rather overzealous military man who enacts in order to release the bomb and then the president of the united states in the war room and a british lieutenant need to work together without knowing it to stop the bomb from being set off and there's

a lot of you know correspondence with the russian premiere throughout the movie's a lot of, you know, sort of inside baseball about what would happen in the event that something like this happened, but the movie is, you know, tonally completely absurdist and borderline it's, it's, it's, it's really borderline slapstick at times. But it struck me as a different kind of apocalypse than the one that we're talking about here, which is one where you're anticipating one moment, you know, as opposed to Contagion, which is about this, you know, pandemic-like infection spread across the world, or Children of Men, where this is something that unfolds over a number of years, or Independence Day even, where there are a number of coordinated attacks, but we don't know when the final day will come. Dr. Strangelove is basically about the destruction of a society, the mutually assured destruction of a society over the course of like less than 24 hours. And it's tense. It's tense in its way, even though it's a ridiculous movie that features, you know, Peter Sellers hamming it. It's, it's pretty scary. And I'm not sure if I can really add anything new to the Dr. Strangelove discourse other than just to say, like, I find it weirdly calming. But it's immensely effective in this genre.

When you think, when you, Sean Fantasy, think of the apocalypse and it's your fears of the apocalypse, like, what is the apocalypse to you in that fear like is it a tidal wave is it aliens is it you know nuclear fallout i hate bugs i don't want it i don't it's bugs i don't want to i don't want a bug invasion do you ever see starship troopers a very long time ago okay so starship troopers obviously is on my is on my short list as well, not on my top five, but a movie that I've always loved. And it was easy to love as a 15-year-old when I thought it was just an alien invasion movie. And then as you get older, of course, you realize that there's just an incredible subtext about the Third Reich and fascism.

And the metaphors are very obvious in the movie. But the aliens that invade in Starship Troopers are bugs. They're literally called bugs. They're giant insects. I hate insects. I'm really grossed out by them. And if giant insects invaded my world, I would be destroyed. Okay.

But so it's an invasion and then you're imagining a fight. Like it's a protracted apocalypse. and maybe at the end there are survivors. I guess that's what I'm asking. Is it like for you? Is it a moment or is it a long? Okay. I'll say I don't have nuclear anxiety for the same reason that I don't have fear of flying. If it happens, it happens.

I can't control it. But what I don't want is to turn on the news one day and say a spaceship has landed and several thousand giant cockroaches have exited and they are murdering humans. If that happens. Okay. I mean, I don't want that to happen. I don't know what I'm going to do. I might just go drive off a cliff. Like, I don't know how to engage with that.

Okay. What about for you? Yeah, I don't have nuclear anxiety either. And I think that's just a little bit like only child syndrome of me. Just like what I read in the newspaper. I'm just like, but really, is that going to happen to me? I guess it's also American only child syndrome, which is an extremely important distinction. Yes.

Some American exceptionalism and some Amanda exceptionalism happening at the same time. But for me, I do think I like i fear for me it's both instantaneous and i am like really spoiling many of my picks here but it's instantaneous and like and you know it's coming and for me it's like the the anticipation i think also part of the reason it's instantaneous is because i just know i'm not surviving any post-apocalyptic situation because you remember this. I have terrible eyesight and I just know that as soon as the apocalypse comes, if I don't have access to my contacts, it's over. I actually won't be able to survive.

Remember the day I read that New Yorker story about how all of the supremely wealthy people are preparing for possible like apocalypse or, you know, breakdown of civilization. And they were all getting LASIK because they knew they wouldn't have access to like vision correctional. Like if I don't have access to contacts, I fall down. Like the glass, they can't even make glasses that work for me because the lenses are like too big and thick and they just can't be adapted. So I just know I'm not surviving as soon as those factories shut down. So for me, it's more about the anticipation. Amanda, should we get LASIK live on the podcast? You and I both, we both really need LASIK for this exact reason. In the event that the bugs come, I need to be able to see. But you actually can see a little bit like you would survive by

like so much longer than i would like i'm day one out i would also survive because i'm i'm very strong and i'm well trained in the art of weaponry there are all sorts of reasons uh what's what's your number three what is my number three oh my number three is just a real Amanda treat. It's Arrival. Which is one of my favorite movies of the decade. And I just wanted to find an excuse to talk about it. It didn't even occur to me for a long time that Arrival would be eligible for this movie

because I think because the energy is so different. But if you think about it, giant orbs show up and nobody knows what's happening. And then there is a command center and there is like, are we going to be able to save the world or are we are we not and i think what's different about arrival in terms of apocalypse movies is like what makes it so powerful to me personally and also what makes it interesting to talk about there are two things one that for so much of the movie

like you don't know what's happening you don don't know, like, is this the apocalypse? Like, is this, and that feeling of just like, what is this? Is this going on? What do I need to do? What do we all need to do? Very familiar in the last few months and very, you know, very familiar in general. I don't know if the apocalypse comes that we'll immediately know it's the apocalypse or, I mean, maybe we will, but in my version of it, but, and maybe if it's the apocalypse or I mean maybe we will but in my version of it but and maybe if it's cockroaches we will but maybe not maybe we won't understand but that sense of of kind of like creeping quiet fear actually seems to me um maybe not more realistic but certainly possible and then you know ultimately this movie is about about making peace with grief and with time and kind of with knowing that the end is coming or knowing that bad things are coming. That, you know, time is a flat circle, but in like more beautiful visual ways presented to you by beautiful aliens.

But it, you know, in a sense is making peace with like apocalypse of a sort. And not all of the movies like make peace. They're really with that survival instinct. But I think there's something kind of beautiful about like accepting unend, if not the end. Or maybe it's not the end as the aliens teach us. It's interesting that Arrival has emerged in the last four or five years as the movie that people turn to in times of great crisis that gives them a kind of relief because it's a movie about crisis with relief. And I completely agree with you that it is 100% an apocalypse movie. And that feeling of dread that comes when

something abnormal happens in our society and people are trying to reckon with it and explain it and solve it. We're solving people. We're desperate to understand and figure out what's going on. But there's something kind of unsolvable about the story in Arrival, except for this one woman who is gifted enough, empathetic enough, sophisticated enough to get to the bottom of why these are they octopi what what is that heptapod okay yeah abin costello that's right that's right i haven't re-watched this one in a while but um yeah there's human sorry i just it's also a good meme anyway. Yeah, maybe that's a good big pick meme is me and you as Abbott and Costello as the giant heptapods. But I do like that movie a lot.

And I've been wondering if Denis Villeneuve is going to bring some of that meditative quality to Dune later this year, because that's something that is in the book Dune, but is not in the David Lynch version of Dune later this year, because that's something that is in the book Dune, but is not in the David Lynch version of Dune. You know, there's something sort of oddball and adventurous about that movie. And I think, you know, with Chalamet on board, maybe he'll bring some of that Amy Adams energy. My number three is kind of similar to Arrival in a way, which is that it starts out one way and you think it's going in one direction and it turns in another direction. That movie is WALL-E,

which is the Pixar classic from 2008 directed by Andrew Stanton. WALL-E. WALL-E. WALL-E. Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve. Steve. Eve. Eve. Eve.

Ah. Eve. Eve. Eve. Eve. Really one of the most beautiful movies ever made. It's, you know, time-worn to say that this is more or less a silent film. It features a robot as its main character living in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

This is basically a trash robot, a robot that cleans up and organizes trash and continues to do so even though humanity has completely abandoned or been removed from the planet that he inhabits until he meets another robot named Eve and makes a love connection of sorts. You know, if robots can love these two robots, they definitely love each other. And then he goes on a quest to find Eve. And ultimately takes him to where society is living, which is in space. And all of the humans that are occupying this new society are fat, lazy, chair-bound, addicted to their phones morons. And I would say it's a pretty stunning indictment of humanity, WALL-E. The fact that the most sympathetic figures are

inanimate objects who have single missions in terms of their lives is fascinating. It's fascinating that Disney funded and made this movie. And yet, despite the fact that it has like one of the more cynical premises of all time, it's like a lyrical, beautiful, sentimental story, like all Pixar stories are, and holds up well in this time. I mean, I certainly feel like not like WALL-E, not like a motivated person in search of love, but much more like one of those sloth humans stuck in a chair riding around gleefully changing my shirt color from red to blue and being amused by the most inane bullshit as we, you know, go through this terrible phase of our life. So, you know, just a perfect kind of a movie and definitely an apocalypse movie that turns into not an apocalypse movie. You know, I like that we're picking stuff that has a little bit of, um, I don't know, a little bit of flexibility. It's not just all exploded, exploding the white house so far.

Should we go to your number two? Yeah. I think my number two might be like the apocalypse movie. It is for me, uh, at least visually, which is Mad Max Fury Road. I don't know whether people would have expected me to pick this movie because I don't know. I don't normally love action movies or things adapted from comic books. But I was talking about apocalypse movies as imagery and kind of bringing to life all of your worst fears that you've imagined in your head and actually being able to see them. And I obviously had never seen Mad Max Fury Road until I saw it. But when we imagine the post-apocalypse and when I imagine trying to survive without my contacts and why I know I'm dying on day one, it's because it looks like Mad Max Fury Road. It just like, it is so like visually and, and socially, but, um, just like the vista and like the desperate beauty, but really the

desperate of it, of it all just is, it is Mad Max Fury Road that's just kind of how it is things like what I read about in the bible turns out to be this movie um and it's obviously such like a visual and technical achievement and um again kind of not quite a silent film but it was funny I was trying to pick a clip for Bobby to play in this podcast and I was like well not really a lot of talking talking's not the point of this. Though again, I think like talking probably in my mind won't be a major feature of the apocalypse, I guess, because I like to do it so much

and I don't think the apocalypse will be filled with things that I like. But yeah, just visually, that's it. That's what I'm afraid of. Yeah, if you had not picked it, I definitely would have put this movie on my list. I think we both had it in our top tens of the 2010s and it's become much like arrival has become one of the most celebrated movies of its time.

And I think it will probably stand the test of time. Fascinating. I wonder if it's the greatest number four film installment in a series. You know, this is the fourth Mad Max movie and it comes 30 years after the previous incarnation. I mean, it has to be. Unless how, I mean, the Christopher Nolan Batman movies

are later than four, right? Well, I guess that depends on how you look at it. Do you look at that as just a trilogy of Batman movies or is it in the arc of the Batman story? Anyhow, regardless, Fury Road is an amazing movie because, you know, when the movie was released, George Miller, who directed and wrote and directed all the Mad Max movies, was 70 years old. And this is like, seems like one of the most physically taxing films and the stories now are legion about

how difficult it was to make this movie and the incredible design and the effort and the amount of practical effects that went into making this. And, you know, it is like the summation of Miller's visual and technical wizardry. I've been watching a couple of George Miller movies in quarantine. I watched The Witches of Eastwick for the first time because of Polly Platt. I had been listening to You Must Remember This. And you can see moves even in that movie, which is significantly different. You can see the moves in Mad Max Beyond Thunder, uh, you must remember this and you can see moves and even in that movie, which is significantly different. You can see those, the moves in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, which I watched this week, um, to remind myself how much I don't like it and how

confusing it is that, uh, it really doesn't work relative to, um, to Fury Road, which is just such a stunning achievement and, uh, just fun as hell too. You know, just, just, it's just a blast, which is great. Also a blast, number two on my list, Terminator 2, Judgment Day. Ever heard of it? Released in 1991, directed by Jim Cameron. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes online on August 4th, 1997.

Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2.14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet fights back.

Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia. Why attack Russia? Remember Jim Cameron? He was going to release Avatar 2 and then they pushed it like another six years.

Yeah, I do. I hope that movie comes out at some point. You know, he's got time, more time now. Everybody has time. Why not? Keep working, Jim. Yeah, he's another guy though, who like much like George Miller

is waiting for the kind of the later stages of his life to kind of wrap up some of these lifelong stories that he's been trying to tell Cameron right now is 65 years old. By the time Avatar two comes out, he'll be probably in his late sixties. Um, when he released Terminator two, he was at the absolute height of his powers. Um, he may be the most significant big tent filmmaker of the 1980s and nineties. Uh, this is of course a sequel, but it operates in a completely different way from the original Terminator movie, which was kind of a lean and mean science fiction story that

was absolutely an apocalypse movie, but did not have the scale and the staging that T2 does. T2 turns 30 years old next summer and it still looks amazing. And the effects work in it. And the, the work that, um, the actors in that movie are doing, you know, certainly, uh, Edward Furlong and, um, uh, Linda Hamilton and Robert Patrick. And of course, Arnold are like, you know, iconic is an overused word, but this is a truly iconic movie. It's a movie when you're watching it, you feel like you are watching an event. When you hear that, you know, that percussive dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, that sound, that score of that movie, you feel like you are, you're in the middle of something special. And certainly the thing, the thing that is special is, is deeply apocalyptic. And in fact, one of the most upsetting visions of the apocalypse, of a nuclear apocalypse, is in this movie when Sarah Connor has this vision of herself on a playground with her young son, John Connor.

And she starts visualizing what happens if Skynet takes over and starts instituting this sort of devastation throughout the world. And, you know, that famous moment of, you know, her character is holding onto a chain link fence and this nuclear explosion is set off and fire comes racing towards every person on the planet. And the, you know, the skeleton holds onto the chain link fence as its flesh is torn from its body is one of those things that you're not supposed to see when you're nine years old. And I did see it when I was nine years old. And now I think when you were asking me, like, what is the apocalypse?

I think in some ways, if it's not giant bugs come to kill me, it is that flash moment where one day you're here and the next moment you are gone. And so it's my number two. You seen T2 lately? Not in a long time. But I also feel like Skynet is another thing that just kind of

lived on as a reference point and a thing that predicted a lot of our reality and our fears about the coming reality. Absolutely. We're almost to the end here. You and I have both chosen some arty number ones. I'm proud of our number ones. Why don't you share yours? My number one is melancholia directed by lars von trier do you know my melancholia story? I don't. I'm excited to hear it. All right. It's a brief personal anecdote. I'm sorry.

Please bear with me. But it's why it's my number one. I mean, among other reasons. So I got married in upstate New York, which, Sean, you know that because you were there. I was there. Yeah, I wanted to go to City Hall

and my husband wanted to have a large wedding. And so we had a 200 person wedding, uh, which Zach to his credit planned, he planned the whole thing. And I thought he did a very beautiful job. It was like upstate and, you know, like every upstate wedding, it was in a barn and Zach and the woman who owned the barn kind of like did all the tables and everything. And my mom did the flowers. It was like a very lovely wedding.

So we're there on our wedding day. And our whole family was there. And my dad was going to walk me down the aisle, which I was like a little bit nervous, not like nervous about, but you know me and the wedding industrial complex. But I was glad to be there with my dad. And my dad was very excited to be there. My dad loves Zach. My dad loves me.

So we're in this barn. And we're waiting to like literally walk down the aisle. And Zach and his mom have already left and walked down the aisle. And it's like the last moment. And I'm waiting. And my dad turns to me with an expression like full of like joy and love and like wonder. As happy as he could be and he says to me this is just like the wedding in melancholia and then we walked down the aisle that is a true story that is straight up the last thing that my dad said to me

which so let me just for anyone who like you know doesn't know my dad or is concerned like number one my dad meant that in a loving way and i received it in a loving way and also our wedding did not end with like me having a depressive episode and or the apocalypse which is what happens in melancholia he I think he just meant it, number one, as a stylistic distinction, because I will say, when I rewatch Melancholia this week, a lot of great design inspo. Before things really go down, it's a great estate where they are. It looks like a pretty fun wedding. But my dad's a kook, and that's what I love about him. So that's why he said it. But he also said it because he loves that movie. And I love this movie too. And I think part of the reason, the ways my dad and I

are similar is that we find this like beautiful and kind of hopeless evocation of the end of the world and not knowing what to do with yourself and the fear that there's nothing that you can do and that maybe your life has not added up to enough, or maybe it doesn't even matter because you're the Kirsten Nutz character, is our understanding, our shared understanding of the apocalypse, which is maybe a dark thing to say, but at least my dad and I have each other and we have that great wedding story. So that's it. Melancholia, number one.

I think that's it. Melancholia. Number one. I think, I think that was beautiful. And I'm, you know, I'm very sorry that, that you had that experience on your wedding day. I'm not. That was the best part of my wedding. That was great. There were times at your wedding when I was so drunk that it felt like a planet was crashing into our planet. You know, I was, I was, I was pretty lifted. So, uh, you know, you really, you achieved the, the von Trier to the, to the nth degree that day. Um, it's a great pick. And while melancholy literally as melancholy in the title and is not uplifting, uh, in any way at all, it's, it's actually a little bit sunnier compared to my number one, which is a movie that

I rewatched just yesterday for the first time in about, how old am I? I'm 38. So I probably saw this movie 19 years ago. The movie's called Stalker. It's directed by the great Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet era filmmaker. I definitely saw it in a kind of typical intro to film theory class in college. And when I was 19, I was a moron and pretty selfish and not as patient as I've become and definitely didn't know anything about Russian cinema. Definitely was an atheist, but not interested in having discussions about faith or purpose and just didn't get the movie. Even though it has many of the hallmarks of movies that I love, which is to say it's a kind of a mystery box movie. It has lots of touches of

science fiction. Very briefly, the plot of the movie is fairly uncomplicated. The stalker, the sort of titular character is a guide of sorts and people hire this guide to bring them into a space called the zone. This movie takes place in an unnamed country in an unnamed future. Seems like the distant future. And The Zone is a post-apocalyptic space in which the world that has been kind of hollowed out around us is somehow more mysterious and more beautiful in a way, but also abandoned because it appears that something terrible has happened there. Maybe it's an alien invasion. Maybe it's a spiritual moment of apocalyptic reckoning. Maybe it's something else. And the reason that people want to go to the zone is in the zone, there is a room that is called the room. And if you make it to the room and you

make it through the zone, which is a treacherous and ever-changing place, you will have your deepest desire granted to you like a wish. Such a simple but fascinating and complex premise for a movie. And 19-year-old me was like, oh, it's too slow. I don't get it. I don't really want to have to think about this. Usual college jerk-off stuff. But you know, it's the kind of movie that is designed to make you think. And over time, you know, I think about it and I would be like, what was that movie really about? And then you go into like a Reddit hole. But I never actually rewatched it.

I just would think about it because it's the kind of movie that if you look at the sight and sound lists over the years or the BFI lists over the years, they say this is really one of the two or three greatest movies ever made. It's one of the most important films ever made. It's this profound reckoning with all the things that make us human. So I finally rewatched it. And those people were right. It is just absolutely incredible. And I do think it takes a little bit of patience, not just to watch the film, because it's two hours and 40 minutes and it is, it is very slow and it is very methodical, but it is a, it's not just a brain teaser. It's like a, it's a mind expander and it, it is, it resists definition. It resists clarity and it is the sort of piece of art that you can project all kinds of meaning onto,

depending on what phase of your life that you're in. And we're in a really difficult phase of our life right now. You know, last night, Eileen and I were having a conversation and I was like, I think this is probably the signature event of our lifetimes, what we're going through right now with COVID-19. And we've been through quite a bit. We've actually talked about it on the show. 9-11 is certainly one of the most meaningful things that we ever lived through. We've lived through some really complex, you know, sometimes inspiring, sometimes frustrating presidential administrations. We've had personal experiences that are immensely difficult and inspiring.

Your dad compared your wedding to melancholia. That was insane. In a loving way. And it was a nice wedding and a good marriage. That's a story meant to illustrate love, but continue. And still, I really do feel like because of the kind of closed off nature of our life the last four or five months, the fact that we're not having the social experiences that we have and the fact that Stalker is a movie that is about three characters, the stalker, a professor, and a writer. And, you know, these three characters,

if you look at the movie very simply, it can be very archetypal. You know, the professor is scientific and logical. The writer is emotional and driven by creativity. And the stalker is working class, a representation of, of you know trauma that is forced upon people who don't have but like it's much deeper than that that like it resists that kind of like banal easy definition and there are times when you're watching the movie we're like wow this movie is definitely about jesus and there are other times when you're watching the movie we're like this movie is definitely about the terror inflicted on people who lived in the soviet union over that period of 45 years and then there are other times when you think the movie is definitely about the terror inflicted on people who lived in the Soviet Union over that period of 45 years.

And then there are other times when you think the movie is about the inability to be creative in the face of trauma or the inability to resolve the world's complex problems with science. Or there are times when it's like, this movie is literally about me. There are some phrases, there's some dialogue in the movie by the writer, which I can't believe haven't been memed that talk about like just the complete degradation and loneliness and sadness of like working so hard to create something and then getting to the end of it and rereading it and being like, this is such shit. This is such trash. Why am I so bad at this? Which I'm sure

I know you can relate to that, that the pain of writing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And you know, it's not a funny movie. It's not even really an entertaining movie. So it defies a lot of the conventions of the stuff that we're talking about here. But man, it really worked on me. And it was fun to have something that could work on me in this way. So while I don't think it's necessarily easy for people to get through, and all of Tarkovsky's movies are long and slow and digressive and philosophical, this is definitely, I think, his best and worth it for people who want to be challenged. So that's number one. Will you watch Stalker, Amanda? Maybe not on my vacation, but maybe when I get back. I mean, I was going to say, and it's fitting for apocalypse movies, I guess. It's one version of the apocalypse where it happens and it's over, but we ended with your

very deep, philosophically challenging stalker and me with Melancholia, which is just like, yup, the world's over and in the meantime, we'll be depressed. So, you know, it's not quite the Bill Pullman Independence Day speech that you might be hoping for at the end of an episode. Our mission on this show is to show all of the colors of the cinematic experience from Bill Pullman and Will Smith to Andre Tarkovsky. Amanda, you're going on vacation, so you're not going to be here on Tuesday's episode. Have a great vacation. Are you going to the zone? Are you in search of the room? I'm always in search of the room. Well, I hope you find your greatest desires and are not destroyed by the concept of what finding that out could mean as the people in Stalker are.

That'll do it for Amanda and I. Before we get to my conversation with James Gray, let's hear a word from our sponsor. Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Masterclass. With Masterclass, you can learn from the world's best minds anytime, anywhere at your own pace. You can learn how to, I don't know, make films by watching a Masterclass with Martin Scorsese, or you can improve your poker playing skills by watching Phil Ivey shuffle and deal. With over 85 classes from a range of world-class instructors, that thing you've always wanted to do is closer than you think. What did I learn from watching Phil Ivey play cards?

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15% off Masterclass. Today's episode of The Big Picture is also brought to you by an American pickle. An American pickle stars Seth Rogen as Herschel Greenbaum, a 1920s American immigrant who was accidentally brined in a vat of pickles for 100 years, emerging in present day New York City. Seth Rogen also plays Herschel's only surviving relative, his great grandson Ben, a mild-mannered computer coder living in Brooklyn. From the producers of the disaster artist N5050, An American Pickle tells the uniquely heartwarming story of two men from different generations who must learn the true meaning of family. Stream the new Max original on American Pickle now, only on HBO Max, rated PG-13. Delighted to be rejoined by James Gray under very complicated circumstances, but nevertheless,

James, how are you doing? How is quarantine? How is your life? Well, my life is, I guess you could say in many measures, objectively better than a lot of people have it, so i'm fortunate but uh it's still lockdown is lockdown and i have to observe a pretty strict lockdown because of some uh medical issues with someone in my family so we haven't been able to do anything and in that sense it's been pretty maddening and you realize how important human beings are i mean it's weird it's like you never thought that being with friends was unimportant but when you have to stay at home all the time can never have dinner with a friend at a restaurant when the idea of you know having you're going to the sushi bar means you might die.

It's like, this is a very strange and may I say awful situation for everybody, for everybody. And the idea that, you know, you can't have a piece of pizza with your friend without, you know, what are you going to do? You wear a mask while you're eating pizza? Like, you know, I don't know. I don't understand how it was supposed to function really as social. We're very social beings. And so it's a tough time. But it's not exclusive to me. And I recognize that for sure. Everybody's going through it. You are an unusually good talker, conversationalist, person who knows how to engage it so are you are you doing this virtually are you sitting down with your friends and having zoom calls like the ones we're having right now i don't know whether that's a compliment or not i'm it is i never thought of myself as that it's

funny because i'm pretty awkward socially um i i i zoom yeah i zoom all the time. But this is a very poor substitute for having a friend over for dinner. You know, my wife and I really, really like that. It's very important to us. You know, we have Sunday night gravy, really, where we invite a whole bunch of random people all the time. And it's a very important thing to us. It's part of the richness of life. And we like to expose the children to many different points of view about the world. And that's also important to us. And yeah, Zoom, you can, you know, open up your computer and there it is. But it's not the same thing. It just isn't, obviously. Again, I don't know how people made it through the 1918 1919 pandemic because

zoom is better than the the alternative i can't imagine what it was like in 1918 so maybe we're very fortunate to be in a pandemic under such circumstances but by the same token as you say if you into conversation, then the energy you get from the other person is vitally important. And I can see you now,ually thoughtful as well about what it means to be a creative person. And I'm so interested in what creative people are doing right now during this period. So on the one hand, I'm sure you're watching a lot, but on the other hand, I presume you're working. So let's talk about working right now. What is working like for you? Well, again, thank you for saying that um i i don't really consider myself also very good about talking about creative things there

are many people far more creative than i am and that's not false modesty that's a fact but i think that what if i had to say what might distinguish my approach with you for example is just to be very open and very honest so So that's all I've tried to be. And if I'm going to be honest with you about creatively what's going on with me, then I would say the news is not all good. I had written a script, which I feel very fortunate that I did finish right before lockdown. First week of March, I finished the first draft of a new movie that I want to do, I'm going to do. And I got wonderful actors attached, and I got the money to make it. And then all of a sudden, the door closed, which is a weird,

weird thing. You know, usually you're struggling to get the money, you're struggling to get an actor, it's never been such a wonderful circumstance, such a happy circumstance, and then all of a sudden you're told you can't work. I think that there are times when creativity needs to pause. Now, that doesn't mean that you're not working. So, for example, a lot of times you'll sit there at the computer and you'll try to solve some kind of narrative issue that you've been trying to solve for your film, and you can't. But then you'll be in the shower, you know, 12 hours later, and all of a sudden, a very high quality idea will come to you. Because what you find out is that the unconscious is a very high quality idea will come to you because what you find out is that the unconscious is a

very powerful thing and it's working very hard and it's answering. You ever try to do a crossword puzzle? For example, I do the New York Times Sunday puzzle rather addictively or used to anyway. I haven't been doing it lately, but in the magazine And I would put it down and then I'd come back to it two hours later and I'd get like 30% more of the puzzle. So lockdown is sort of an extended version of that in some way. And I think that at the beginning of lockdown, I wasn't able to do anything. I would get on the phone and I would perseverate with my brother or whomever about the catastrophe and what the virus means and all that. And the federal response or lack thereof, all this stuff. And I wasn't doing anything.

And I felt very guilty about it. I felt very bad about it. I sort of was angry at myself and talking to my wife about it and talking to my friends about it. Like, how could I produce so little? How could I do so little work? And at some point, my wife is fairly brilliant in these matters and others matters as well. She kind of said, well, don't be so hard on yourself. Maybe this is the time to be, not to have to create.

And she was completely right. It's one of those things where, you know, when somebody says it and you have a fair amount of distance, you're like, oh, of course, I don't have to be creating every second of the day. And in some sense, what you realize is that your existence is dictated. If you're a creative person, you're dictated by your creativity.

So if you're not creating, you're dying. That's what it feels like. You know, Hal Ashby, the wonderful director from the 60s and 70s, he said, when film directors don't make a film, they begin to die a little. And I think Peckinpah said something very similar to that, that both of them said almost exactly the same thing. And it's sort of like that idea that if you're not creating, if you're not working, a part of you is dying. And over the last month or so, I think I've gotten a little better about it. I think that I feel more at peace with not creating, which ironically has meant that I've been able to go back to do some writing. So my day is pretty dull. I see you asked me this very brief question, and I'm giving you

the longest answer in history. Well, my day is pretty simply the same thing every day, which in itself is a form of torture, but it is the case. I make my breakfast, which is my egg white omelet with nut butter, some kind of nut butter and my green tea. And then I march over across the lawn to sit outside and I start with my, actually my Uni-Ball Ultra Pen. I have all these Ultra Pens and I start working off hard copy rewriting. And then in the middle of the day, I'll break for lunch. After lunch, I'll take out these resistance bands and I'll pretend to work out for about 40 minutes, which are, you know, they're actually pretty good. And then I go back to work again until dinner. And then I cook dinner. I'm always the one cooking dinner because I'm really good at it. That's a true talent I have. And then comes the nasty cleanup. And then in the evening, we watch a movie. My family and I watch movies. So we've been watching a ton of movies.

So before we talk about what you've been watching, which as you know, I'm always fascinated by, but the writing itself, are you continuing to rewrite and restructure that movie that was going to happen? Or are you doing other writing? Both. I'm rewriting the film, which I always do anyway, but I'm working on the script that I'm going to make, which I will make. As soon as COVID allows me, I'm going to make it. This is Armageddon time?

It's called Armageddon time. That's right. And I have just the greatest group of actors. And it's such a personal film i think it's you know if i may say this doesn't really mean much maybe it's anybody else but it's the script i've written that i'm most fond of to date i have very high hopes for it um and it's very personal which was something i felt I had to do for a variety of reasons to maintain my sanity. But the other stuff I'm doing is, you know, I'm also beginning to research a much larger scale film about the Russian Revolution, which I'm hoping I can go right

into after this, a sort of historical epic. And that is very ambitious, very complex, and will probably take me some considerable time. So I've been bouncing back and forth. And then I also have, you know, your fair number of Zooms about other projects and so forth. And those are actually quite entertaining. So amongst your friends and colleagues who are are making films like what's the psychology right now is is everyone in a similar place to where you are are there people who are looking on the bright side and seeing like there could be some improvements that come out of this moment very few of us i mean i talk to a bunch of directors all the time i'm actually good friends with many and there is very little positivity being granted about.

The only positivity comes really from saying, okay, I mean, first of all, it's impossible to be positive in a context in which several hundred thousand of your countrymen are dying, which is the case. So, look, the number now is what, 160? 160,000 people dead. That's only the official tally. It's going to be over 200 for sure. It's like having 9-11 happen every two days. But I would say that the only optimism I hear is that in connection with George Floyd and all of that, that you get a sense that the country, you know, American history is much more convulsive than we like to think it is. So if you view it in that context, perhaps it's the shock to the system that was needed in order for us to understand that the system was basically founded upon a rather rancid idea of maintaining white Anglo-Saxon property values.

You know, there's a very influential economist at Harvard. He just died. He was pretty young. He was like 64, something like 63. And he wrote a very influential paper on why the United States has such a weaker social safety net than the other industrialized wealthy nations. And the answer really came up, racism, that the country's system was constructed in the late 18th century, and it was built for basically rich white Protestant men to keep their land. And so I think the system is going through this kind of convulsion now where we come to grips with that. Now, I'm very scared, and I don't mean this just

as a kind of a partisan thing, although certainly I feel this way, but I'm very scared, especially if Donald Trump is reelected with the minority vote again. In other words, if he doesn't get the majority of the country again, it'll be the first time in American history that two straight elections have happened where the minority vote getter wins. I'm going to put that in quotes. And that will be the concretizing fact that we don't like to face, that this is not a democracy. And then I think we're facing four more very dark years. Because the country's not being majority represented. But if that should not come to pass, then I think you might see some interesting things happening in the country.

And that's a form of optimism, I suppose. Well, that raises something I wanted to ask you about, which is a theory that a friend of mine suggested a couple of weeks ago, which I don't think he was the first person to suggest this, but you mentioned the 1918 pandemic and how we did or did not cope with that around the world. And then subsequently after that comes the jazz age and comes this explosive moment of creativity in the country i've discussed that also you know the interesting also i don't think about the jazz age i've heard a lot of people talking about the death of movie theaters and so forth i i feel like if

financially that movie theaters can survive until uh anti monoclonal monoclonal antibodies or a vaccine or something if they can survive that moment to your point i think the movie theaters will actually explode because i don't want to stay home anymore people stay home you watch netflix it like, that is the last thing I want to do right now, stay home. So if the theater chains can survive somehow, I think it's going to come roaring back. The Roaring Twenties, I think, in some ways was a kind of response to that. It's difficult to say also, though, because we were coming off, you know an epic catastrophe not just uh of the flu the spanish flu making but also of the war the war it was sort of a dual hit and it's hard to say whether this will mimic

that entirely but to your point you might see it you might see an amazing explosion of creativity now unfortunately that also led to Adolf Hitler, you know, a few years later after the Weimar decline. But that was connected to the war. It's difficult to say. History doesn't repeat. It rhymes, right? That's what they say.

So it's possible to draw not just too little, but too much, you know, comparison. One thing that I've heard from a lot of folks who work in television, and I'm not sure if this is as true for films, but in television is that this is high time buying season. You know, the only thing that can happen right now is the writing of scripts and the selling of scripts. And that may lead to another kind of boom time when it comes to TV. Do you sense that in the movie world too, that this is an opportunity to get something going that maybe it would have been difficult to do five, 10 years ago?

No, I see very bad things happening on the horizon that way. And I know that TV people have said that too. And many people that work in TV that I talk with on a daily basis, and I myself would love to sort of delve into some of that. But what I see is a lot of the streamers are now trying to get into the blockbuster business. And what I see is a consolidation in a weird way, not a multitude of voices that are now going to be heard. I see ever more consolidation towards trying to get the maximum number of people to watch whatever it is you're doing. And I don't think that is a good long-term situation. I think it's very dangerous. So I'm not sensing that boom that you're talking about. I'm sensing a boom for a very limited, specific sliver of what you might call creative activity. You know, people talk

about, you know, you mentioned, you know, some of the real villains of the 20th century, not just Hitler, but Mao Zedong, or Joseph Stalin, or any of these people, and the creative censorship that people had to endure in Soviet Russia, which was, of course, unbearable. But we have our own form of censorship. It's just economic, you know, that certain voices were not heard in the past, really for economic and, you know, race race uh racist reasons and classist reasons and uh and that's its own form of censorship that's just as pernicious um so i don't know i don't share the optimism that a lot of people do about that i do share optimism about the business itself being okay if we can survive. But then the question is,

will the business return to this kind of atomistic thing where they basically just keep making fewer and fewer things, bigger and bigger budget, more and more like based on a comic? And at that point, you then say, well, what's the point of it all? I mean, you would think that the average person, whatever that even means, would want to engage fully on at least some level with what's happening in the world after a pandemic, after George Floyd, and after what will be, I think, a prolonged period of economic catastrophe, by the way, maybe not on the same level or duration as 1929 to 1941 but certainly not too far away that at that point you'd hope that the that people would want to engage culturally but i don't know how much optimism i have about that because i think the system really resists that so that's

an interesting entree into something that i wanted to talk to you about with a little bit of distance from Ad Astra, which is the biggest film that you've ever made. Mainstream is probably not the right word, but the most big tent, which is something that is top of mind for all people who finance movies these days. With a little bit of distance now, what's your feeling about how the the film was received do you think it was understood how do you feel about it right now well it's a little hard for me to talk about that film it's uh um i'm it's i'm in a weird zone because i'm fairly still fairly close to when it was finished, but also far enough away that I have some kind of judgment, I think. I don't really know, to a large degree, how it was received. I did a very good job this time of avoiding reactions, because the film itself, you know, I had to make many compromises on the cut of the movie. And I don't feel complete ownership over it in a way that I did when I had final cut on the previous many films that I did.

It's not to say I don't probably feel like I came through on or or achieved certain things I wanted to achieve but when the film is not wholly yours it's very difficult to process that and I tried to shut out everyone's reactions because when that's the case and you've had to spend during the finishing of a film or the making of a film so much of your time sort of convincing people of the quality of your ideas, and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, you feel very sad. And even when it does work, you've spent so much time convincing that you don't spend time actually working on the film's more difficult elements. So my feeling, my reaction to that film is very complicated.

I've had friends of mine say they think it's my worst work. And then I've had other friends say that they think it's by far my best. And so my only reaction to that is it just sort of enters the film, you know, it enters the collection of stuff that I've done. And my relationship with it will change, I suspect, quite significantly over the next 10 years. But I will say that, you know, my relationship with it is very different than it would be if I hadn't had to make what I view as several compromises in its completion. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tantalized by the idea of you doing an epic Russian Revolution film, but it is notable to me that you're doing something that is smaller in scale with Armageddon Time as your next movie? Was that a very, was that a designed choice that you wanted to do something

that didn't have as much of the budget and the heights of Ad Astra? You know, I've never, and this is probably to my detriment, I've never worked on a film from a careerist point of view. In other words, I don't write a movie going, in this part of my career, I don't write a movie going, in this part of my career, I'm doing this, so I should do that. I do things that feel very close to me.

Having said that, it was very important that I entered into a circumstance where my opinion was the one that mattered in the end, because in the end, you're going to get the blame anyway. And you may as well get the blame for some of your bad ideas, you know. And so I just felt that I wanted to do something which was personal to me and that I could express myself with as little compromise as possible. And the only way to do that is when you're doing something that's slightly smaller. You know, the Russian Revolution thing, I would structure that so that I could still control it. And if I couldn't, I wouldn't do it. You know,

I'm now 51 years old. I'm at that place in my life where I just, there's a reason you want to make films and you reevaluate that on a constant basis. And if it's not yours, I just feel like, what's the point? You know, I am. But to answer your question, I mean, it's interesting why I do wonder why you're asking me these questions. Why? Because you always I always feel like they're leading somewhere. And I want to know what you think about all this more than what I think, because what I think is not interesting to me. You know what I mean? Like I live with me and it's not a very pleasant place to be a lot of the time but you know the whole point is to try to express yourself

and so on this film uh i wanted to get as personal and directly intimate as i possibly could i think that's what i was searching for and and was that a purposeful choice to try to get to something that was reflecting specifically on you, your life, your feelings, your experiences in a way that genre maybe can accomplish? Well, if I were fully successful in a genre, I would say that it could. I don't think that Ad Astra or The Immigrant, even though that's about a woman in 1921 or whatever, or Z, Lost City of Z, I don't think those necessarily are less personal. Personal is not the same thing as I've said to you many times. Personal is not the same thing as autobiographical. But it's like I said, when you're accustomed to having complete control over something, and then there's a level of compromise that gets introduced. And by the way, this may be my own problem as well. It's not like I'm sitting here saying, you know, I'm the best. In fact, I think that a large part of having complete control means that you then have

the freedom to listen to others. Because in that context, when you have a lot of voices in the room, and I always say this, I don't want my vision. I want something that's more beautiful than that. I want something better. I don't want exactly what I have in my mind. But the problem is that then the core issue of directing a film becomes about the idea of saying this idea expands the original notion and makes it more beautiful. And this idea gets in the way and is not part of the original light and not part of the original core and we'll dilute it. And that's the job of the director to say, yes, this is better. No, that is not. And so when you have creative control,

it is your doing that you are taking the better things and getting rid of the things that don't get in the way so i view that as the actual definition of my job and in that sense i felt a need to do something like that to do something that became better than what I had in mind, but that was still in keeping with my impulse. And that is to be personal. But personal doesn't mean autobiographical. And with genre, you can do it. It just means that you need to be in a circumstance where you are the person choosing what is better, not just different. Making sense? You are. I want to specifically ask you about setting and place though because as i understand it armageddon time is a new york story and it's been a few films

since you've been back in new york which is where most of your films took place prior to z and i'm curious what your relationship is to new york right now because I don't think you're in New York at the moment, and New York has had a complicated six months just like the rest of the world. I don't have any relationship with New York right now. I don't live there anymore, and I think the city has changed in many ways for the worse, some ways for the better, of course. Central Park is as beautiful as it's ever been and all that. But when every third store is a Duane Reade, every fourth store is a bank, a chain,

the city becomes much less interesting. When working class people cannot live in Manhattan, the city becomes much less interesting. And I think that New York stopped being the place I knew somewhere around the late 1990s. And I've been sort of diving back into the past further and further every time I go out, out back there, you know, every time I go out to Brooklyn or to Queens. And I think my relationship is totally about what it means to make a personal film. And New York is there only really as a kind of, because that's where I grew up. In other words, if I grew up in Philadelphia or something, I would do it there. It's just, it's the New York of the past.'s not new york now and new york now doesn't have any meaning for me a friend of mine a wonderful writer a really great writer named

kevin baker has written a whole book about uh new york it was originally a i think it was sort of an the it was originally an article that he wrote in har's and it was about the decline of New York and why it's become, dare I say, boring. So that's what people think of it now. Who knows, maybe COVID will change that because the city is going through, I guess, a rough moment, but I'm not there. I can't speak with any intelligence on most things, least of all New York right now. So it's really the New York of my childhood fantasies in a way that I'm working on. That's a very different thing. That's almost like an alien, you know, it's like an alien world. It's not the same. Is it important for you to get details correct? Or can you let that just come to you as you remember it it depends on what you mean

by that details what do you mean by details my friend do you mean the things that are actually you mean getting it right i mean getting it you tell me i mean you're you're writing it there can be period details there can be does did this place look and sound the way that it once did or it can be this is true to the essence of the city or the essence of my experience. Well, I used to not care that much about the absolute specifics of period detail. And then I started to care because I realized people do notice that. And you need to focus on the idea of the suspension of disbelief so the minute anything enters into the movie that doesn't feel realistic i mean people get very upset unless the context has

you know wookies or something you know and then you do anything you want but uh people get very upset at you if you have any kind of realist style, because realism is a style, let's be honest. Or if you're making a claim to any kind of authenticity, and then all of a sudden you've got something else which isn't authentic seeming. They get very angry, you know. People get very hostile. So my own view is to get the details, of course, right. You know, the alternative is to do something like a Fellini movie or something like Armored Accord, which feels very kind of, not a fantasy, but very dreamlike.

And in that circumstance, I mean, you can kind of do anything you want. I mean, there's a scene in Armored Accord where they're going to see a cruise liner and there's like the water is basically black garbage bags, you know, and he gets away with it. It's incredible. It's a heightened reality. It's a dreamlike state. And that's Fellini at his best.

So maybe I'm wrong in trying to pursue this. But my own view is that in the American language, the American cinematic language, it's difficult to kind of do that sort of thing. It feels, it's not Italian. You know, it feels fake to us. So I'm going to try to get the details as right as I can for what it is, which is fall of 1980.

I'll put it this way, as right as I can, given the budget I have, which is about $15. I know that's not the number that I read about in the trades. Well, the number you read in the trades, which is $15 million, is not bad. It's great. I'm very fortunate. But the problem is that you don't have that money to put on the screen anymore. The amount of money that you have to spend on COVID protections, insurance, bond, all that is so large that you would be stunned. Let's talk about what you're watching. I'm always interested in what you're watching. Last time I saw you, or maybe not the last time I saw you, but the last time we spoke on the show, mentioned bullfighter and the lady which i had never seen before and i checked out afterwards yeah the bud boddicker movie which was great um tell me about what you're doing with your family

like do you guys have a a mission a plan or is it just dealer's choice how does how do you guys figure out what you're going to watch uh i have a weird this is maybe not entirely a good thing but i have a weird desire to educate my children about the cinema and so we've been watching a lot of classics and um i had a weird epiphany that was sort of, so I read this excellent book that a friend of mine named Sam Lawson wrote about Chinatown. Oh, it's a great book. It's wonderful, isn't it? Yeah.

And I read that book and I started thinking about Chinatown. And then right after that, just to give you an idea, I had a bit of an epiphany because we watched The Killers, Robert Siodmak's movie with Bert Meinke, Cesar Neiva Gardner. And that did sort of make me ruminate on art and cinema quite a bit. But to answer your question, we've been watching, my daughter's obsessively making a list now, but we watch a lot of old movies.

So last night we watched It's a Gift with W.C. Field and Baby Leroy. And the night before, what did we watch? We watched The Train with Burt Lancaster. We've done a lot of Burt Lancaster. Frankenheimer, right? That's Frankenheimer. That's right. We've been watching a lot of Burt Lancaster. We've done a lot of Burt Lancaster. Frankenheimer, right? That's right.

We've been watching a lot of Burt Lancaster. Also a lot of Hitchcock stuff, Strangers on a Train and Rear Window and Lifeboat, which the kids really liked. I mean, basically everything I've seen before, to be honest. But I love watching it with them. And a few nights ago they i showed them the graduate

not not my youngest my youngest is 10 years old so he watches some of the stuff but not everything usually he goes to bed uh but the older the oldest is 14 14 year old boy and he went he and i watched watched Clockwork Orange, which I had to so weirdly revise my opinion of, which I'm doing constantly, which is in a way, I think, a very healthy thing. And a lot of other really incredible films from really the greatest directors. Well, let's talk about how your your teenage your adolescent children are responding to the graduate and a clockwork orange that's a that's a meaningful moment in any young cineous life is seeing those movies well i think they mostly are blown away i mean what you realize is that it does reset i mean that they i think've, not to sound too haughty about it, but they understand the power of storytelling.

And, you know, I had not seen The Graduate myself in 25 years. And that is a movie of, particularly the first half, I think the second half is probably not quite as strong, probably because Catherine Ross is absolutely wonderful in it. It's not her fault. She's great. But the character as conceived, I think, is a little bit thinly written, which is an asinine thing to say. I'd be, you know, beyond overjoyed if I ever made a movie half as good as that. So I need you to understand that.

But, you know, we can be critical on the highest level. But the point is the first half of The Graduate is some of the best directing and acting I've ever seen in my life. Anne Bancroft is beyond brilliant. Dustin Hoffman is beyond and the way that the film is directed the way the scenes are staged and paced is so insanely good that I mean I just watch it with my jaw to the ground he's got these you know I know it's there's

several things that are flashily cut and all that but but then I think you need to sow a few wild oats. There's one take with Dustin Hoffman on the left and Murray Hamilton on the right, and then Dan Bancroft comes in out of focus, and she goes over to the bar. She says, don't get up, and they continue to talk. Then he gets and walks Hoffman to the door, and the camera goes up to Dan Bancroft's face. One shot. My 14-year-old, bang, cross his face, one shot. My 14-year-old son looks at him and goes, great shot. For me, I was so happy. When we've been watching, I mean, so many of these films are so admirable

and the talent is so incredible. Bonnie and Clyde, which they love, which is just brilliant. Apocalypse Now, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II. You know, just the collections. And then older, not just new Hollywood films from the 60s and 70s. We've been going back and watching Games and Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street and Philadelphia Story and Holiday and Born Yesterday and Sabrina and Sunset Boulevard, which is beyond great. And all these, Stalag 17 and The French Connection, by the way, that's another new Hollywood movie we watched, which they loved. And, you know, there's a number of films I haven't been able to show them yet. I want to show Taxi Driver to my eldest, but I think he's old enough, but my daughter clearly is not. And so I have to make certain provisions that way. Dog Day Afternoon, we did show them and they loved. to them they love them i mean occasionally they i occasionally i strike out you know like i showed

the last detail with jack nicholson which is a movie i think is terrific i love that movie i love you mentioned ashby earlier yeah yeah i love last detail but the kids were the kids were not they didn't get it like what's what is this guy oh he's going to jail or is he is he not what's what is this 48 hour leave like they didn't understand the whole premise wonderful with the cuckoo's nest they thought was great uh but my youngest was like traumatized by it he might have been a little too young for it um but the list is very long i mean the lockdown every night you know you're talking about now about 60 movies. What sort of a, I don't know, a ticket taker are you?

Are you, during the film, giving them context? Are you doing a class? Is it silent in your home for hours? It's, unless the film, I had to do it with Grapes of Wrath. Because they did not understand what a red was. They didn't understand the whole idea of strikes and scams. They didn't get any of that stuff. So I had to give them a bit of a primer on the New Deal, the Great Depression, unions.

Not so easy. When all of a sudden you find yourself talking about Eugene Debs, you know you're in a little bit of trouble with a 10-year-old. But they get the main thrust of it, you know. And I felt, my wife and I felt that Grapes of Wrath was very important for them to watch because we wanted them to know what deprivation is. You know, we've also watched, though, I mean, Double Indemnity, by the way, was one that went over really well. I do commentary on some films, and sometimes they'll ask me,

they seem to be very preoccupied with money. So, for example, someone will say, it's a gift last night, he says, I got $44,000. I say, Dad, how much money was that in 1934? Then I have to say, I don't know, a million dollars. I do my best to guess. By the way, the number after we Googled it is $844,000. Pretty good guess on your part. Not bad.

I was pretty close. They loved wars, too. They loved war films. Pairs of Glory was a big hit. All Quite on the western front when your daughter starts talking about lou airs you know you've done something right or wrong i'm not sure um but they they've been watching a lot of great stuff and i i've been just totally i've now convinced burt lancaster is one of, I always loved him by the way, but I now think he's like one of the top three movie actors of all time. The looks on his face in the killers, when he's looking at Ava Gardner and she doesn't love him and he's so deeply

in love with her and the look of loss, the pathos on his face, the vulnerability and someone externally so athletic, acrobatic, tough guy, but the vulnerability, the willingness to do that is such a thing of magnificence of beauty. And one of my big,

big discoveries, I don't know, you know, for personal discoveries during this period has been the movies of Frank and Eleanor Perry, which I was not very familiar with. And I saw the movies of frank and eleanor perry which i was not very familiar with and i saw the swimmer recently and speaking of bert and i was just knocked out by it not even necessarily because i thought it was perfect in any way but i just couldn't believe

that a film like that was made bold it's bold yes yeah it's very it's very you know who was very integrally involved in that period too uh with frank perry was uh sydney pollack you know sydney pollack worked with lancaster a lot and i knew sydney i loved him uh he was the greatest guy and he used to tell burt lancaster stories are just amazing he said that when he went to see burt lancaster at one point when he was at universal and burt lancaster still one point when he was at Universal, and Burt Lancaster's still at his office, he was something like 78 years old, Burt Lancaster,

and he was still going out to the parallel bars. I mean, that he was just a force of nature. But yes, The Swimmer's a very interesting movie. That's 1968, I believe. It is. And it bears some of the hallmarks of sort of the more dated films of that era. But it doesn't obscure the fact that there's a kind of melancholy and sadness and an importance of purpose that still governs the film. It still makes for a very interesting experience. I like it. Yeah, I like it too. I was i was just i mean have there been discoveries for

you have there been films that you haven't seen because i know you're you're voracious with this stuff and you have access to films that maybe the rest of the world may not always have access to what have you seen that has has blown your wig back well i have to admit to you i've seen almost nothing that i haven't seen before which which is frustrating on this level, because my kids are like, what are we watching tonight, Dad? And I don't, you know, I did see recently, I'll tell you, I saw William Wellman's film, The Story of G.I. Joe with Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum, which weirdly had always escaped me, but I

finally saw it and I thought it was fantastic. It reminded me a bit of they were expendable which i think is a great movie john ford movie with robert montgomery and john wayne but uh that that was something that i thought was terrific that it escaped me before but very little new stuff new viewings not because i'm not interested i want to but because i don't have the time because the kids come out here with me and i don't want to show them something I've never seen before. Because if, usually, I'm worried, of course, if it's the 70s, there might be something terribly inappropriate. But even if, for their age, but even if there isn't, I don't want them to get discouraged or by a movie that doesn't work or function in my view and that they don't think

functions so i haven't been watching new stuff and that's because they're home all the time now i remember last summer when they when they went to sleepaway camp that my wife and i watched a ton of new stuff when i say new i mean, I mean, you know, things that I like, Jean-Gremillon movies, I'd never seen it. You know what I mean? That sort of thing. But that's not,

that's not happened during the lockdown. Now that doesn't mean it's not been rewarding because I, I've been, you know, I'm reassessing all these incredible films, sometimes loving them more and sometimes loving them less, but that's what makes it a beautiful experience. I'm curious if you or your children have a consciousness about the streaming services and the accessibility of things now, because on the one hand, I think that a lot of the original material that goes to some of the streamers is not very strong. But on the other hand, between the Criterion channel and then these

new services, you know, Peacock and HBO Max, you know, Gold Diggers of 1933 is on HBO Max right now. And that was not an easy film to see for a long time. And if you want to watch Stagecoach, you can just watch it with the click of one button now. And there is a way, there is a kind of a path towards easy, accessible film literacy that there really was not even 10 years ago.

And I'm kind of, I'm personally kind of torn about that because of what the services represent and what powers them, but also what they can be and provide for people who really care about this. Do you or your kids have any kind of relationship

to that stuff? It's a great question, but I want to ask you a question. How old are you? 38. Yeah, so then I can say this without being patronizing. You are too young to remember a period where actually it's a very weird thing. When I was growing up, you could see Gold Diggers of 1933 very easily. They showed it on television all the time. And there was a whole network in New York in particular of revival cinemas where

you could see it on the big screen. Now, sometimes the print would be pretty shitty, but sometimes it wouldn't be, and you would always see it in a way that they intended on the big screen. And then what happened was videotapes sort of took over, and then all of a sudden they weirdly went away. So it was not always thus. I did have access to these movies. And I had access to them in a way that's better than there is now in the theater. So I don't want to romanticize the current about how it's just a click of the button away. And may I say one other thing about this?

If you go to the theater, you are forced to engage. And sometimes, and this is something I think that's really important and very lost on people of, may I say this without sounding too awful, lost on your generation and those who are younger. A lot of great art is work. And I don't think people want to work. Now you say, well, why would I have to work when I watch a movie? This is part of the problem. Movies were born in the Nickelodeon, you know, and they were born as a popular medium, still are. People don't respect them really the level of discourse in movies is generally very poor uh you know you would never say about uh guernica by picasso that gets eight paintbrushes on my scale of 10 paintbrushes but if somebody says that gets three stars out of five in a movie

totally accepted culturally that is scandalously lowbrow for what is a great art form and the most important art form of the 20th century and maybe the 21st, although I think it's slipping. So my point is, when you ask me about whether my children recognize that, I think they recognize that it's an amazing thing that they can see all these old movies at the click of a button. But I don't think it's a great thing. When you have to buy the ticket and go to the theater, you are forced to engage with the movie, and you are making the active choice to do that, and you are acknowledging that maybe it might be a little bit of work. And I think that this ease of access has led to a degradation to some degree of our assessment of works of art. If you were, for example, if you were to watch, if I were to show my kids The Leopard by Visconti with Burt Lancaster. I believe that's three hours and ten minutes long,

maybe a little bit longer, about the reunification of Italy. And, I mean, it's not really about that. But it's work to watch that film in some places. Now, for me, it's not. It's transcended that now. You know, I'm 51 years old, and what I see in it reverberates with me very powerfully.

But I can imagine, and I remember seeing it in the theater when I was 18 years old, and it was work. I didn't quite get all of it, but I saw something beautiful emerging in the film. But I sat in the theater. I was a captive audience. I couldn't turn it off. Not an option. Let me pause so I can make the popcorn. Not an option. Pause

so I can pee. Not an option. So we have lost that sense of the importance of the cinema. The ease of access has forced a loss. Now, the positives are you can see stuff like that, which for a period you couldn't. So that's a positive. Think about growing up the way I did, stuck in a blockbuster looking for something to rent, you know? 100% better than that. And there's no doubt about that it is better but you know it's the number one thing that i think nobody really talks about

and i i've mentioned it i guess so you know this whole idea of the real damage that you know the streamers do is not uh you know because the theatrical experience doesn't mean much to me anymore anyway the theatrical experience left me a long time ago. Unless you live in a major, major population center, which, by the way, I would argue is why most film critics who are very well-intentioned say movies aren't dying, they're better than ever, are completely off the mark. Because what they're doing is they're basically judging the cinema because they can go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music cinemas, or they can go to some theater in Chicago. If you don't

live in a major city, it is crushingly difficult on the big screen to see anything of value. So that experience left me a long time ago, I think. But what replaced it is the beauty of seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 and HBO Max. I think the big problem is, pause, I have to get up and eat that, you know, shrimp jambalaya leftovers. No, no, no, no.

No pause. Because when you can pause, and when you can take things in chunks, the movie begins to lose the need for narrative momentum. The whole structure of how we learn in school and in the cinemas about how a narrative is a series of building tensions so that your audience was captive. They couldn't press pause. That's lost. I have so many thoughts about what you just said, which is very provocative in a lot of ways. There's two things that jump out to me about it. On the one hand, I think the most destructive

aspect of it for me personally, and this is because of how I'm wired and my relationship to understanding movies and movie history, is I now have checklist brain. I have cue brain where I'm trying to get through the things that I haven't seen and everything is organized very neatly in their lists and I'm kind of firing through them quickly and maybe not spending the time with them that I want to intellectually. And that isn't necessarily how I viewed things when I was getting excited about the medium 30 years ago. On the other hand, I can rewatch things now in a way that I couldn't before. And the rewatching, like you said, with your kids is very powerful. I rewatched Stalker, a movie that was completely mysterious to me 20 years ago.

And I completely synchronized with it when i re-watched it on a streaming service in my home and that's still i think that has value it's an amazing movie uh you know that movie might have killed him i i think you're right i think everybody got cancer on that movie i think you're right it It's an amazing film. I didn't have a question for you. I just needed to observe that for myself, you know? It's a wonderful observation, and I think you're not wrong. I'm a miserable New York view.

I tend to focus a lot on the negative. No, no, no. Well, I focus on the negative not because I'm a negative person. I'm actually quite optimistic in general. I focus on negative because I always think, how can we improve X or Y? And it's like, you know, I'm a curmudgeon, but I'm not a cynic. You know, a cynic, I think, is the person who says nothing could get any better. So in that sense, you're right, it's way better. I just wish that, you know, because something like 44% of Americans, an outrageous number like that, has some version of home theater experience. So ask yourself, what is better? a guy who lives in, you know, outside St. Louis, Missouri,

in an exurb or whatever, who has a home theater, who's actually going to make the effort to watch, you know, I don't know, he's going to turn on the Criterion Collection, which he just got as an app, and he's going to watch Summer with Monica. He's going to check it out. That's amazing. That is absolutely amazing. So the question is, how do we make that even better? How do we make circumstances of that

even better? I don't have an answer. I think the answer would be that you can't pause some of these things. And I'd be, what do you mean you can't pause it? I have the right to go to the bathroom? Right. And when I was a kid, if you had to go to the bathroom, you left the movie in the middle and you went to the bathroom. And Hitchcock said, you know what Hitchcock said? He said, the definition of me being a success is making a film where, you know, you didn't have to empty your bladder in the middle. And what he really meant by it is exactly what I'm saying, which is to craft the narrative so intensively that your audience was hooked.

That was the name of the game. I'm going to let you empty your bladder and let you go. But before I let you go, I'm going to... Can you just recommend one one movie right now for people that will make sense to them in this experience that we're having is there something that feels was resonant to you or helped explain some of your feelings well i i gravitated tremendously and i tell you i always loved no i always really liked sunset boulevard but watching it again this time i was so blown away and the reason i mention it in

conjunction with what you're talking about with the lockdown and so forth is the importance of the human connection and the devastating effects of loneliness and how Gloria Swanson is clearly holed up in that house and hasn't left in forever when he happens upon it, and she's looking for love in any way she can. And the film struck me so much about these people and their loneliness. And what a beautiful film it was about that, about the need for love. And that's who we are. You know, I've said this before too, but it's like why Ayn Rand was so ridiculous. Because people don't act out of self-interest.

Even when they think they are, they aren't. They act out of desire. And desire is usually created by what we lack or what we perceive we lack. It's not totally like, you know, I've seen people do unbelievably self-destructive things and couldn't understand why in the moment it's all about desire and desire is connected also to what it means to be a human being

maintaining that contact with others that's why the lockdown is punishing and that's why it doesn't matter whether you're locked down in a gigantic yacht or whether you're in a tenement from 1918. It is punishing. Because the human contact with others is everything. So I really was moved by Sunset Boulevard, these lonely people trying to make connections. Well, the human contact with you is meaningful to me. It's always good to see you. It's always good to hear your voice. It's always good to ask you questions and get deep answers. I'm glad you made the time.

You're so welcome, Sean. I'm happy to be of service to you and anybody else who cares to listen. I mean, it's a hard moment and I feel like I'm Robert Duvall from the flip side saying, someday this war is going to end. He's miserable about that and I can't tell you how happy I'll be when I get to go to get a slice of pizza and not have to look like I'm entering some kind of radiation shield, wearing a radiation shield. It's a tough moment. Anyway, good to see you.

Good to see you too, man. Keep your spirits up. Good luck with the writing and talk to you soon. Thank you.