The Big Picture - Top Five Cult Movies, ‘Bad Trip,’ and ‘The Empty Man’

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Adam Nayman returns to the show to discuss the elusive nature of cult movies: what makes one qualify, and when and why does a movie officially earn cult status. Sean and Adam use two of their favorite recent movies, Netflix's prank comedy 'Bad Trip' and the impressive 2020 thriller 'The Empty Man,' as a launch point before sharing their favorite cult movies of all time (0:15). Then Sean is joined by writer-director Emma Seligman to talk about her terrifically entertaining and terrifying first feature 'Shiva Baby' (1:01:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guest: Adam Nayman, Emma Seligman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Press Box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out The Press Box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about cult, or cults, or cult movies. We have a double shot of Toronto film culture today. First, our pal and Ringer contributor Adam Naiman will join to discuss the elusive nature of cult movies. What makes one qualify? Why and when does a movie officially earn cult status?

We'll use one of our favorite movies of recent memory, the ominous, surprising, and altogether impressive 2020 release The Empty Man as a launch point for our discussion before sharing our favorite cult movies of all time. Later in the show, I'll be joined by another Torontonian, Emma Seligman, the writer-director of a movie I could see picking up a cult of its own, the terrifically entertaining and terrifying first feature, Shiva Baby. Emma and I talked about how she made the movie, the anxiety cinema that inspired her, and what to do next after you've been dubbed a wunderkind filmmaker. But first, let's talk to Adam Neyman about cult. Good science, by definition, allows for more than one opinion. Which is why our gathering of data is so far-reaching. Otherwise,

you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult. Adam Neyman, how are you? Thanks for coming back on the show. I'm well. How are you, Sean? I'm hanging in there. Adam, we're talking about cults, cult movies, and where they come from and what they really mean to us today. And, you know, I wanted to talk about Bad Trip on the show, and I couldn't figure out who to talk to about it. And then I noticed that you were a fan of Bad Trip. Now, I don't know if Bad Trip is going to qualify as a cult movie, but it feels like it's in the spirit of some other cult movies that have come along over the years. What'd you make of this prank comedy from Eric Andre? Yeah, I had a very good time watching Bad Trip,

as I think you did as well, which is an extension of what he does sometimes in his TV work, right? This kind of spontaneous haphazard using the materials of reality almost as props, you know? And he's fearless in the way that some of those other extemporaneous comedians like Sacha Baron Cohen are. But what it also reminded me of, and we won't go too quickly into the cult thing yet, but it reminded me of Jackass just in the extremity of it i mean i happen to think jackass was very good for culture and probably belongs in the louvre museum and the smithsonian and the hall of fame it's one of the great things ever for me for a lot of reasons um but also just that idea of the body and extremity and feeling like something is both

very kind of disgusting and unembarrassed of being disgusting, which is kind of gets you into the territory of cult because cult is all about taboos and breaking them and exceeding them. But you also don't want to be too pretentious about it. Like this is a movie where two people's, you know, penises get stuck in a Chinese finger trap or where people projectile vomit or just absolute insane exchanges in public spaces. And maybe it was just my mood, but I found it just devastatingly funny from beginning 10. And laughed kind of the way I laughed at stuff like Jackass and Borat, which is this is very liberating.

One thing I have noticed in the conversation around this movie is that this film has maybe a little bit more in common with jackass than it does borat specifically because jackass was frequently pranks at the expense of the prankers you know this was this was a cadre of people who were doing this to each other and of course borat was frequently identifying victims and using the sort of you know the ignorant in the world, the people who we perceive as dangerous and making them, you know, the victims of Borat's shtick. This movie is much more oriented around other people's genuine reactions to the insanity that Eric Andre, Lil Rel, Tiffany Haddish are all executing against each other here.

Well, it's oddly touching as a pre-pandemic movie. And I'm not one of those people who watches a movie now from like 83. I'm like, oh my God, crowds, I'm crying. I mean, you know, almost any movie shot before 2020 is a pre-pandemic relic. But it is interesting to see these actors freely mixing out in, not just on sets or like, you know, in society. Oh, yeah. You know, public spaces, some private spaces. And yeah,

you're right that it's closer to Jackass than Borat. And also it, it seems to make the opposite point about, and here I'm being a little lofty, but like, it seems like the opposite point about America, you know, uh,

I'm not saying that it's like affirmative nationalistic portraiture, but like the people are all very nice Considering what Eric Andre is putting them through. And yeah that's editing. And that's a choice of what to leave in. And again I don't want to spoil it. But a movie like this always has credit stingers. And I loved the end credits. Of Bad Trip.

Which are kind of moments where people are. Suddenly let in on what they're seeing. And there's such a sense of euphoria. And relief for the people. Where they're like oh that shit's such a sense of like euphoria and relief for the people where they're like, oh, that shit's not actually happening. But also for us, we're like, oh, they didn't actually want to murder him. You know, they didn't actually,

they didn't want to kill him. And I don't know Eric Andre at all. I've only watched a couple of interviews with him, not the ones he does, which are like Dadaist pranks. His show is the greatest. The people have not seen his show on Adult Swim. It's fantastic.

But he seems, and I hope that this is true, seems like a chill guy. You see him in the end part of this film interacting with people after whatever he's done, and within two seconds, they forgive him, right? Because it's clearly just funny. Yes. I think it's also just not mean-spirited. And it's an interesting portrait, I think, of a perverted sense of empathy. You know, there's a sequence in which Tiffany Haddish's character escapes from a prisoner's bus. And there's what looks like maybe a sanitation worker or a local city worker telling her to hurry to get away. And then later the authorities come to him and say, did you see where she went? And he points him in a direction. And then later the authorities come to him and say, did you see where she went? And he points him in a direction and then Tiffany Haddish comes back and you can

almost see the conflict that this guy is having in real time with whether to help this person who's downtrodden or whether to help the authority figure. It was an oddly nuanced kind of movie about human behavior, even though it also features projectile vomiting. Yeah. Which again is a testament again to the way that it's assembled or edited, right? I mean, Borat, some people are like, well, what's the nice stuff that got left on the cutting room floor? And in this movie, you're like, you know,

I'm sure that there were some people who were real jerks. But I mean, also it's a great experiment. And this is how some of the people who've not, it wasn't really written about very seriously, critically, which is a common theme with something else we'll talk about later. Where it's like sometimes you wish that there was criticism that was more up to the good movies that were coming out. But no one really knows what to write about these days.

But on Letterboxd, where there is some good criticism of this movie, I like the people who've written about how what it's doing is it's staging a really banal, generic, road trip, romantic comedy within reality. And it's a wonderful genre critique too there's like that great onion article where it's like real life man gets arrested for romantic comedy behavior and i thought that that was sort of what you get in bad trip where it's like those things that we see sometimes like these spontaneous declarations of love after you've destroyed someone's workplace or these big gestures where you go up to people in public and stuff, they're actually like quite awful and horrifying. And you have to just sit with it,

you know, as, as the movie's happening. Yeah. It identifies that the conventions of general movie storytelling often feature sociopathic behavior. And so this is just sociopathic behavior to an extreme. It's a, it's an incredibly fun movie.

It strikes me that this movie was originally produced by MGM and was meant to be released in movie theaters. I think it was going to premiere at South by Southwest in 2020, if I recall. And of course, it was acquired by Netflix, and that's where it premiered. Now, on the one hand, I was very happy to have a movie like this on Netflix and very happy to have a quiet Wednesday night slightly lifted by getting the experience of watching it. On the other hand, I was very happy to have a movie like this on Netflix and very happy to have a quiet Wednesday night slightly lifted by getting the experience of watching it. On the other hand, could there be a better movie theater movie? This would have been such a fun experience in a theater. And I did feel a sense of loss around that.

Yeah. I mean, in a way, it's a perfect movie to watch, as you say. Not watch distracted because that does it a disservice. But it is a light, fun home watch. It's also very easily excerpted and segmented we're like oh i'll watch that part again yeah which will also end up happening as it gets put on youtube the same way that jackass lives on it's like you know super cuts of the best moments from the three movies but yeah i would have loved to see it with a theater and comedy or horror are genres where you have a lot of catharsis.

You like to feel people acting the same way that you're acting. Nothing makes you laugh harder than other people laughing. And it's a little trickier, but sometimes nothing is because fear is very solitary. But when you're in a movie theater with a scary movie, like I remember going to see the first paranormal activity and just the feeling in the room being what was better than the film itself. Right.

So, yeah, a bad trip would probably be very liberating to see in a theater. I miss movie theaters, Sean. Wouldn't it be great if we could go to them? I would just love to do it. Well, I'll be vaccinated soon, I hope. Fingers crossed. And then maybe I'll start going again. We'll see.

I can't wait to hear about that from all the way here in Toronto, which is a demilitarized zone. But I digress. Well, things will improve, I hope. Fingers crossed. Things have improved significantly for The Empty Man, Adam. I would say The Empty Man has been on a long journey to relevance, and I sense the relevance growing over time. Now, people listening to this show, know bad trip that's easily accessible fire up netflix in the last two weeks and you probably saw it served up straight to you the empty man is a little bit tougher to find but i sense that there is something growing there is maybe perhaps

a cult growing around this movie so i was hoping that you could explain the arc of the empty man what is this movie where did it come from and then why do we both like it? So this is a film that I checked out when I had a baby daughter this past year, and I found it out of just basic addiction to genre cinema, right? And I don't remember what it was. And this isn't the point, because all I want to talk about is how good this movie is. But I saw something on iTunes, because that's where I got it, spent money on it and it was like you know 58 on rotten tomatoes which is even the most middling grade that might have changed by now but it was something like that and that's not even like a low enough grade

where you're like oh if people hate something it must be good because that's actually my usual way of being i wrote a book on showgirls man it's like if people hate something it's probably good and i figured that it would be a middling watch for a middling night because if it's like if people hate something it's probably good and i figured that it would be a middling watch for a middling night because if it's a good new horror movie surely i would have heard about it because that's kind of just what i'm into and i got about three and a half minutes into this movie and thought this is a very good movie nothing's happened in it yet but this is clearly good movie making let's see if it stays a good movie. And when it was over two hours and 20 minutes later, because it is a long movie, all I wanted to do was go and see who wrote about this.

Because that's the way that I'm wired. What do people say about something? And I think that part of the big story of the imprimand, and I have a piece on this movie coming out, not for you guys somewhere else, but it'll be out in a couple of weeks. And that's, I think the story of this movie is just who didn't see it or how was it not presented? Because we're in a moment now where horror, quote-unquote elevated horror, is film festival catnip. I'm not denigrating any of the movies I'm about to mention, but things like Hereditary and Midsommar and Bob Eggers' movies come pre-packaged as a tour works, director centric, horror,

elevated horror. However you feel about that term, it exists. I like this movie more than most of those movies. I don't know whether David Pryor would agree that he's made elevated horror that this movie qualifies, but if this movie plays at Sundance or South by Southwest, it maybe gets the kind of eyeballs on it that then turn into

a kind of advanced buzz. This is a movie that has earned its buzz in retrospect, which I think in some ways is really cool, given what it's about. This idea of cult formation and ideas that kind of just metastasize and break through and you can't see them until they've gained critical mass. But I mean, man, it's just such a good movie. It really is. It's really effective. I had a very similar experience. I want to say it was reading a review by Brian Telerico at RogerEbert.com that first really hipped me to it. I had had an awareness of it because I have this unhealthy addiction to organizing the release dates of every studio I can remember.

And so I knew that this movie was coming out and it was in fact released in movie theaters, frankly, at the height of the pandemic in October of 2020. And it was, I would say, dumped into theaters by Disney. And this is a film that was originally developed by Fox.

I believe it was filmed in, is it 2017, 2016? When did they start shooting this movie? I think I should know this because I talked to David Pryor about it at length, but I think it was shot in 2017 and completed in 2018. Okay. So it then spent north of two years on the shelf. In that time, Fox was acquired by Disney.

I would say this film does not have the hallmarks of a Disney film in any meaningful way. Disney is not well known for its interest in horror as a genre in the first place. And so the movie came and went. And it got quite middling reviews by the critics who had a chance to see it. And to say something about those middling reviews. Yeah. You get it, right? This is like dog days release date.

It's not an award season movie. There's no festival premiere. And people are so distracted by the incredible just changing of the exhibition landscape. Writers don't know what they're even being assigned for because release dates keep changing. And then horror tends to be reviewed by stringers anyway. That's right. So the bad reviews or the middling reviews, they make mad but they're also so understandable in in context it's like of course that's what happened i think it's also completely askew from the rest of whatever we could describe

as modern horror right now so elevated horror certainly it's not quite in that it wasn't marketed in that way though perhaps it could have been but even more specifically it does not have the kind of fizzy horror comedy energy of some of the blumhouse films it does not have the sense of um haunted house historical annabelle creation sort of you know the conjuring universe affectations it's it's um it's a movie that is a little bit difficult to compare to most traditional horror movies. The films that I think it's been compared to most frequently are probably the films of David Fincher, the early films of David Fincher. And there's a reason for that. It's because in part, David Pryor has had some exposure to David Fincher over his career.

Can you just explain where Pryor comes from and what your conversations with him were like? Yeah. I mean, he's a filmmaker in his own right, and he made a horror short, a long horror short that's kind of slightly Lovecraftian that I think in the way that short films sometimes serve as calling cards or advertisements, this one would be that. But I mean, what he is living and he's very good at it is he works on studio DVD supplements, which already marks him as a, it's weird, it already marks him as a slightly anachronistic specialist because DVDs and Blu-rays still exist. But now we have online streaming and behind the scenes isn't what it used to be, right? But David did the behind the scenes featurette on Fight Club, which he chose. He told me that he went to Fox after working on the DVD for Ravenous, which he did a great job on all of the features in Antonio Bird's film Ravenous, another great horror movie. And he said, I want to do Fight Club. And that began this association between him and Fincher, which is not

an apprenticeship. And it's not like he's part of the creative team of those movies. But yeah, as you said, it's exposure to and relationship to Fincher and his methods. And he did the stuff for the Benjamin Button, which is a really good doc on the Benjamin Button disc and also on the social network, which is obviously like peak Fincher or peak late Fincher. And I think that what reminds me of Fincher and the Empty Man, which isn't so much themes or even the desaturated color palette, like you can get into both of those things, but it's the sense of convergence that the movie has. This is a movie that feels like it's in a constant state, not just of momentum, but like of arrival. It is constantly arriving, and its main character is constantly arriving exactly where things are most intriguing and most immersive for you as a viewer. It's like Fincher has this thing where when he's good, like I think Gone Girl is very good, it's like a silenced pistol shot that just keeps going. It's like two and a half hours, but it feels like 10 seconds,

at least to me. Empty Man, I think, turned a lot of people off sight unseen because who watches a two-hour and 17-minute horror movie? But it does not flag for me. I mean, I think that it's a triumph of pace. And that's the Fincher thing. It feels like it is constantly arriving, converging, coming together, assembling itself. And I don't want to be too spoilery or too coy,

but that idea of arriving and assembling itself, man, does it make sense in retrospect. And this ties into the idea of it maybe being a cult movie, because one of the hundreds of ways you can define cult movies is they tend to be rewatched. It is so good a second time. I was just going to say that to you. So I watched it for a second time last night. And thinking about Pryor's experience as an extras creator, I went looking for the extras for this film, and there were none, of course, on the release. And I'm really eager, actually, to see if there is anything out there that will show us the creation of this movie, because it seems like a complex production. There was some stopping and starting. There was some shifting in location.

And also the movie itself does not have any of the standard, forget about horror movies, even just traditional studio Hollywood films not made by powerful auteurs, shape or arc. It is not a typical three-act structure. It has, in fact, one of the most audacious openings to a conventional seeming horror movie that i can really remember and it's like this 20 minute introduction set in in the himalayas um and that i think it was pretty much by the time we got to the end of that prologue i was like oh this is unique and perhaps maybe even special well when i mentioned earlier i got about three minutes in i wasn't kidding because there's a shot in this prologue, which takes place in Bhutan, and has these American backpackers who are just hanging

out, right? It's like, you know, summer, I mean, not summer break, but it's not a professional venture. They're on vacation. And they pass or they're passed by a truck with these Bhutanese monks, and they make eye contact. And and again I'm sitting here with a baby and I'm kind of brain dead I mean I'm kind of brain dead anyway but I look at I'm like no that's the cart from the exorcist that's the Iraq prologue of the exorcist when father Marin sees this cart go barreling by him the fact that several weeks later when I got in touch with David Pryor he was kind of like yeah absolutely I mean I don't need it vindicated by the filmmaker though he said that's exactly it and told me about scouting, trying to find Bhutanese monks in South Africa where the movie was shot, which is funny in and of itself. But the Exorcist

thing for me, it's not just that I like the Exorcist. I'm like, yeah, William Friedkin used to do that. He shot in Exorcist and Sorcerer, these 15 minute prologues that are like mini movies. They're epic mini narratives. And then the movie starts. And I was just so excited by that ambition. I was so excited by the idea that the first 15 or 20 minutes of this movie are a satisfying, interesting, unsettling short film in and of itself, but also not self-contained because they're so suggestive. And you feel like you do at the beginning of The Exorcist, like something has been let out. And then you cut to America, you cut to Missouri, and you're like, how is this going to add up? And it's such a fun feeling of,

I just went through this one experience. How is that experience now going to contextualize what I'm watching? And I was mostly almost completely delighted by the answer to that question. Me too. I was impressed that he was able to thread the needle. I have seen some people who have watched it and I have been advocating that people check this movie out ever since I saw it. But I have seen I've heard the response that for some people, it doesn't all add up, so to speak. Candidly, I don't really care about that. I'm not really necessarily interested. But to your point about the prologue, the prologue does add up and it does pay off and it does feel of a piece with the rest of the film ultimately. Well, I'm torn. I mean, I'm torn in a couple

directions because one, I'm writing about it later and I don't want to give away all my best thoughts, but also I don't want to spoil it for the people who are listening. This isn't like doing a rewatchables for you where I mean, everyone has seen heat, you know, like you want people to be drawn to this movie. But what I i will say the comment i've heard from some people including some very smart people is that not just that it doesn't add up but it feels like a bunch of different movies at once and all i would say about that to any prospective viewers is it's such an interesting choice because it seems to inhabit and discard all these generic containers that i would recognize as kind of 21st century horror

movies. It's kind of an urban legend movie, and then it's kind of like a high school gang movie, and then it has this weird kind of slasher interlude, and then it starts converging as a kind of a cult movie. And I think that, again, given how the movie's about the relationship between outer and inner forms and how ideas are kind of transmitted and carried in different ways, I just love that even if there's things that don't add up, or if you call them plot holes, which I think is debatable, the core tone of it remains so steady and solid and propulsive as the surface keeps changing. And that's a rare thing.

And the movie that it kind of reminded me in that sense of, which is much shorter and which I've spoken about before, but it reminds me a little bit of Kill List, the Ben Wheatley film where Kill List seems to be one kind of movie and then it becomes another and then it definitely becomes another. But on viewing and certainly on reflection, it's all of a piece. And what I'd say about The Empty Man certainly on reflection it's all of a piece and what i'd say about the empty man is that it's very much of a piece and that's where it's satisfying or satisfyingly unsatisfying because again without spoilers and this is a hard thing to get into in a granular way though maybe we can try it's also an exceptionally bleak movie

right like not fashionably dark and i don't even think it's mean-spirited i think it's quite empathetic and sad there's a really really downbeat horror movie i agree with you i think it is also there are moments of violence but i would not describe it as a violent film um no not at all i think the word that i would i mean there are a couple of words that i thought of when the first time i saw it. I think grave is one that, you know, again, I can't get the Disney connection out of my head and the idea of some executive at Disney acquiring this film and looking at it and being like, what is this? What do we do with this? But it's also, it's quite sinister and quite ominous. And I really like films like that, that are able to capture and hold that tone,

especially at two hours and 20 minutes. I mean, that's not easy to do. No. And when you talk about that, I would say sinister, I would say ominous. I would also say it's very contemporary. And I don't just mean that it's set in the present tense or that it's not a period piece. I mean, what it is depicting, and sometimes I think it's very explicit about it in the dialogue. For those of you who are a fan, and if you're not, what's wrong with you of the character actor, Steven Root, who ennobles his profession every time he practices it and everything.

He is fabulous in this movie, but he's fabulous in this movie. I mean, there's a big kind of exposition slash, I guess, ideology dump in the middle of the movie where he kind of talks about what the movie is about. But even without that,

the vision that you get is of such a kind of drained, spiritually arid world. And sometimes when filmmakers do that, I get very impatient because I say, why am I suffering through your bad mood? And other times I think, oh, this is reflecting something pretty apt. And there's something in this movie where you have all these bodies kind of clustered together in search of some kind of enlightenment, some kind of idea. There's lots of images of people on their phones, which I know sounds, even when I say it out loud, I'm like, oh, that sounds so lame, but it's not. There's like this dialectic in it between connection and disconnection. People who are searching for

answers and people who've stumbled across something I think is going to work for them. And also just such an incredible sense of loneliness, which is, which is conveyed through the performance of James Badge Dale, who's great. And on the basis of this movie should be a big star. And I'm not saying he's not, but should be a bigger one because this is what it means to carry a movie. And, and, and, and he just puts it on his back and it's a physical performance and he's moving through the whole movie i mean he's a detective kind of his character we should say plot wise the once you get out of bhutan and whatever happens there you're in missouri with this guy whose friend's daughter disappears and she says i know you're not really a cop anymore but you

don't seem to have much else going on in your life. Can you find her? And because he suffered through this trauma of his own with a loss in his family, this idea of a missing girl really horror movie cliches, there are detective movie cliches. But by the time you have Steven Root literally giving a monologue about cliches and what's dangerous about them and also what it would mean to re-imbue a cliche with its original meaning, you're sitting here being like, this is a smart movie. Yes. His deconstruction and reconstruction of a famous Nietzsche quote is like as the centerpiece of the idea of the movie is so smart. But there are tons of moments like that. There is literally a two minute sequence in which all we see is James Badgedale

clicking on various Wikipedia pages. And frankly, I was wrapped. And if you read that in a script, I would be like, this is the most hack work exposition you could possibly do. But it worked. So one thing I will say

when I interviewed David Pryor, we talked about this. I will go out on a limb. I try not to be hyperbolic on this podcast or anywhere else. It is the best Wikipedia passage in any movie I've ever seen. There you go. I mean, I'm not surprised to hear you say that because it really is effective. And part of that is a clear sense of pace in the editing.

Part of that is just the way that it's shot and lit. Part of it is James Badgedale looking, gazing at Wikipedia in an effective way, but it is a really good performance. He's a great reader in this movie. And again, that's where the Fincher thing comes in because, I mean, you can talk about Fincher with the big capitalized words, like it's about process and it's about method. But I mean, with Fincher, it's always about the accrual of information and knowledge, at least in his procedurals, right? Absolutely. The Wikipedia passage in Empty Man is great because the accrual of information and knowledge, at least in his procedurals, right? Absolutely. The Wikipedia passage in Empty Man is great because the accrual of knowledge is so steady and the click-through is so steady and the ideas are insane. And the idea that this is all sitting out there on Wikipedia and these kind of internet rabbit holes, which again feels very contemporary.

It's not a movie about the internet exactly not as explicitly as say pulse is as an internet horror movie or fear.com but it has that feeling of click through hyperlinked um momentum to it which is kind of where it feels contemporary but then it's also dealing with things that are very ancient and when you mentioned the nietzsche quote which the the the grad school listeners of the big picture would probably guess is the famous one about looking at an abyss and an abyss looking back at you. If you're watching the movie and you have that in your mind

and you think about the imagery in the cold open of this guy in a cave sitting and staring and adopting the posture of what he's staring at, you see just how carefully written it is. Writing and horror cinema sometimes don't tend to be talked about that much in the same breath because we're like, what is the director's compositional sense? Or how do the actors look terrified and reflect our fear back at us? All that good stuff. It is, to me, holes or not, it is such a well-written movie. And if I were to say you can keep one thing about this movie that you want to tell people you like about it, for me, it's the script. It's exceptionally

well-made, but it's exceptionally well-made within the parameters of the script that he went and wrote. And it actually is, I was going to say it's not a comic book adaptation, but it actually literally is. It's a graphic novel adaptation, but it streamlines and reconfigures that source material so much. It's not about the source material being it streamlines and reconfigures that source material so much. It's not about the source material being bad. He just didn't want to make it. He took almost everything in that comic away. It did a great job.

It has heavy ideas and heavy influences. You know, another influence that struck me as I rewatched it was, and this is overt, and this is also in that prologue, is the film opens with a shot of a mountaintop. And then within two minutes, we are down in a tunnel in a cave. And that's just pure There Will Be Blood. That's exactly how There Will Be Blood opens. And there's no way that's a mistake. That's certainly the kind of film that you imagine David Pryor would be interested in. And this idea of reaching the mountaintop, you have to go to the depths of your life and existence is so obvious. And it's fun to play that game with a movie like this, because you

can see that Pryor has a brain that is kind of swarmed by influence. And even though that makes it a frankly unoriginal kind of movie in some ways, it's also some of the very best movies of all time are peeling away pieces of their favorite films and restitching them together. When you mentioned playing with it, I like it because it plays with you. And there's wonderful variations in this movie on that idea that if you call to something, it calls back. If you step towards something, it steps towards you. Then if you try and move away from it, unfortunately, it also keeps coming towards you that's right and uh you know it's got all this very granular gestural stuff i think without those things without the movement from a mountain to a

cavern without the incredible motif in it of bridges this is like one of the most bridge centric movies i've ever seen all kinds of bridges without all the repeated motifs of dropping underground and corridors without that stuff the ideas and it might be pretty lofty and they are kind of lofty right i mean david if you're listening to this like it's not an unpretentious movie right but um the way that the somewhat high-end or somewhat airy ideas in it get tied and tethered or physically manifested, hint, hint, in actual things in the filmmaking is very impressive. I sometimes feel like there are movies that kind of start as metaphors and then filmmakers look for ways to realize them. This is a movie that achieves metaphor. I think it achieves it. And it achieves it because scene by scene, shot by shot, location by location, prop by prop, it's solid black detective. And the comparison between seven is unmistakable.

And the things that the older detective is saying, I would say are a bit overwritten. There is a moment in which the detective literally says, it is communicable. And then that idea of virality and something getting trapped inside you is obviously overt in terms of the story they're telling. And yet, it seems incredibly conscious of the decision it's making to echo something that has

come before it. And so to me, it's perfectly effective. It doesn't really matter that perhaps line to line, it's not the most subtle telling. This is a mainstream, ostensibly horror movie. Sometimes it has to be direct. Yeah. And it has the scale of a movie that cost whatever it cost. Right. I mean, there's an irony here that again, I kind of discussed with the director, discussed what I'm going to be writing about it, where somehow if it was made smaller, it might've been bigger. You know, if it had had that more underdog and I hate to name a specific distributor, but you know, if this is an eight, an eight 24 movie, you know, or neon, uh, probably wouldn't have cost as much. And,

you know, David Pryor has said, not just to me that, you know, on the other hand, how do you complain? I mean, you got final cut on a movie you wrote, directed and edited for a big studio. That's a really kind of visionary cosmic horror movie i mean that's not a bad outcome and in a way the bad outcome of the movie being dumped and ignored is what's going to create the conditions for a kind of cult resurrection it's not only movies that are kind of left for dead that become cult movies but it helps and well i'm sure we'll talk about this a bit more later that's also rare now because things get reclaimed before they even come out. Because all we do now is review trailers or plot synopses or source material before we actually watch movies. And you always know people are going to jump on something that's getting badly reviewed the second it comes not like it used to be where you had to have time for revisionist criticism to achieve critical mass. This is a rare case of something that because it's being not reviewed by critics after the fact, but reviewed by social media after the fact, feels culty.

I agree. It is the newest, the latest iteration of cult, which is very exciting. Before we get deeper into cult movies, we have a special guest on the show. I'm very excited about this. We actually have the Empty Man calling in to the big picture. This is an incredible honor for us. So let's patch him in now. Empty Man, are you there? Hey, Sean sean thanks for having me on man what a journey how are you yeah you know it's been god you know what a year right for everybody uh but for me it's been it's hard to even keep track of time from the euro valley in bhutan you know we go all the way to missouri and now silver lake but

look i got the j and j i'm feeling. And we, and it's a team. I got to make sure I thank the team. We feel like Q321 is going to be a huge, huge moment for both Empty Man and Pontifex Institute. And it starts here. It starts on my favorite movie podcast. So thanks so much for having me on for the very first time. Well, it's our pleasure. You know, Em-Man, there's a lot of lore surrounding you. Adam and I have been talking about the lore surrounding your work. How do you think in a post-COVID-19 world, your work will continue to prosper? Well, I mean, a lot of the conversations that we've been having are about how to,

I wouldn't want to say weaponize, you know, because I mean, I don't want to scare anybody off, but just sort of like, you know, what are we, I don't want to scare anybody off, but just sort of like, you know, what are we not doing on TikTok? What are we not doing on Clubhouse that could bring people a little bit closer to what we're all about here? You know what I mean? It's like when you show someone an ancient demon that is just a skeleton with prayer hands, I think that there's a little bit of like a blanching that goes on. Oh, what's that? But if we can kind of come up with some fun dances, maybe some memes. We're working with a lot of really important influencers in a lot of different spaces. Mostly self-care,

mostly beauty. But I think there's a lot of open paths for us. Yeah, you are redefining virality in so many ways, Empty Man. Adam, you've been thinking about the Empty Man for a long time. You finally have a chance to confront him. Anything you want to ask him? I have so many questions, you know, I mean. Adam, huge fan, by the way. I appreciate that, Empty Man.

Me to you as well. I mean, is it vindicating for you or validating for you that after kind of so many people missed you the first time, now they just kind of have to deal with the fact that you're everywhere? Like one of your guys was saying, you know, we were all one once, we're going to be one again. And we're in the second part of that formulation. It must be just very satisfying. I mean, identity is so fluid in this day and age, you know what I mean? And I feel like that's been a real boon to our business, but also to our mission. And we try to live by our principles that we're for everyone, even if we are just for one. And yeah, I mean, that's a great question.

I really think that balancing the individual, the work-life balance has always been kind of difficult for me as an empty man. But I think that we have the tools out there to make it a success. Empty man, I'm hearing that you're considering joining the SPAC with BuzzFeed and Axios. Is there any truth to that? Are you going public? Look, I can feel Steve and Bernie getting really annoyed at me for even talking about this. Those are my business managers. You guys are crazy. Look, I can't really talk about a lot of my

investment plans. The GameStop thing was a dip. You know what I mean? Everybody goes through peaks and valleys in this market. The important thing is to stay calm and stay aggressive. You know what I mean? And not bet scared. So if bite-sized news combined with incredible listicle content is something that we think over at the Pontifex that would help get our message across, sure. We're open for business. Can I ask you one other thing, empty man? Oh, for sure. Yeah. Who are your guys?

Who are my guys? Well, you know, I mean, I came up at the store in the 70s. So, you know, just seeing Eddie, like, you know, you have to understand, like, if you were there on a Friday night and Richard or Eddie walked in, it was like, if I may say so, it was like being in front of the empty man. You know what I mean? You were like, I'm here. I'm in front of an actual legend, a god. Empty man, this has been incredibly informative. I feel like in many ways, Adam and I will be haunted by this conversation for years to come. So thank you for showing yourself to us. Is there anything you want to share with our listeners before you go? First, you see me, then you hear me, then you pod with me.

That is The Empty Man, folks. Thank you so much. So Adam, that was The Empty Man. Let's go from The Empty Man to cults at large. Now, cult movies are a fascinating subject to me i would say that my exposure to cult movies at a young age certainly changed my trajectory as a movie fan from what would have been strictly a hollywood normie which of course i am in many respects to someone who has got a much wider sense of taste beyond that.

What about for you? When you think of a cult movie, what do you think of? Well, I mean, it's one of those things where you don't want to give a cop-out answer, because if you start saying that everything is potentially cult, then it doesn't sound like you're talking about something special or specific or interesting. But it is one of those things that has really elastic boundaries. A few years ago at the University of Toronto, where I do sometimes teach, I was actually, I put together a course and taught a course about cult cinema where I think the guiding principle of that beyond just a survey of some of the key literature, like the Rosenbaum-Hoberman book, Midnight Movies, and

a lot of the writing like Danny Peary's cult movie books and writing on filmmakers like Ed Wood. In addition to that, I kind of put it around the idea of extremity. And I don't just mean extreme violence or extreme sexuality, which is a big part of cult, but movies that stick out or stand out or don't fold in easily and that that's where people's attraction to them comes from and sometimes it can be an extremity of aesthetics sometimes it can be extreme intensity it can be extreme length extreme rareness extreme scarcity but irregularity basically and since the the the standards for what constitutes normal or mainstream keep changing. It's interesting how some movies lose their cult aura and some movies kind of take it on.

But I would also say that loss, scarcity, rareness, or movies that were missed, that were kind of not given their due the first time or that were misunderstood, is also a big factor or facet of cult. I mean, again, I wrote a book on showgirls, which is probably one of the key Hollywood cult movies in the 90s. There's a group of people who passionately love something and want to reclaim it and own it and worship it in a way. And that doesn't work so well with something that everyone likes in the first place. Yeah, it's interesting. I think that notion of a movie sort of,

I don't know if evolving is the right word, but moving beyond the concept of cult has been fascinating to me too because I think there are many films in the 90s and in the 2000s when you and I were coming of age, so to speak, that seemed like they ought to be cult movies and then completely transcended that brand. You know, The Big Lebowski is often

identified as a cult movie these days, but that is a movie that has been seen by more people than perhaps have seen a film like Deep Impact. Including by your very website, where I believe it was, and which both makes sense that it would top a list like that because of a certain tone or demographic or readership. And in other ways, it's not remotely a cult movie the way that, you know, Cobra Woman is a cult movie or The World's Greatest Sinner is a cult movie. There's different tiers and arenas and contexts for it. I think that cult in academic terms has always been seen as somewhat oppositional. And when something is oppositional, you have this idea of underdogs or foundlings or things that have been lost or that haven't been nurtured or movies that are

weird and deformed and unwholesome in a way. But it's equally true to say that in the sense that they were passionately loved and that people still love and quote them, that movies like The Big Lebowski or Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Wet Hot American Summer, they're not cult movies. This is what I mean by it's a huge category. I think that those movies that you just named in particular have a kind of, I'll say sweetness, for lack of a better word. And historically, in my mind, cult movies are a little bit more subcultural, a little bit more transgressive, a little bit more outside of the mainstream. And so there's an interesting

bit of confusion, I think, sometimes when we talk about these things. We all have our own personal definitions. You mentioned The Ringer did a list earlier this year, which I thought was a very good list. And frankly, I would recommend every single film that appears on the list. The standards for that list were domestic box office gross of less than $30 million, a lack of initial widespread acclaim, and a surge in sales popularity and or acclaim once the movie hit VHS or DVD. And so in that respect, the remit is broad. That could be a whole number of kinds of movies. I would guess that my taste in cult is slightly more esoteric. And I would guess that you, having seen everything and having been deeply trained as a film scholar, would run even deeper than that. So I guess, do you think that it's still possible

to have a cult movie? You know, we're talking about The Empty Man. We're talking about the way that this film seems to have attracted a sense of loyalty, I would say. I think it has advocates out in the world. It has followers. And that is seemingly increasingly rare

and or I think you could say that every movie kind of has this in a way now. And so the rise of Stan culture has also kind of perverted the idea of cult movies. I mean, I'm going to mention a movie and I wasn't planning on mentioning it, but just to put a movie in play that some of your listeners might know and I'm pretty sure you saw, which is Panos Cosmatos is still Mandy. Yes. On the one hand, I think Mandy is a cult movie, which is, but I also think it's made to order as one. And that's also an increasing phenomenon.

I mean, I can't date it. I can't say that, you know, as soon as the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out, people tried to make cult movies, but Rocky Horror, which would make any serious list about cult, which I taught in my course, and in some ways taught quite critically because there's a way in which it's not actually a very transgressive movie. It's a movie where in the end, the forces of transgression disappear and the heroes emerge a little kinkier and wiser, but we don't have to deal with Frank N. Ferner anymore. But with Rocky Horror, that's made as a cult movie. It's about cult movies the music and rocky horror is about old rko and fey ray and king kong and science fiction double feature it's already in 1975

nostalgic for the idea of true cult and now 50 years later rocky horror is like an old chestnut and kind of a classic or it's beyond the attention span of people who are in their 20s now and you try and show them the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and maybe they're not into it. But movies made to order as cult movies, self-conscious cult movies, I'd say Richard Kelly falls in this category too. Maybe Ben Wheatley falls in this category with Field in England. There is something about them that is valid and viable,

but it doesn't excite me in the same way as things that are older. And it's not about being a snob and not about being an obscurantist. It's just the conditions of cult in the 30s and 40s and 50s, very different than what's considered cult. Now, with some exceptions, a movie like Showgirls, which was so toxic and so hated and had nobody willing to advocate on its behalf in real time, which has then been reclaimed in so many different directions. I think as an example of the movie that was on the ringer list, but also just a movie in general from the last 20 years that I think actually qualifies as opposed to things that are made to order in a way to tap into an audience that wants something self-consciously weird or self-consciously strange.

It's interesting. I mean, you're taking a somewhat philosophical and critical approach to this. And I think when I think about my favorites in the category, I have a much more emotional and chronological relationship to it. And so it's frequently movies that I saw at a critical juncture in my life. And one of the movies that's on my list of my favorites, and I've written about this, was just my exposure at 14 or 15 years old to Profundo Rosso, Deep Red, Dario Argento's slasher, Giallo.

And that movie completely reordered my brain it is it is as impactful on me as as jaws and star wars and it was it was a very classical i didn't know you could do this i didn't know you could frame a story this way i didn't know you could tell a film like this i didn't i probably had seen fewer than 20 foreign films before seeing that movie in my lifetime. And that is, I think, in many ways, a true cult film. It has a cult following. It's probably not the signature cult movie of Argento's career. That's probably Suspiria.

But it is a movie that, to this day, if you put it on, I will sit through the entire thing delighted and feeling the same pangs of emotional recognition that I get when I listen to Nirvana's Bleach. It has the same kind of like, boy, when I was 13, I was discovering some wonderful shit in the world. And it's interesting the way that these things work on you. No, I mean, in terms of being formative and in terms of that strong attachment, those are absolutely the individual conditions for that kind of cult love, right? And Argento would definitely qualify, again, because of that kind of cult love right um and argento would would would definitely qualify again because of that idea of extremity formal extremity and the palette of the

movie i mean starting with the title is so rich like it doesn't pass unnoticed but you know i don't know if you had them and you probably did i'm gonna guess you do though i can't see them on your your bookshelf though i can see a book on the coen brothers that somebody wrote um shout out to you yeah do you have the danny peary cult books you know i do i do it's a terrific interview on the ringer.com with danny yeah ben lindbergh did i was gonna say it was a terrific interview because it spoke to how influential those books were and the way that they were so ecumenical and mixed so you you read Danny Peary's original cult movies volume, and there are illustrations and images from movies that are really screwed up, I guess, when you're a teenager, like Blue Velvet. Yes.

I read that before I saw Blue Velvet, and there's a black and white blurry picture in there of Isabella Rossellini naked on the lawn, I think. And I'm like, what is this movie? Or Dennis Hopper with the gas mask on. And, you know, he's got Jodorowsky in there, but he's also got Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz. And he's not wrong to have them. I mean, for one thing, it's written in 1980.

So things like Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz are only as old then as Ferris Bueller is now. And home video hasn't really existed. So there's rareness and scarcity and legends and lore around these movies you know like people used to think that there was a hanged munchkin in the wizard of oz and that makes something a cult movie because then people like i gotta watch wizard of oz to see the hanged munchkin but also if you play dark side of the moon wizard of oz becomes a cult movie and on the other hand i'm just thinking it was because my four-year-old's

been watching it all week it's also the most wholesome big tent movie imaginable. The fandom of Star Wars is the definition of cult fandom. It is obsessive rewatching. And I don't want to get into this now, but Star Wars and Marvel are not cult. And the fact that they are perceived as such makes my blood boil. The product doesn't make my blood boil. The perception of it drives me nuts. Or when people talk about WandaVision and they say, this is Lynchian, it's not just an aesthetic observation. It has to do with like, no, it's not because of how Eraserhead was produced and shown and screened for three years in underground cinemas in New York before attaining critical mass. It was not widely and tyrannically available via a streaming service. It's not a shot at WandaVision, which I've not watched one

second of. It's more about the idea of like, well, what is cult? Can the biggest thing in the world also be cult? And even if it is sci-fi-ish like Star Wars, it can't. However, when David Lynch tried to make a Star Wars movie and failed with Dune, that's a cult movie. Absolutely. It's an interesting concept because I think what you're underlining is this idea of outsiderdom and operating outside the lines of traditional means of production. And so you have this nuanced concept where films like Rocky Horror, and this is Spinal Tap and Heathers and Reservoir Dogs and, you know, Repo Man. They all seem to be like they seem to feature different shades of cult. You know, these are very well known and frequently seen films or films that have been celebrated and restored and reissued time and again over the last 30 or 40 years. And I think to your workaday film fan,

Repo Man is a cult movie. You know, it's a movie that, you know, did not have a big successful box office release that very quickly gained a kind of intense fandom in a certain kind of community. It was speaking to a certain kind of community. It features a number of actors in the same way that we were talking about James Badge Dale

as a guy who appears in a lot of good independent films and TV shows that basically were not hits, Harry Dean Stanton kind of had that sort of persona. And so when he shows up in a movie like Repo Man then sort of starts to seem closer to Star Wars than it does to Cobra Woman, for example. Is that fair to say? Yeah, or it becomes, which is a contradiction in terms, but an interesting one, it becomes like cult canon, right? The whole point of cult is that it isn't canon, but there is a cult canon.

And then the movies in that cult canon are what these enterprising ambitious filmmakers sometimes purposefully are trying to imitate like you watch something like mandy and i'm not picking on mandy but it's like this is a movie that is made in thrall to six movies that are in the danny peary book you know this is what nick reffin is doing now too i mean he's dedicating movies to yodorovsky in the 1970s people he's dedicating movies to Jodorowsky. In the 1970s, people weren't dedicating anything to Jodorowsky. They were like, who the hell is this guy? And it was either hated or it was kind of passionately loved, but it wasn't establishment. It wasn't an established kind of aesthetic.

But I mean, there's also levels and tiers of cult cinema that are below. I mean, we're not just talking about obscure. I mean, we are talking about handmade, lost to time, not even lost to time, never found in the first place. And when you investigate and interrogate those, then you have a whole other level of cultivation. But what it also really has to do with, I think, is a rejection of this idea. And it's a rejection of the Razzies and the Golden Turkey Award books that the Medved brothers did. And a rejection to some extent of Siskel and Ebert, who famously gave Blue velvet one star and hated showgirls and all that it's like it's a rejection of square criticism and it's an inversion of traditional values not so bad it's good which is part of it but more not bad actually good and the ways in which something is good and has merit can be trashy, they can be sleazy,

they can be incoherent, it can be wild. It's a very participatory thing. And that also has to do with a lot of cult movies being movies that encourage or have led to the encouragement of audience participation around viewing them, like Rocky Horror, which is a prompt to viewers. And then you have something like The Room, which is not made with one, I'm trying to think of a big number here, one gazillionth of the intention of Rocky Horror. And we don't have to re-litigate Tommy Wiseau, and I don't really want to, but that is the most participatory viewing experience you'll ever have. In Rocky Horror, it is not at the movie's expense. In The Room, it is at the movie's expense, but it's also at the expense of people who are so humorless that they wouldn't

watch The Room. That's absolutely right. And I think one thing is external and one thing is internal. And whether films have a consciousness, Mandy is a movie that seems to have been made, and I don't mean it's an insincere movie in any way, I couldn't tell you honestly, but it seems to have been made for that four quadrant feature of photos on Twitter. It's like, look at the most outrageous sort of rainbow-like configuration of blood across Nicolas Cage's face. The room obviously is the total inversion of that.

And what has grown around that is fan driven, is follower driven. And so these two things, I think coexist quite comfortably like my personal taste for these sorts of things are the opposite or sort of the i guess a third strain which is purely internal how i receive it and what it means to me which i think is true for most people but it's interesting that the the vagueness the broadness the flexibility of this term can apply to so many movies it makes it just a fun concept to discuss.

Well, like a landmark movie, I think in deconstructing this, if you were to teach a course on it, you would want to show Tim Burton's Ed Wood. Because in a way, it's a total love letter to someone supposedly the worst filmmaker of all time and someone who made supposedly the worst film of all time by a certain standard, but it sanitizes him in a way that's not correct. If you read about Edward D. Wood Jr.'s life, and if you watch his movies, not a two-minute clip reel of Plan 9 from Outer Space, but you watch the movies, they're not sweet, and they're not innocuous,

and they're not just things that were misunderstood in their time. They're these wild, unruly, deeply personal testaments that earn, I think, not just cult status, but seriously fascinating movies. But they're not what Tim Burton made of them. Tim Burton's grafting his own Burton-ness on top of this. And there's a weird thing in Ed Wood of a total front runner who's making the Batman movies, trying to identify with someone who lived and worked in borderline abject poverty. I like Ed Wood a lot.

I like it a lot. But when I was 13, that was an entry point to Ed Wood, but it's not the real thing. And I think that the cult film scholarship and cult film appreciation comes when you want to reckon with why Ed Wood's movies are actually interesting. And it's not because they're the worst movies ever. And it's also not because they're cute it's like no one else could have possibly made these this way yeah well that's when you just underlined something that i find so interesting which is that so many of these movies and even the ones that could be perceived as slightly more conventional are gateway drugs you know tim burton's ed wood is a gateway a gateway drug. It is a snapshot of a person's story that then for the curious, for those who are touched by the story, for those interested

in the idea of schlock or the personal storytelling of Ed Wood, we'll go seek out his movies. And that's been true for me too, for many movies. I have Big Trouble in Little China on my list, which I think is an extraordinary and quite strange John Carpenter movie, perhaps even more strange than it's given credit for. But it's also a movie that sends you down a rabbit hole of ancient kung fu mysticism films, of films like Born Losers and the Billy Jack movies, and this idea of obscuring and redefining male American hero masculinity. And that is like the greatness,

I think, of some of these movies too. Even if they're a little bit obvious, even if they're office space, which I also love, that can also repel you down a Mike Judge hole and make you figure out everything that he's done. And so they have this beautiful first toke of marijuana kind of feeling to them

that I really appreciate. There's this very obscure American filmmaker named Quentin Tarantino. No one's ever heard of him before. There's actually an alternate timeline where that would be a true sentence, right? You know, there's an alternate timeline where that's what could happen with the reception of a movie like Reservoir Dogs, which is so derivative of City on Fire and The Killing. I don't want to talk about Tarantino, but I want to talk about how you look at something like Kill Bill, and depending on how you want to look at it, that is either the best case scenario for what Cult is,

which is a powerful, final cut, carte blanche, name above the title filmmaker, serving as a gateway drug dealer to 50 movies that are, you know, on any cult syllabus, or it's reprehensible because it's a hundred million dollar budget multiplex appropriation of those things. And I'm not going to say which side I'm on, but that's the condition we find in the 21st century. We're post, post, postmodern, you know, and what it means to be a cult film appreciationist, what it means to have been someone, not just someone who saw Eraserhead 20 times in 77, but who saw Star Wars 20 times in 77. It means something different now. I think it means something different to have seen Star Wars 15

times in theaters than to be like, oh, I'm so into The Mandalorian. And I'm not trying to be a jerk when I say that. I'm just saying it's a very, very, very different context. You know what's interesting about the Tarantino point that you've made, though, too, is I think that it would be different if all of those things were happening for him today, in which information and media is so deeply accessible. But even, and forget about Reservoir Dogs, let's say Kill Bill. When you see Kill Bill, you don't necessarily, I didn't necessarily have access to Drunken Master. I don't know how I would have seen Drunken Master. Maybe if I had lived in New York City at the time when Kill Bill came out, I could have checked it out at a rep house, but I didn't. I lived in Ithaca, New York at that time. And there was no way for me to see Drunken Master. It wasn't at his early films. So the idea of watching Uma Thurman execute his choreography and then alighting my mind to his work was so powerful. And I think a service to movie fans now

in which everyone has a Letterboxd account, everyone is on Twitter, IMDb exists, Netflix exists, the Criterion channel exists, things are changing. And so I wonder if this idea of the sort of like associative living homage filmmaking will evolve over time. And if that will change too, because that always seems to be a part of cult too. No, I think that, I think it's a good point. And that's why in some ways, one of the very first things you said about VHS, which are three very archaic letters, but VHS was not the invention of cult. It was not the invention of cult aesthetic or cult condition, but it was a huge, huge part of, again, a contradictory sentence. The mainstreaming of cult or mainstreaming the awareness of cult where you're not dependent on a repertory screening

or owning a print or being a Quentin Tarantino type person whose life is the obsessive chasing of those things until the point where you get to make them again with a million times the budget. It's more like the video store. But we also all have our cult frame of reference based on when we're born. And I'm constantly reminded when I do go online or when I read pieces or when I see papers turned in by students, I'm reminded how incredibly narrow my frame of reference is. And that's not fake self-deprecation. It's like you talk about normie. I mean, so am I. And that's even when I'm trying to seek stuff out. There are a few people I follow on Twitter and make a point of following on Twitter where the things

that they are into and not just to wear it as a badge of honor and make people feel shelter but the things that they're actively into in terms of international cinema and older cinema and also this kind of like weird semi-professional quasi-amateur history of american film that's that exists on youtube i'm not there i try i know i've seen more movies than most people but not as many as they have and it's it's a humbling thing. And that's why call it the piece I wrote for you guys for the ringer about this was like, you just want to share something. And maybe that would have been a shorter answer to all this, but it's that idea of sharing

something when you find like-minded people who want to share it with you. Well, I mean, that's what a cult is. And hopefully it's not Scientology, you know, hopefully it's showgirls. I would rather people share showgirls than Scientology, but that impulse of like, oh, I have found this thing that appeals to me and I believe in it and it's worth believing in it. Have you heard the good news? Absolutely.

Have you, have you, have you, have you met the empty man? That's what it is. Evangelism is the reason I like and wanted to do this show. There are things that I've seen that I care about that I want people to check out too. And even if they disagree, that's okay. So the list that I made, I would say is somewhat normie. And I did that purposefully with the expectation that you would come and blow me out of the water. And in a way you have. So I will just very quickly identify the movies that I want to talk about. And then I want to let you talk about the list that you made. So I mentioned Deep Red. I would

encourage anyone to check out, frankly, the first 10 Argento films that he made. They're all wonderful, in my opinion, all fascinating to varying degrees. I did put Office Space on my list as a, I would say, a nod to the ringer list, the idea that the cult movie can also be mainstream in a way. Big Trouble in Little China, Altered States, the extraordinary Ken Russell adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky, two of my favorite creative minds of the 20th century working together on something that doesn't totally work, but also works in my heart. Amazing William Hurt performance in that movie. And then Evil Dead 2, which much like Profundo Rosso, I think opened my mind and showed me a world that I wanted to spend more time in. Imagine both Sam Raimi and the Coen brothers still being active in the way that they are right now. And also the strangeness of Sam Raimi making a Marvel movie in 2021 and Joel Coen on the verge of releasing an adaptation of Macbeth and just the way that paths can diverge as well is so fascinating to me.

I mean, Evil Dead 2 is one of those cases of something purely good and wonderful got put into the world. It's not as ferocious or as serious a horror movie as the first one. The first one's already funny. I mean, the second one is more of an overt comedy. But that movie, I mean, here's a really precise film critical term. Evil Dead 2 is a vibe. It's got such a good vibe, which is this is disgusting and disreputable and to some extent not correct, but it's so relaxed about it. And I remember as a kid, I was very influenced by reading Roger Ebert's reviews. And I remember reading Roger Ebert, both on Dawn of the Dead, which is a different kind of movie, but also Evil Dead 2 and being very interested as a 10 or an 11-year-old that he liked these movies. And that what he said about Evil Dead 2 is he was, I he made some it might not have been this review but he was talking about how you know gadard said that it's not blood it's the color red and evil dead 2 is like a great

example of that where how you can't possibly take this gore seriously this gore is so excessive that to call the movie disgusting is just fundamentally misunderstand what disgusting is it's joyous it's affirmative it's like kids flinging finger paint around yeah and that movie is looney tunes it's tex avery yeah it's looney tunes it's tex avery and uh talk about a movie that captured the imagination not just of viewers but of filmmakers because that dna is visible everywhere and ramey is one of those guys like peter jack For me, Peter Jackson declined badly as a filmmaker and Raimi never did the same way. But those are like Lord of the Rings more because this guy was chasing his friends around with a camera pretending to scoop each other's brains out. And then a few years later, he got $190 million or whatever it was to make this trilogy. And that's an example of the mainstreaming of cult that I think is good.

Weirdos like Jackson and Raimi kind of infiltrating and inflecting Hollywood is a good thing. I completely agree. So I asked you to make your list and what did you do? I just did a list of five cult movies about cults because I didn't really feel like, I felt like the category was too wide. So it was very quickly my list. I have Kill List, which has been Wheatley's second feature, which I've spoken about and written about a lot. I think it's great. Starts like a Hitman movie and does not end like one. And that's all I'll say.

A movie that I'm not even sure I like, but that I was interested to write about and have thought about, which is David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake, which I think you like more than me. I've been dragged more in the direction of liking it because of the conversations I've had about it. Obviously, a riff on noir, a kind of stoner noir. It's like The Big Lebowski is already a pastiche, and then this is a pastiche of The Big Lebowski. But as a movie about looking for meaning and signals in popular culture and the question of whether it's scarier for them to be there or not, it's a little bit like the empty man. And definitely Andrew Garfield is playing an empty man and it's a very

impressively unlikable performance. It's also to this point without knowing it, the best Epstein movie, which, which, which I'm not, I won't go into because it's unpleasant to talk about and also i don't want to spoil the movie but as a movie but like richness wealth and privilege insulating you from like morality i had not drawn that correlation but that's a wonderful call yeah it's like a good Epstein movie. I have Cobra Woman, which I hope people

seek out. I think it's on YouTube. It contains one of the great performances of all time by Maria Montes, an actress who is not conventionally good, but conventionally good sucks. It's the kind of performance that would never get an Oscar nomination, and that's why it's great and it features us an island snake worshiper cult it's an ecstatic film in the 1940s uh timothy carey's the world's greatest sinner which sean have you seen that was the one i've never seen this i've never seen it i love timothy carey but i've never seen it so timothy carey was among other things a very unwholesome presence in the early movies of stanley k Kubrick like if you watch the killing and paths of glory he's just there and you're like this is not good news you know he's

he is he is weird as the day is long he was a very strange person as a character actor and in 1962 he wrote directed I believe produced and definitely starred in this movie about someone who drops out of the business world to basically become an evangelist and form a cult. And it's so unpleasant and maniacal and an allegory of itself because it's all about this narcissist who wants to exert influence on the world around him. That's Tim Carey making this movie, but it's incredible. I mean, a real artifact. And considering America's love affair with insane demagogues past and present, it's a pretty good little riff on that. Very small movie, because it's handmade, basically. But, you know, it rules. one without talking about it i'll just say if people want to read the piece i did during the ringer cult movie week i anchored it to todd browning's movie freaks which isn't necessarily about a cult but more about inclusion in a particular society a society of carnival performers who are simultaneously in the film rendered completely other and terrifying and rendered so close and empathetic and in 1932 an audience is just completely torn by like not just what's this movie about and how real is it because you cast real

circus performers which is very uncomfortable but also like where do our sympathies lie and i would actually say the movie answers that question and in answering that question it's the great cult movie of them all because you are pulled out of your comfort zone and and into a place where you're like very happy to be welcomed um and i would say for people who find it made in 1932 it's insanely scary now you know that's not said in a condescending head patting way where it's like oh they still made you know those are still pretty good i mean of course they're still good, but it's really nasty movie. I love Freaks. It's a wonderful choice.

I love the way that you tweet the list. Adam, any final thoughts on Cult? No, I think that we covered it, except we didn't cover it at all. Isn't that the point? Maybe you'll come back. We'll talk more about Cult movies. Thank you so much for joining us as always.

And people should read Adam's work and watch his work on YouTube. It is incredible. Thanks again, man. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thanks to Adam Naiman. Now let's go to my conversation with Emma Seligman. Delighted to be joined by Emma Seligman on the show. Emma, thanks for doing this. Thank you for having me. Emma, I'll be honest. I had never heard of you before until I heard about Shiva Baby. And I'm curious where you came from and where this movie came from. Can you just tell me a little bit about who you are and how

this movie came about? Sure. Well, this is my first movie, so I'm totally okay with the fact that you haven't heard of me. And even if it wasn't, I wouldn't be offended at all. I went to film school and I made the short film that this is based on in college. It was my thesis. I'm from Toronto originally. I grew up with TIFF and all of their programs. And then I went to NYU where I made Shiva Baby, the short film.

And I was very lucky that it got into South by Southwest, the short film. And from there, my friends and I, who none of us had made a feature before, all just tried for two years to refinance this movie. And we ended up making it as like, you know, an ultra low budget, um, you know, under 250 K situation. Um, and got lucky with this incredible cast and, uh, and here we are, uh, it was supposed to premiere a South by Southwest in 2020, you know, which was of course canceled. And that was sort of like the first big cancellation of our industry when it comes to COVID. Um, so then I was like, it's this movie's over. The, the life of this movie has died, um, here. Um, and a year later, here we are. And, um, so yeah, that's totally cool that you haven't heard of me. Cause I was like,

throughout this whole process, I was like, this movie's going nowhere. And then once up, I was canceled. I was like, it's really going nowhere. So it's a surprise to me as well, all of this. I hope I wasn't being rude. Speaking of TIFF. No, not at all. I saw your movie at TIFF and it was one of those like kind of classical festival surprises, a filmmaker with their first feature, with a movie that I didn't know very much about, with a beautiful runtime of 77 minutes. And I was like, let's just take a chance on this. And I fired it up and I really connected with it. And it seemed like a lot of other people did too. I'm curious about that growing up in the shadow of TIFF thing though, and what it's like, what the kind of Toronto film community is like and what that was like for you and how it influenced you to become

a filmmaker. Totally. Yeah. Toronto is a huge film loving community. You know, there's a lot of American productions that shoot there. There's Canadian filmmakers as well. But I feel like everybody in Toronto, almost everyone just loves movies, is so aware of like what's out and what's popular. And you can just catch anyone and everyone talking about movies in any public setting all the time. We have TIFF. We also have Hot Docs, the documentary film festival. And I feel like TIFF is one of the few festivals in the world that is a people's festival, you know, like people line up around the block, or at least they used to,

to get in, to get their tickets and then to get rush tickets. And so I grew up doing that with my friends and family. They, they used to have, you know, TIFF is a year round organization and it's their government funded. So they have a lot of programs and other like smaller festivals they do. And when I was a kid, I was a juror for their kids film festival that they don't have anymore. Yeah. Um, so I got to I you had to submit a movie review um and then they picked three kids for each age group um and I was one of them and I got to watch like foreign films for the first time and independent films which I feel very lucky that that was one of my first formative sort of film experiences that was other than just sort of like Hollywood movies that my parents would take me to

you know every Oscar season so Tiff did. And then I was also part of their high school committee called TIFF Next Wave. And I think before Next Wave, I really wanted to be a film critic. I loved, I was just a regular TIFF person. I loved going to see movies. I loved enjoying them. But I think I was just, the idea of making a film was so foreign to me until I met a lot of young filmmakers that were on the committee. Um, and a lot of college students, because they would connect us to all young film lovers, whether they be university students or high school students. And I think I, I started to understand what it would be like to just make a short with your friends and to just make something really doable and what it meant to even

just shoot something for fun. So I think TIFF really in the community that TIFF inspires is what ultimately made me want to try becoming a filmmaker. I think before then it just seemed so foreign and they really did such a fabulous job. They do camps for kids. They do like, they do so much. And, um, uh, I think I got to meet so many female filmmakers and, and queer filmmakers and filmmakers of color. And I was like, Oh, like this isn't just this foreign concept of like an old man, you know,

with a baseball hat, like, you know, directing a film. I was like other people and young people can do it too um so TIFF was completely formative and I think they have accomplished what they've set out to do which is inspire children and teenagers to get involved with films so that was what it was like growing up with with sort of TIFF as a shadow yeah it's pretty cool was there a particularly memorable or inspirational screening you can recall from growing up i remember every tiff screening i feel like people always say like you know of course you enjoyed this movie you saw it at toronto because the audience is always just so excited and so enthusiastic i i feel like I remember seeing 127 Hours with my friends and the real guy that James Franco plays, Aaron Ralston, was there.

And that was pretty emotional to see the real subject there in real life talking about it. I also remember seeing Spring Breakers with my friends and we were all like 15 and because because it's unrated at TIFF you know so anyone can get in and I wrote film reviews at the time for the Huffington Post for the teen section um because I had started my own little film blog and so that allowed me to to do that stuff so I remember Spring Breakers was really cool because it was like seven months before the movie came out my friends and i got to go to school the next day and be like yeah we saw spring breakers it was pretty it was pretty crazy so that was a um that was a particular experience yeah it's really painful to hear that you were 15 at the premiere of spring breakers i know that's that's so you

know you you are like a bit of a wunderkind and obviously you're, um, quite young to have had such a, you know, incredible feature film debut. How did it happen? You made the short and then basically how did you make this project happen? How did you build this story? Where does the story come from? And then you mentioned the cast too. I'd love to hear about that as well. So where, where did you start once you made the short? Yeah. Well, where do I start? So I made the short.

I wanted to make something affordable. And also in a world I understood. I feel like it's already challenging enough to write a short or a first feature. Just in general, there's so many things that can go wrong that you might as well write a story in a world that you understand with characters you know and I always knew that the first thing I would write sorry I always knew the first thing that I would write would um be a Jewish family function because I just felt like that dialogue could roll off my tongue really naturally and I wouldn't have to think too hard about it. And then I, I just felt like what's the opposite of

a Jewish family function. And then I was like something sexual, like something like, you know, something with involving your sex life. And there were a lot of sugar babies at NYU and I tried it briefly and it was just like a huge part of the world there that I felt like whenever I told someone outside of the NYU world or college world, they were like, what, that's a thing. And I was like, yeah, like so many of my friends do it. And it's not weird for us to hear about that. So I just thought it would be a funny concept initially. And then I think as I workshopped it in class, and then when we finished the short and I started developing it into a

feature, I think that's more when I realized there was like a lot more to it, to the story. There was a lot more emotion and a lot more of a character change for this, for this young woman sort of at a crossroads before graduation. So that's where the story came from. And then I honestly just did trial and error with my two friends. We tried getting it made through production companies that we'd interned for or worked for, and they all politely said no, but would give us advice or guide us in certain directions. So none of that works. And then we brought on our third producer who I met at South by Southwest, and she had

just produced her first feature. And she was, she's a few years older than us, but same sort of film school community. And so she was like, I just went through this. So she was perfectly in reach, but also experienced enough that she could help guide us. And we basically, she just convinced us to reach out to every person we had ever met in our entire life and ask them for money. And so it ended up being a large number of investors giving us small investments, not small amounts of money, but small investments by film standards, even film, indie film standards. So we had one EP that had had experience her name is riannon jones who's and she always gives um her model is giving 50k to first time second time female filmmakers so once we had her on board we got to we went back to all these other family friends

or friends of family friends or just people we'd been connected to for like seven degrees of separation um and said this producer this real producer is giving us money. Like, why don't you come on board? Like, you know, like you should jump on the train. Cause it's always hardest to get the first one. So yeah. And I, at that point, Rachel Senate, who's incredible, who stars as Danielle, um, she, she was, uh, helping us find financing too. And she had set a timer on the movie. And that I think is what ultimately got it made because she was like, it has to be this summer. Cause she watched a summer go by. I was like,

I want to make it next summer. That summer passed. And then the next summer was slowly coming up. It was the fall before. And I said, well, if it can't be the summer, then maybe it'll be the next.

And she said, no, I told everyone it's going to be this summer. It's going to be the summer. And I said, okay. So then I just had a panic attack every night, um, and dried. It just didn't do anything else, you know, except for like babysit and, you know, eat and sleep. Um, and we just kept going and going and we were raising money up until the very last second just for production. And then even throughout the production, we were raising money for post. And it continued.

But we brought on our incredible casting director, which was the most important move and something that our third producer was like, we need this. This is going to change the game for the movie. And thankfully, Kate, Kate Geller is her name she had worked at a casting agency forever and she was breaking out on her own so she was down to do something that paid very little because she wanted some she wanted her own stuff you know to under her resume and also because she believed in us and so she just you you know, was incredible. And we just offered, we just sent the script to everyone that was in the movie was just offered the role and they all said yes. Um, uh, which is

crazy, but I think I learned that a lot of bigger actors are down to make something small if they like the material, if it doesn't take up too much time in their schedule. And they think, you know, maybe it'll be a festival success or it gives them the opportunity to do a role they've never done before. So they all said yes. And, you know, I got very, very lucky with the cast that we got.

And we, you know, we shot it in summer of 2019 and then we raced to sort we shot it in summer of 2019 and then we raced to sort of get it done for festivals. Um, my editor and I were both, you know, working a regular job. So we would edit at night and on weekends. Um, and you know, you, you met, I mean, you mentioned me being young, but I think being young is helpful because you just sort of wring your body out like a towel and don't sleep. And I think that's something that you can only really do when you're this age. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but it felt impossible even at 24.

And I still feel like I'm sleeping at home. You will find out just how right you are, truly. Yeah, I guess. I definitely feel the repercussions of it now. But yeah, that's how it happened. And I sort of blinked and four years of my life went by, but it's been an incredible experience. That's really remarkable. I'm curious how much the movie actually changed during that, you know, long sort of prenatal period,

you know, like you talked about the concept being kind of fun and funny seeming. And then the movie itself, while it has a lot of funny charm is kind of terrifying and anxiety riddled and kind of a horror movie. I've seen a lot of people compare it to a horror film. Did it change a lot as you were kind of conceptualizing it and even trying to raise money for it? Definitely. It changed up until the end. I think the hardest

thing was finding the right tone because I wanted to keep the audience engaged. But I was like, staying in one house for one day, like everyone's going to just want to get out of there and do something else and do something different. So I think at first it was very slapstick, very like death at a funeral, because I was like, it just has to be filled with all this crazy characters and all these crazy events and all this shit happening one day. And then I was like, this is so not grounded. And this sort of lacks what the short film had of like this undercurrent of this woman's anxiety eating away at her and sort of realizing that she doesn't have power. She doesn't have any control in her life. Um, and so then I just started watching, um, movies that take place in one day in one location or just one day in general

or three days, one location just to see how they did it. And most of them were pretty anxious. Um, and so I think I just started narrowing in on like, what, you know, what is happening for her and what's making her anxious. Um, so we got really good advice from one of the, our former bosses, uh, that, you know, this has to be a coming of age story in a day, because if we're watching this day, why is it so important? It has to change her for the rest of her life. It has to, she has to be a completely different person after this day. So I watched Crescia and then from watching Crescia, I watched woman under an influence, under the influence. And then I was like, okay, I want to go for this realism, claustrophobic,

Cass Betty's vibe. So I started watching more of his movies. And then from there, it reminded me of like Black Swan, rewatch Black Swan. And then I sort of went down the line of anxiety inducing sort of thrillery movies. There were other things that were anxious. There's parts of The Graduate that are pretty anxious. And there were parts of like Rachel Getting Married and August Osage County, these sort of like tense family dramas. Um, so, but I didn't really think of it as a horror movie. I just was like anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. And then, you know, we filmed it in the summer of 2019 and then Uncut Gems came out in December. And I was like, here, this is anxiety at its finest, you know, keeping you on the edge of your seat. Um, and I, I just feel like I got, I just kept saying anxiety and everyone was like,

okay. And then it was only my composer that was like, so horror. And I was like, Oh, I don't know. And then as I was telling her what I wanted, like screeches and plucks, she was like, that's a horror score. I sort of realized that the mechanisms of making an audience feel anxious is just what a horror movie is, which is often, you know, why first time films are horror films, because it's a great way to keep an audience engaged while making a film for a very low budget. And when I think of like Ari Aster or, you know, Day Beggars, Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch, Robert Eggers, are all these A24 first time features like, you know, they're scary. And so that's sort of where it came from. It just was practical.

I was like, we have to stay in the house and feel like we need to we want to stay there and we don't want to leave. So that's where it came in, that sort of anxiety thing. But I think I always knew it was going to be funny. I was like, how do we stand out from these, these quirky romantic comedies, these like Jewish, like, uh, fun romantic comedies, like Obvious Child and Kissing Jessica Stein and stuff like that. I was like, this will be compared to those movies, which I love and would be honored by. But I was like, I just want to stand out because it's already been done. They sort of put a stamp on that territory and I want to do something different. Yeah. I mean, you just named a whole bunch of films that I love and some of which I could

totally recognize in your movie. And it does feel like there is a little bit of a... I don't want to put too fine of a point on this, but a little bit of a generational wave, you know, your film was supposed to premiere, I think alongside shit house, which is also a similar kind of like, I'm young, anxious, not totally sure who I am as a person yet trying to make my way through that. Obviously the Safdies movie is all about that, the nature of anxiety and the way that it kind of encroaches upon you and also make like drives you drives you. Do you feel like you are part of a generation? This is something that I used to watch journalists ask my favorite filmmakers in the 90s,

and now I'm a person asking you that. But do you feel like there is a kind of generational cohort of filmmakers in their 20s who are particularly interested in a certain kind of work? Yeah, I think there's always, I think there's always, you know, there's always a generation of new filmmakers sort of finding a different way

to tell stories. I'm honored to think that I'm part of a generation of filmmakers, particularly you naming the Safdies, but also Cooper Rafe and, you know,

other folks, you know, who we were supposed to play alongside. And there were so many filmmakers at TIFF this year that I was so impressed by um and felt honored to sort of be playing amongst um yeah I think I think the thing that I see more in my generation of filmmakers is um different perspectives of of characters I mean you just named two white men, two straight white men,

which I enjoy their movies. I'm like, you know, the Safdies are everything to me. But I think of like Chloe Zhao and Emerald Fennell and all of these women and people of color and queer people who are finally getting their voices heard. And it feels really, really cool to be a part of that kind of generation. I feel like looking back in time, we'll remember this moment where, you know, two women were finally nominated in the same category for best director and two Asian Americans were nominated in the same category, et cetera. I think that's what I think of more. I don't think the stories are necessarily changing as much. I do think, you know, looking at the Safdies and this sort of like 824 sort of model of anxiety or horror, I think that's a moment of time and a generation of filmmakers that I feel a part of, which is really cool. I think that that's sort of because it's

cheap. I think we're part of this like sort of wave of like, how do we make movies for a lower budget that stand out, you know, um, that are, are, are story driven, character driven and smart. Um, but you know, are innovative, you know, that, that haven't been done before in different ways. So I do feel like that sort of model that A24 sort of set, um, uh, is, is sort of the state. I think, I think different.

And I feel, I feel like I, you know, am inspired by different and I feel like I am inspired by those filmmakers and feel like I'm part of the train, sure. Over the last 10 years, a lot of filmmakers who have been in your position have had basically a festival hit that has gotten really positive

reviews, have been shotgunned pretty quickly into the studio system or the IP system or whatever you want to call it. For you personally, what are your aspirations as a filmmaker? Do you want to take a big studio job quickly? What do you think you'll do? I have my own stories that I want to keep telling, but it's been really fun this year in COVID, especially to be, you know, looking at other people's material and other people's stories and see if I can lend my perspective to them. I think, I think like five years ago, I would have said, no, I just want to tell indies. I just want to like tell female driven independent stories. But I think that's something that unfortunately has been taught to

female directors or maybe just even independent directors in general that we have to stay in our lane and I think I heard something like uh you know that two years ago at Sundance or something they asked female directors like how many of you would want to direct a Marvel movie and only like two of them raised their hand and I think now that I even understand that that's a possibility I'm like well of course I want to make like a big studio movie. Like that'd be so much fun. So I want to do everything. I'd like to tell films in all kinds of genres. I think that, uh, I think female directors have sort of succeeded well in the dramedy space for a long time. And I would love to be able to do like a Western or like a true genre film, just genre, et cetera.

So to answer your question, it's really sort of like I want to do everything and anything that comes my way. And I'm more interested in bigger stories and challenging myself to be more ambitious. Do you have a next thing? Yeah. Rachel Sennett, who plays um in shiva baby she's a fantastic writer and comedian on top of being a wonderful actor um and producer and her and i started writing a feature script right after we wrapped this short four years ago and that is a much broader fun campy comedy it's called bottoms. And it's about these two unpopular, like queer girls who start an underground fight club at their high school to try to win over the

cheerleaders from the football players. So it's sort of like a wet hot American summer style, sex, teen sex comedy, but from the perspective of like bisexual and lesbian teenage girls. So yeah, that's the next thing. So that's sort of the, I feel like he's very different from Shiva Baby. It's not a horror movie at all. It's not Jewish. And it's inspired by, you know,

both of our loves of teen sex comedies growing up. So yeah. That sounds rad. Emma, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen. What have you been watching in quarantine? Well,

I feel like so basic because I really don't, I, I've been watching, uh, the Sopranos and I'm almost done. Um, so, you know,

yeah, it's been incredible, but I, it's funny. You're like, what's something you can recommend? And I'm like this show that I don't know if anyone's been incredible, but it's funny. You're like, what's something you can recommend? And I'm like, this show that I don't know if anyone's heard of,

it's sort of the greatest show ever made and sort of changed the game for television. But it stands the test of time and it's been fantastic to watch. I feel like a lot of people have attacked those bigger shows. I did all of Breaking Bad, so I feel really proud of myself. I'm almost done Sopranos. And then after this, it'll be The Wire. So you wish me luck. You're in for an amazing time. I mean, I wish I could go back to the first time for all those

shows. That's what everyone says to me. They're like, oh, so jealous. Yeah, got to say it rocks. So if anyone hasn't done it, quarantine's almost over in the states so i mean not almost over i don't know i don't want to knock on wood whatever but um you know you got to get those shows in there before we're all out there in the world uh emma thanks so much for doing this and congrats on shiva baby of. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to Emma Seligman, Adam Naiman, The Empty Man, and Bobby Wagner, of course. Please stay tuned to The Big Picture. Next week, we will be doing something a little new. We're going to be completely redoing a famous Academy Awards ceremony, the 2011 Oscars. Amanda and I will be fixing the problems of that ceremony. See you then.