The Big Picture - Top Five Movie Robots, ‘Finch,’ and the Awful Truth About Hollywood

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

A new Tom Hanks movie, ‘Finch,’ just hit Apple TV+; it's about a man and his robot pal enduring a post-apocalyptic terrain. Sean is joined by 'Gene and Roger' host and writer Brian Raftery to break down the movie and share their favorite movie robots (1:00). Then, writer-director-producer Jim Cummings stops by to talk about his new film, ‘The Beta Test,’ and the uncomfortable truths about a career in Hollywood (49:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Brian Raftery and Jim Cummings Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about robots. Later in today's episode, I'll be joined by writer, director, producer, and all-around indie film wonderkid Jim Cummings. I profiled Jim back in 2018, ahead of the release of his film Thunder Road. Three years later, I wanted to check in with where his career has gone and why his new film, The Beta Test, reflects some of his experiences in Hollywood. Jim is a really fun guy to talk to. I hope you'll stick around for our chat. But first, robots. A new Tom Hanks movie hit Apple TV Plus this weekend. It's called Finch. It features Hanks and a robot pal named Jeff to discuss this new movie. And what robots mean to my movies is my favorite Terminator, a journalist and the host of our Gene and Roger podcast on the

Big Picture. My pal, Brian Raftery. Hi, Brian. Hey, Sean. How you doing, man? I'm good. Welcome back to the show. Very good to see you. Thanks. Let's begin with robots quickly. I don't know why I thought of you, but I just thought, who's a person who's probably seen more robot movies than I have? And you struck me. Is that a fair assessment? Are you a robots guy? I mean, sci-fi was kind of the first genre I gravitated to when I was watching movies. So I've seen a lot of robot movies. I've also seen a lot of incredibly terrible bad robot movies because I was obsessed with Star Wars ripoffs. So and that made that might play a factor in my list later on. But yeah, if there's basically I still to this day, if there's like a terrible Star Wars ripoff on Amazon Prime, I'm like, oh, what is this?

Richard Keel, a robot directed by Robert Corman. I'll watch it. Why not? So let's talk about a current active robot. Finch is the movie. The robot is actually named Jeff. This is a movie about, I guess, a loner engineer, somebody who has survived an apocalypse. Hanks plays this engineer figure who's building a robot

not for himself but to take care of his dog when he passes on we learn early on in the film that he is suffering from some sort of illness interesting movie directed by miguel sapochnik who is probably best known for some of the more high tension high action episodes of game of thrones uh what did you what did you think of finch you know i really enjoyed it um it's funny i watched it with my daughters who are at this age now where these kind of movies are new to them, both post-apocalyptic movies, which will soon be their pre-apocalyptic life, I guess. But also, this sort of journey going on the road movies is kind of new for them. And my daughters, for reasons I don't entirely understand, they absolutely love Tom Hanks. I think they've seen two movies

and three Oscars he's appeared on. So it's kind of like, but I think that watching it with them, you know, the story beats itself kind of didn't really surprise me as they played out, but it was kind of delightful to watch them picking up on it.

And I did really enjoy, I mean, I love Hanks at this point in his career and I thought the robot was very cool and I definitely felt like, you know, I don't know this is a spoiler, but at one point the robot puts on like a really kind of dope parka and I was like this is the coolest like why don't robots wear more cool jackets in movies like he really looked pretty cool um he was a styling robot he was styling that was a really cool like I literally was like do I have a parka that hangs off my head that well like it's really really sharp um so I

definitely enjoyed it I mean I I again I've seen some of these story beats before there weren't a lot of surprises in it for me but um you know hanks is great like i said at this point and yeah jeff i dug jeff the robot and i dug kind of how he evolved over the course of the movie even though again i kind of was able to figure out where it was going but it was it was a fun ride yeah a lot of people have compared it already to cast away because he's more or less acting against no other people. The robot is voiced by Caleb Landry Jones, and so he has some interplay there, but it's him and the robot and the dog. And that's really it. There's one brief flashback sequence, but this is such a wholly contained kind of a film. It's also very, very gentle as post-apocalyptic movies go. It is sort of predictable, but there's a sweetness

and there's like a carefulness. And I think actually when I saw that Sapochnik was directing it, I was expecting this kind of noisy, bloody kind of post-war movie. And it's not really that. There are a few big set pieces. The fact that the solar flare that has kind of dropped holes in the ozone layer is the cause of the apocalypse that has wiped out most of the population. So there's huge heat throughout this world that he's living in, but also it creates these kind of atmospheric pressures that create tornadoes all over the place. And there's all this kind of weather threat throughout the movie. So there is some high action, but it's mostly a, it's just a very sweet

kind of a movie. And it's a movie that I think is kind of perfect for, you know, my kids and I need something to do on a Friday night. And it's also so strange to me, you know, talking about Hanks, that this is the second film in the last two years that Tom Hanks has starred in that just showed up on Apple TV Plus on a Friday night, which, you know, obviously there's some sort of orchestration happening, I think, with him and his production companies and his management that they feel comfortable putting their films into this space. And when Apple TV Plus first came along, there was this suggestion that a kind of family-friendly entertainment was at the top of their list.

So a movie like Greyhound, for example, or this movie can kind of sit comfortably alongside Ted Lasso. But Hanks in the last, I want to say five, almost 10 years, has taken on what was once an avuncular kind of role in our culture and is now becoming more grandfatherly. And it seems like every movie that he appears in now signals some sort of acknowledgement of the end of an era of civility or decency.

If you look at Greyhound and News of the World last year, and It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Post, Sully, these are really his last six or seven films, and this one too. What do you see in terms of what kind of movies Hanks is making now and kind of where he stands having been, frankly, probably the most successful actor of the 1990s? Yeah, I mean, I think he's probably the most successful movie star of my... I mean, there are movie stars who've been around longer, like Travolta or a couple others,

but he so dominated those peak movie years in which I was learning about movies and reading Premiere magazine and it's such a big part of my life. I think what's interesting is he's kind of, for all that 90s kind of reputation of, oh, he's this Jimmy Stewart, he's really kind of turned into like Henry Fonda. Like he's kind of, I mean, he's not as old as Henry Fonda. He looks great.

I don't know. But I do think he has kind of skipped a couple of years, maybe because this world is kind of feels like we're growing a lot faster. But he definitely kind of feels that he is like the wise kind of voice of reason. And he does have that thing that very few actors have and that he's been lucky to as he kind of ages the movie star is that when he enters a scene there is this kind of authority that he doesn't have to command with dialogue he's just you you kind of trust him and you know him and you and you sort of trust his face in these movies which is like one thing i

find myself now looking at tom hanks it's like he is just for someone who was kind of you know elastic and kind of muggy when he started out in the 80s and doing these big broad comedies he's really a great kind of facial actor he does a whole lot um and i and i i love watching him and i think his movies the last couple years have been hit or miss for me um i love captain phillips as someone who grew up in a newspaper family i love the post like i saw like the post is like a thursday night opening night movie for me any movie with like dramatic shots of people walking through newsrooms is a very big high for me. And I really dug him in this a lot.

But there are also moments where I'm like, this movie is kind of, he's kind of carrying around, carrying along some of the scenes of the movie that weren't quite working just because I love watching Tom Hanks at this point. He was interviewed on the Bill Simmons podcast last week and there was a really interesting point

of that conversation. I'd never really heard him say this before, but he talked about the transition, essentially, from going from punchline to big, and what he learned working with Sally Field about kind of like the interiority and the decisions that you make as an actor. He went from being that elastic and muggy guy

that you described to somebody who is a much more thoughtful actor. On the other hand, I've noticed that in the last five or 10 years, even when he's playing someone who is complex, flawed, maybe even a little bit devious, there's still this sense of care and wonder in all particular i think if if finch character had been played by a different actor let me think who would be like who's a contemporary michael keaton michael keaton is often compared to tom hanks there might have been a little bit more kind of like anger bitterness regret this this character in particular you know it talks about how he's been abandoned by his father and he struggles to connect with

other people and he's lived this lonesome lifestyle that allows for him to kind of build this companion. And there's also this sickness that he's dealing with and this frustration and this lifestyle that he has to endure. And yet you're kind of always in this gentle cradle of moviedom. You know, all of his movies, there's like a softness. Do you feel that? I do definitely. And I think, you know, the movie that I think is probably my favorite performance, which kind of touches on some of these things is Captain Phillips, where he's not playing someone devious. But I think it is one of the first movies where I

really saw his, you know, this kind of strength that he always projects, this kind of stoicism, like just seeing him weaken a bit was really fascinating. And I think, you know, everyone talks about that last scene in Captain Phillips, where he's kind of like in this, you know, he's being surrounded by doctors. And you really, first of all, you're, everyone talks about that last scene in Captain Phillips where he's kind of like in this, you know, he's being surrounded by doctors. And you really, first of all, you're kind of terrified because this is Tom Hanks and he looks like he's about to have a heart attack and it's really hurtful. But I just, he's so good in that scene. And I think sometimes I do want a little bit more shades of Tom Hanks. And I think there's a certain point in this movie where he is giving this flashback scene.

And I thought, oh, is this the scene where this movie's going to take a much darker turn with his character, where there's more that he's running from in his life? And I think maybe that would have made the movie a little more interesting for me. But I'm also watching this with my two young daughters and I'm like, we don't need to see evil. They're not ready for evil Tom Hanks just yet, possibly.

Because I grew up loving certain movie stars and only from seeing their happiest, cheeriest roles. And I'm okay to preserve that with my kids for a little bit. Do you think he could pull off a heel turn? Do you think he's capable of, because he's really never done it as I recall. Am I forgetting a film of his where he pivots and is actually the heavier or something along those lines?

I mean, I think, I mean, parts of Road to Perdition were supposed to, I mean, there were parts of that were kind of sold as like this is he's doing something darker he's doing a darker kind of movie i think that maybe he had done um but i i do think he is someone who would just be a great heel at this point it's i actually was talking about that after with a friend after watching the movie where it's like i do kind of want him to just because i think he has like i said he has this expressive face and audiences have this decades-long relationship with him, that that is when it's a really fun time to kind of turn your audience,

you know, turn yourself into something new for your audience who come with these expectations. Could he have played Frank Mackey in Magnolia? No. Are those kind of roles still being written? But that kind of like, you know, because I'm sure Tom Hanks has a lot of anger in him. He does a lot of interviews saying, look, I'm not the super nice guy everyone thinks I am.

But like, I would love to see that in a movie because I bet it would be terrifying. Yeah, I'll give you a very small example of something I thought of. I saw the movie Licorice Pizza last night. I'm not going to spoil the movie. I'm not going to share anything about it. But the one thing I will say is that Sean Penn pops up in the movie. If you've seen the trailer, you know that. And he plays a lascivious figure in Hollywood.

That's it's not there's not a real person just like just a figure who you're like i don't know if i trust this person i would have i would love to see tom hanks pop up and even if it was just a small role like that and watch him work against type and see if it could work because i mean he's now made it's got to be north of 50 movies at this point i mean i feel like he's done so many projects and he can continues to work he doesn't do he's not he hasn't stepped back. Like George Clooney makes one movie every three years now. Hanks has been in four movies in the last three years and it seems like he's only going to continue to go. So it's really interesting. Very quickly, let me ask you about the Apple TV

thing because I'm constantly on this show trying to figure out like what are people watching? What are they engaging with? What services do they have? New films that are coming out? What should we be discussing? Apple TV still seems to be lagging a little bit behind for many people in terms of subscriptions. And I didn't get a sense that there was a vibrant Finch conversation happening over the weekend. I know I asked you to watch this movie for the purposes of this conversation. But how do you think the actual movie part of the Apple TV Plus experiment is going? Do you think that people are engaging with that stuff? I mean, I feel like, at least in the kind of the social media circles I live in, I do think the Velvet Underground movie has popped. It's a movie that I'm saving to watch my wife at some point this fall,

and I'm very excited for it. It's a great filmmaker. I do remember being kind of really stunned by how few people I knew who were movie fans, maybe not super eager movie fans, but who were, you know, check in on things. How many of them had just no idea what CODA was, no idea that it'd come out on Apple+. And now I'm seeing it sort of in these like Oscar short lists. And I'm like, I really don't know anyone who's seen CODA. And I really hate to say that because I think, you know, it's so hard to get your movie out there. But there is something, you know, in this word of mouth you can't you know put a hundred million dollars in the word of mouth and I think that's what these kind of movies need now

like Ted Lasso was word of mouth they're very different things obviously and for whatever reason Apple just can't no and people just aren't thinking of them as a movie hub yet um I would have watched this no matter what I do like Tom Hanks um but i didn't i didn't watch greyhound because one of the things was like it just didn't look up my alley and i think the word of mouth was just kind of muted or there wasn't a whole lot of it honestly um i think that's kind of a problem they're facing yeah it's really tricky because they're now reaching a place where they've got quite a few good films on their service you mentioned the velvet underground film definitely one of my favorite movies of the year i look forward to hearing what you thought of it um boy state was

one of my favorite movies that came out last year um they had a sofia coppola movie last year yeah wolf walkers was one of the most acclaimed animated movies of 2020 walkers yeah yeah so and you mentioned coda which i don't think i really talked about too much on this show but revisited after sundance and then because i just had a baby daughter i was like well coda is the greatest film ever made so um yeah it's an interesting proposition because obviously they've gotten much more attention for whether it be good or bad for the morning show or for something like Ted Lasso or even Foundation or The Invasion. There's a lot of shows happening on Apple TV+, but the movie aspect seems to be lagging behind a little bit. We'll see if there's

a Finch moment in our culture. I'm not really anticipating it if i'm being honest um let's let's transition to robots uh you mentioned that finch had pretty cool design and a badass parka in in terms of what we'll talk about here i this is a a broad range of robots we're talking droids humanoid artificial intelligence, vacuum cleaners. If it's got a robotic design of any kind, we're including it in our lists here, in our conversation about the robots that we love. But for you, as a science fiction fan, as somebody who's seen this over and over again,

what are you looking for? What are the things that you think make a movie robot appealing and the way that they're used in a story appealing? I mean, some of it is just sheer, like as someone who grew up on star Wars, it is a character design thing where it's like, which of these do I want as a toy? Cause it looks cool. I mean,

that's still, that's still kind of lingers. But I think when I was putting the list together, I looked at the list that I, that I put together and I was like, Oh, these are all characters that either I'd want to hang with or I'd want protecting me.

So it's like, some of them are like, some of them are sidekick robots, which I enjoy to a varying degree. And some of them are just like real kind of brutal, like nightmare fostering robots. And I, you know, there was, as a kid, I was watching a lot, like I said,

a lot of these Star Wars ripoffs and some of them were a little too intense for me. And like they often, some of these movies, they'd make these low budget, cheap, but really terrifying robots. And those, that kind of wound up being a staple of my my of my like love of certain junkie sci-fi um but also robots that you kind of wouldn't mind hanging around with i think it's also something for any character are you someone who fears artificial intelligence in the coming uh android battle of our times

you know i'm i don't think about it too much because at this point it's like i just feel like i'm going to be we're all going to be replaced by something that we haven't even figured out yet like it's like to me it's like it's not gonna be robots it's gonna be but i have always one of my favorite um micro micro genres is technology gone awry like i'm one of the rare people who thinks maximum overdrive is top five stephen king movies ever and i don't think even stephen king who directed that movie or remembers does not remember making it would agree with that but i love love movies like that. I love where technology rises up. It's super fun to me if it's done with a sense of humor. That is one of my favorite

things. And Maxim Overdrive also has a lot of ACDC. There's a lot to recommend to that. I could I could I could hijack this conversation with a Maxim Overdrive talk, but I will not. I have to I have to bank that so that next time i'm having a stephen king episode you can come on and talk about your appreciation for a movie that i think is borderline incoherent but it does have a really good acdc soundtrack yes um yeah i don't i guess i i certainly don't fear amanda and i've talked about this many times on the show i think she is a bit fearful of the uh coming ai takeover i'm not sure that I'm necessarily afraid of it, but I think I like my robots in equal measure. Sweet and hangable

or terrifying and prepared to I guess dominate us? In the parlance of the Terminator, they really have come to crush our skulls. So, let's go to our lists.

I'm going to let you start what is your your number five movie robot and why um i did you know i definitely want to give a shout out to some of the old classic movie robots that i didn't put on my list like gort you know or robbie the robots or the santa claus conquers the martians robots but i was really thinking of like kind of our modern era of real kind of terrifying technological creations and And for me, it's the gunslinger in Westworld played by Yul Brynner, which is a movie I saw when I was really young. It's one of those weird 70s science fiction movies that I think a lot of people think they've seen, but they haven't like Soylent Green.

And when you watch it now, it's super fun. It's super gnarly. It has some remarkable, it has a pretty great death scene in it. But I feel like this is the proto terminator uh kind of robot that we have now for the next couple decades and i think what's amazing is yul brinner plays this you know this gunslinger who you know if you've seen westworld nothing about it the robots go awry and he basically has maybe five lines of dialogue and 25 minutes of screen time and he is just this brutal, deadly hunter, and it's terrifying.

And he also, the other fun thing is that not only is the performance really fun, and it's really fun to watch him chase Richard Benjamin around the desert, which is a very 70s movie term, but you also, there's lots of really fun stuff because Michael Crichton directed this, and you get to see his face being taken off and all the kind of fun gizmos and gadgets,

and I love all that stuff about 70s and 80s sci-fi, the pre-CGI. We had to figure out what this robot might really look like if you ripped it open. So there's a lot to love in that. But mostly, I just think this is what the Terminator was. This was kind of right before, a decade before Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This character was just completely personified, brutal, steely, steel intelligence. What do you make of the Westworld TV series? Do you watch that? I started it. I honestly my... I have a lot. I can also digress about sci-fi on TV nowadays.

I thought that Westworld, the movie, is really fun and ridiculous and joyful and breezy. I did not get that vibe from the movie, or the TV show rather. And they don't have, and you know, unfortunately, Yul Brynner can't be with us.

So I think like, that is a very big performance driven movie for me. Yeah, anytime you're doing a humanoid figure, the casting of the human is such a key part of this because acting like a robot is harder than it looks. You know, we've all seen movies where, you know, humans are acting like robots and they are it seems like a real-time mockery of what that means um my number five i think is a good example just like yule runner um it's bishop

played by lance hendrickson in uh in aliens the alien films are renowned for their brilliant casting and execution of android type figures? Obviously, Ash in the original film and then David in the Prometheus and Alien Covenant films and call even from Alien Resurrection. So there's kind of an android in every single one of these alien movies. Bishop is the one that I find most compelling in part because of what Ash was able to do in home. Ultimately, like one of the more truly evil robots in our movie history. And Bishop is a more sympathetic, more empathetic figure who is critical to saving Ripley and,

and, and saving the small child Newt. And also just like a performance style that is wide eyed, serene, but also the sense that it could it could be menacing like an unsureness about what is happening with the character um inside of this world where we know that there is this incredible biomechanical engineering um i just think it's like one of the more fascinating portrayals and one of the more uh difficult to predict that's the other

thing too is i think sometimes with a movie like with Westworld for example I probably didn't see Westworld until I was 18 or 19 and by then when you hear the word Westworld you're like

okay there's evil robots at a theme park. So you know you see the gunslinger and you're like he is evil. There's nothing with Bishop

when I saw Aliens I was like I don't know which direction this is going to move in. So that's my number five. Do you have a favorite Alien series robot? No, it's Bishop.

And I think also because I love Lance Henriksen, who I think is so often cast as creepy guys, but I think there's actually something to Bishop, which is he kind of seems wounded and hurt sometimes by the fact that Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, does not immediately trust him. And then also, the thing about Bishop that's so funny is he was,

he was killed by the other big screen Finch, David Fincher. I remember how brutal that felt. We were like, wow. Like granted, they also killed a little kid from the movie. I'm like,

man, you killed Bishop. Man, that was cold. Finch, original Finch. It's a great call. That just goes to show the brutalizing nature

of the David Fincher movie going experience. Okay, what's your number four? My number four is, as I said earlier, I'm not a huge fan of comic relief robots. When I was a kid, we used to get HBO free weekends and they would show this movie Heartbeats, which is like this Andy Kaufman robot comedy that really scared me.

And I just, I never found, I always find that like robot comic relief, it just, it stretches too thin for me. I can't get with it. But I have one of my favorite movies is Spaceballs and I love Dot Matrix from Spaceballs, which is played by, it's voiced by Joan Rivers, but then played by an actress named Laureen Yarnell,

who was like a comedian who did a lot of robot stuff. But I love what I love about this character is that, first of all, I love, like I said, I love Joan Rivers. This is one of her, she did not have a fantastic movie career. This is probably along with Muppets Take Manhattan, one of her two best performances. But, you know, she's, her character is basically kind of like the audience surrogate commenting on how ridiculous this all is. Like, I think at one point she just says, Oh, I hate these kinds of movies or something like that. And, um,

I think also like, uh, space balls was so crucial in teaching me that you could love something while also making fun of it. Um, so I think this might be the kind of thing where I have a lot of other robots that I left off my list. And this is just kind of an affectionate,

like, I just always love this movie, love Joan Rivers. And she has just enough kind of like wisecracks that I didn't get at the age of nine or ten but that I really appreciate now to get her out to put her on the list that's really great I um I feel like I've been circling some sort of Mel Brooks episode of this show my dad was in town last weekend and we watched uh young young Frankenstein together uh that on on halloween eve and i probably haven't seen that movie with him since i was 13 years old and it was it was wonderful it was transporting and it

was that exact same thing you were describing it is this is someone making fun of the conventions of a story but also having so much affection and attention to the detail of how those stories are told you know the way both space balls and young Young Frankenstein are shot and paced and framed and everything is just so lovingly recreated, even when it looks a little bit chintzy or is, you know, having a laugh at its expense. Love that pick. My number four is a slightly less wholesome. It's Ava from Ex Machina, one of my favorite movies of the 21st century. Alex Garland's portrait of artificial intelligence gone awry. I think really one of the more kind of, it's kind of the inversion of Bishop, where with Bishop, you're kind of waiting for something terrible to happen.

And then he becomes heroic by the end. And in the case of Alicia Vikander's performance as Ava, you see her connecting throughout the film with Donald Gleeson. And you're sort of hoping for some sort of romantic hand-in-hand finale. And in fact, it reverts to something I think most people fear about creating something as sophisticated as the oscar isaac character creates and um obviously the movie is a like a landmark achievement in terms of design and um the the way that shot so beautifully and so carefully and it's got this sort of like synthetic naturalistic world collision where it's you know i think it's shot in this beautiful home in norway where you've got

this waterfall and surrounded by this beautiful forest but then inside of this stone box you have all of these little creatures that have been adjusted just so just an absolutely extraordinary movie if people have not seen Ex Machina I highly recommend it and I think also Ava is probably as close as we have gotten to seeing sophisticated robot technology AI technology sort of like replicant technology, while also showing us the technology behind it. You know what I mean? Not just showing the person,

as you'll point out in one of your picks coming up, where you're just seeing a human and you have to accept that they are, in fact, a robot. This is both. This is the bolts and the nuts and the grease underneath

and also the elegant skin layered over. So just an incredible movie. Ava, that's my pick. Okay, number three. Number three is probably one that will probably frustrate a lot of people because it is thought of a movie.

It's from a movie that's mostly thought of as very junky, but I also think, and it is junky in a lot of ways, but it's also one of the weirdest science fiction movies ever made, which is The Black Hole, which was when Disney was trying to rip off Star Wars. And this is when Disney was, I don't know who was managing it maybe like a bunch of 15 year olds and i don't know what was going on at disney in the late 70s early 80s

but this is a movie uh the road there's a lot of robots in this movie there's a lot of cutesy r2d2 ripoff robots but there's a robot called max million, which is like this big, hulking, not particularly beautifully designed bad guy. And this is just one of those things that this robot scared the hell out of me as a kid. I mean, Black Hole was the movie you would rent when Star Wars was out or even before Star Wars was in print. That's how kind of old I am. Like, I remember when this is all you could get. This is it. It was like you want sci-fi.

It's a black hole every other weekend. And it's a ridiculous movie. It's got black hole every other weekend um and it's a ridiculous movie it's got a lot of great stuff and it's got a great john barry score it's got robert forster who's great and everything um but it also has this scene where anthony perkins who's giving frankly the most robotic performance of his his career like it's the ultimate like i need an addition to my pool job but there's a scene where this giant hulking robot comes up he's got these blades in front of him and he just like basically disembowels tony anthony perkins character you to my pool job. But there's a scene where this giant hulking robot comes up. He's got these blades in front of him

and he just like basically disembowels Tony Anthony Perkins character. You don't see it, but it is scary as hell. I went to go see this at New Beverly a couple years ago

after Robert Forster died and there was a kid in front of me and I was like, this kid's not ready for it. And the kid really got freaked out by this. It's like,

it's a great dark scary and it just gave me nightmares as a kid. Why did Disney move away from this kind of a film? I feel like it's been a long time since you got something that was like kind of hard PG-13 from Disney. You know what I mean? Yeah, I actually thought, I wondered if like Hanks had pitched Finch to Disney and if there was just enough there for them to make it not a Disney movie. But yeah, I mean, when Disney was messing up and you got these movies like this

or Condor Man, these incredibly goofy kids movies, they're like, who is this for? Like, just these movies, they're just like, who? Was anyone paying attention the last three or four weeks of production? Like, just, I love,

I love like out of control Disney. Yeah, I do too. Okay, my number three is somewhat more in control. It's Robocop 1987, the landmark movie from Paul Verhoeven. This is a pic not so much about RoboCop's personality

or even characterization, but more like what he represents. One, obviously, one of the great kind of character designs in movie history, the iconic helmet and the sort of metallic chrome armor that Peter Weller wears throughout the movie.

But also the idea of a robot being used as a sort of like a tool for war, a tool for messaging. And this movie, it's kind of chilling, this movie, how accurate and kind of ahead of its time and prescient it was. It's a little bit of a cliche to call a science fiction movie prescient, but this is one where it's almost overwhelming, the way that it skewers the news media the way that it skewers sort of like privatized military industrial complex it has so it has such a keen

sense of where our culture is headed and in addition to that at the center of it you have this like really two great robot designs um in addition to robocop himself you know the ed209 which is this sort of like battle combat droid that's just meant to stalk the streets and enforce the law was also designed by phil tippett the incredible creature designer there's actually recently a documentary about tippett that was so so great and his his first directorial film mad god is supposed to come out somewhere in the near future and it was fascinating to watch him and his team kind of talk about the development of the figures and how they built all that stuff and it's all very kind of like um modernist ray harryhausen that's the way that a

lot of the best kind of animation and and um robotics are designed throughout this movie but robocop is also just one of those things where some movies and i think a couple more robots we'll talk about throughout the rest of this episode they get burnished onto your brain and like as I get older and I have a kid now and I see I hear feel information like leaking out of my ears I feel like my recall is weakening I'm getting less sleep I don't know as much I'm like trying to recall the name of somebody from a film but the actual visuals of RoboCop will never escape me. Like seeing ED-209

for the first time, seeing RoboCop and the sort of the way in which he moves and the way in which he sort of like removes the gun from the holster and fires and the interaction

with Nancy Allen. It's one of those things where sometimes everything kind of converges perfectly and you get this movie magic. You know, RoboCop is kind of a movie magic moment. So that is my number three. I assume you this movie magic. RoboCop is kind of a movie magic moment. So that is my number three. I assume you're a fan of RoboCop. Yeah, I mean, I only left it off my list just because I figured you would have it on, frankly. I mean, I love RoboCop. I

love Paul Verhoeven. And you mentioned the design. And one thing that's kind of strikes me about this movie is that I read a lot. I was very heavily into comic books in the late 80s and early 90s. And you saw the Robocop design everywhere across. Just these minor, kind of like Marvel or DC, someone would just throw out this one-off fascist kind of cop-like character. And you're like, this is totally a Robocop. But I'm the same way about this movie. I love it. I watch it every year.

It's one of my all-time favorites. It's one of those rare movies that I had kids describe to me, the violent parts, before I saw it, also with aliens. So like, but that somehow made, you know, there's a scene where a guy is basically melting and gets hit by a car, which is truly just absolutely frazzled the hell out of me when I was a kid.

So it's, and I, Verhoeven's sci-fi movies are my, I mean, that's my favorite kind. We're talking earlier about Westworld, a TV show, and it's like my style of sci-fi movies are my, I mean, that's my favorite kind. We're talking earlier about Westworld, a TV show, and it's like, my style of sci-fi that I love is more Verhoeven than kind of the modern kind of slow, more thoughtful sci-fi. I like it fast with a lot of ideas, but also like Bang Bang Explosion, like big, ridiculous social satire. Sci-fi is my thing, you know?

Yeah, I love that too. Okay, let's go to your number two. What do you got? My number two is roy batty from blade runner um which i think i emailed you the nerdiest email i've sent was like we're talking about robots are we also considering your hybrids your robocops are we also considering biogenered beings like blade runner so i'm glad we have room for all of them in the conversation but you know blade run is a weird movie it's a movie that i've watched a gazillion times i've

never 100 loved it i love i really love all the elements of it, but there's something that just stays with me every time I view it. And I think Rucker Howe are playing this really kind of brutal, physically limber, relentless replicant, which is the Blade Runner term for artificial human. And he has this famous scene at the end, which everyone's watched a million times, where he gives this monologue, I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. And I've watched this monologue since I was a kid. And to me, it always seemed like, you know, when I first watched it, I'd be like, oh, this is just him kind of being like, I live this great robot life.

You can't, now you're going to put it out. But now I honestly, as I get older, I watch it. And I feel like that great speech, which is just, it is the most Ridley Scottish scene in any way. It's beautiful. It's raining. There's amazing synthesizers. Neon lights flashing.

Neon lights everywhere. There's doves, slow motion doves. There's Harrison Ford looking like he's miserable making Blade Runner. But I feel like that speech is more of this robot saying to these humans, you don't appreciate what you have. It took you, your people creating us to kind of, we appreciate what it's like to be human much more than actual humans. And maybe that makes them more human. And that's as deep as I'm going to get with this movie, because there's just also a great scene where he just punches through a wall and grabs Harrison Ford. So, but I love, you know, and Roy Batty is like, you know, is that just the most ridiculous, one of the great sci-fi ridiculous names

where it's like, what should we call this bad guy? Let's call him Batty. It's like, wait, no notes, no notes on that. Why not? You know, do you have a preferred Blade Runner cut? I, I, you know, I, I can't get with the narration. I know people love it. It was the first one I saw, but all I can do is just see Harrison Ford in a recording studio, just sighing angrily in between each take. So I,

I, I think whatever the nineties, early nineties cut was, I, but also like, you know, every time they come back and forth on whether this, whether Harrison Ford's character is a replicant or not to me,

it's like, that's just like the least interesting talking point about this movie. I'd rather talk about how cool the fight scenes are and the flying cars. And I got to sit, I was on a set of Blade Runner 2049 for a wired story. And I got to sit, I was on a set of Blade Runner 2049 for a Wired story and I got to sit in one of the cars and I was like, well, this is my peak. This is like, this is about as cool as you can get

if you watch this movie when you were 15 years old. Do you have, do you want to, you want me to clear out for a five minute disposition on the meaning of the unicorn? Are you interested in it? No, please don't. Yeah, I think that's a six part series we should do. That could be a follow upup to Gene and Roger.

Okay, let's go to my number two, which is the first in my Ben Burtt tribute. It's WALL-E. WALL-E, obviously one of the most acclaimed Pixar films of all time. 2008 Andrew Stanton movie. And a movie that is, you know, on the one hand, a parable about ecology and conservation and the way that we degrade ourselves and um all become fattened and uh don't care for what we

truly have around us on the other hand just a really sweet and endearing portrait of loneliness and uh the pursuit of love wally just a absolutely beautiful movie. Obviously, I'm sure many people who are listening to this have seen it and heard it. They mentioned Ben Burtt because Ben Burtt is the voice of WALL-E, among other things. Does Ben Burtt also do Eva? I'm not sure. But he is world-renowned for his work as a sound designer on Star Wars and on the Indiana Jones films and E.T. And he is kind of one of the signature sonic cues of our pop culture lifestyle. And this is just a delightful film and a film that is sort of like more careful than most children's entertainment. You know, it is a little bit slower. It is a little bit obviously it's well known to be almost like a silent feature for the first hour or so before it kind of rips open and it's fascinating to me that it took off

in the way that it did i think before it was released it was considered something of a risk and now it is widely understood as one of the best of its kind but um what do your do your kids have a relationship to wally do they like the pixar movies they do like some of the pixar movies they're much more in the toy story stuff um I think we watched WALL-E when they were maybe, when my older daughter was just too young to kind of get into it or really kind of understand the nuances of it. But I love the movie. I saw it in the theater and remember watching with almost all exclusively adults,

all of whom were trying not to pretend how moved they were by it. I know you were a big Pixar fan. I go back and forth on a lot of Pixar stuff, but this one is, I think, one of their best movies. And I think it hits the tone that they sometimes struggle with for me of heartfelt and meaningful and trying to say something. But it's also like, it's a beautifully designed little,

it's like, I don't like cute little robots, but this one is like, how could you not really? It's such a cute little robot. And it's like, it's so much of its character is in the character design which is really great and obviously i love ben burt i'm someone who watched like behind the scenes specials of him like banging on cable wires to make lightsaber sounds so um the audio in this movie is really wonderful uh his his design uh wally's design is a bit reminiscent of of johnny five from short short circuit yeah i just i need to acknowledge that i don't know if johnny five is going to come up

again in this conversation but i'm sure you like me probably spent more time watching short circuit than i really needed to but it was just on tv all of the time um okay so let's go to our number ones obviously we share a number one there is there is really only one droid maybe two droids that matter in this conversation uh who what's your number one uh oh my number one is r2d2 um from the star wars movie ever heard of them ever him um and you know i think the thing is like i was really trying to think like why that jumped to mind and to me it's like to me r2d2 is kind of like not only is the character design so cool because it's the simplest character design and yet no one's ever been able to rip it off in

an accurate way like it's really just like an upside down garbage can kind of thing and it just changed the way robots were made for movies they every every movie like the black hole had these kind of r2d2 kind of ripoffs they're still trying to make r2d2 ripoffs but to me it's like at least in that original trilogy, I always thought R2-D2 was like the most chill character in all of Star Wars. I mean, when I was younger, my two obsessions were, and I hope you're ready for a truly awful sports analogy, but my two favorite things when I was a kid

were Star Wars and the Phillies. And to me, it's like R2-D2 is like the Mike Schmidt. It's like super reliable, super dependable, comes through in a clutch, and is just like surrounded by these like lunatics and gangsters and self-appointed messiahs

that were the 1980s Phillies. We could talk a lot about who Pete Rose was in this particular scenario, but I always just, you know, in the original Star Wars movies, it's like he gets the greatest scenes.

He gets the, you know, he gives, you know, my favorite Star Wars memory of my whole life was when my parents took me out of school to see Return of the Jedi on opening day, and they didn't tell us what we were doing, and watching that scene where, like,

Luke's about to, like, be thrown into the Sarlacc pit, which is the most bottom of the ninth moment of all the Star Wars movies, and R2-D2's like, I got you. I got your lightsaber right here. It's like, you know, I think it's a great character. It's a great design. It's also just, like like a great i think i think r2d2 is really underrated uh r2d2 is also my number one i guess r2d2 and c3po is a kind of package deal i feel

like they're inextricable from each other in many ways as a sort of like abbott and costello martin and lewis like part of what's so genius about that and i guess a lot of the riffing from those two characters from um the hidden fortress the curacao movie which was a big inspiration for those two figures but um it there is something about the contrast between the way the two of them look together you know the gold humanoid style of c-3po and that upside down garbage can you talked about with r2d2 comic relief in these movies but not like cringy comic relief there's a kind of sweetness to those characters that is really great and i think also the the that pairing basically like invents a new style of movie robot like there's kind of like there's before and there's after r2d2 and c3po you know like you can see everything kind of riffing on it either for better or for worse either ripping it

off or trying to go way in the opposite direction it does feel like in some ways the alien the film is like a rejection of the kind of like fantasy science fiction of star wars and so it is um it's sort of a turning point um do you have any are you fond of any of the other star wars droids do you have any relationship to them uh i mean i would love to have a relationship with ig88 he seems like a cool dude um no i loved all you know i gotta say i'm not as big on c3po only because that test of like would you want to hang out with this robot and i feel like after an hour it's like tough hang you'd want to power him down he's a bit much he's a lot he's a lot um but uh yeah i loved i mean especially like and you know when you had like those early characters the first movies where they would just have a random droid come on screen, never really

tell you what their name was. You had to like look up the toys to figure out who they were. And that was that whole great thing about early Star Wars where it's like you just had to make, you just had to fill in all the blanks in your imagination as to who these characters were. And yeah, I mean, you know, the Jawa scene in Star Wars, they get sucked up on those robots. It's super fun.

And it's just all, they're all ridiculously, a lot of them are really junky looking on purpose. And that's part of the fun of it. Yeah, I love that worn quality. That was also something that I think that that movie does really well of showing that, you know, R2, he's been through a lot. You know, he's been through the desert.

He's not, he's nicked up. And there was something clever about that too. Let's do some quick honorable mentions. I want to mention, I want to ask you about one movie that I saw early, early in quarantine that I'd never seen before um the criterion collection put together this or the criterion channel i should say put together this great 70s science fiction films package i guess back last spring in 2020 and then really one of the only films i had never seen on there was a movie called demon seed from 1977 starring julie christie have you seen this movie

i saw it when i was way too young and i think it was like one of those things that popped up on cable where I was like, I should not be watching this right now. Yeah. This is a deeply disturbing movie directed by Donald Camel. It's based on a Dean Kuntz novel. And it is about an extremely advanced AI program. And this program is seeking essentially to recreate with human form with a human female the movie stars julie christie the great julie christie in the in the heyday of her 1970s fame and she chooses to make this very strange science fiction movie that is violent that is riven with

cons the concept of rape um but the design of the the creature the artificial intelligence is sort of mind-blowing. And it's transformative and transforming throughout the movie and ever-evolving and changing its shape and the way that it communicates. Crazy, mind-blowing movie. I mean, a movie that, I guess, in the parlance of the rewatchables, hasn't aged well in some respects but also is uh such an interesting time capsule of the relationships that like male filmmakers had and with their female characters the way that dean coons writes these kind of twisted stories um super interesting movie and a movie that like looks way better than it should for having been made the same year as star wars and that upside down garbage can rd

r2d2 um you know i had dot matrix here as well i meant i tars from interstellar strikes me as like an innovation in movie robots when i saw that for the first time i was like whoa i've never actually seen anything that looks or moves or sounds quite like this are there any others that you really like um you know i i always thought the iron giant was just a beautifully designed creature and it's a great movie um you know it came out in this year 1999 which i feel like might be an interesting year about movies look back on um why don't you pitch your book brian so you know i wrote a book about the movies 1999 i did i did interview brad bird about

the movie but i think it's one of those movies that um i did not appreciate when it came out because i was like i'm not watching that cartoon at this point in my life but i've really grown to love it and i i also just's, of all the robots introduced in the last 20, 25 years, it's the most, you know, it's in Ready Player One. It's easily recognizable. It's beautifully designed. I love the movie Chopping Mall.

Yes, I'm so glad you brought this up. I love those little dastardly little robots in it. I mean, they're so cool. And I, again, it's part of my like technology gone awry sort of micro genre that I love so much. And I love, there's also like a really weird movie from the early nineties called Eve of Destruction, which I actually had a college professor show me for some reason, which is about a woman who creates basically her doppelganger robot. Gregory Hines movie after Running Scared, after his Billy Crystal and him go to the Bahamas and wear Bahama shorts movie. But I also, I mean, you know, we didn't have the Terminator on our list.

I know. And I think because, just because I had Yul Bryn and Westworld, but I rewatched you know, there was that great Ringer oral history on Terminator 2 and I wound up rewatching both movies that weekend. I just got so excited. And it's like, it's such, it is great Arnold performances but it's like the design

and just what they do with him in that movie with such budget limitations in the first one and with such like budget indulgences in the second one are really fun. I almost thought it was too obvious to put him on there. Now I'm wondering if it wasn't obvious enough. Yeah, maybe we can regret it. I think

by citing Bishop I was acknowledging cameron you know like there was that there was something there but also it's tough to pick between the t800 and the t1000 you know they're both so different and so great um the only other one is i saw for the first time this halloween season uh deadly friend which was one of one of the few west craven movies i had never had a chance to see before i think they just aired it on TCM, so I checked it out. And this is a film starring Christy Swanson, who's much more controversial these days, but not back in this time.

And it's about a young boy who develops a kind of robot friend and that robot friend starts to lose control in a way. And Samantha, played by Christy Swanson, is victimized and she is resuscitated, resurrected, revived in a kind of Bride of Frankenstein style. And she is a kind of half-human, half-robot figure who also goes on kind of a spree.

Not a good movie in the objective terms of good. In fact, it might be Wes Craven's worst movie. But it's really funny and strange and kind of fascinating. So I thought I would give it a shout. Have you seen Deadly Friend? I haven't in a long time. It's actually on my, because it was on TCM, as you said, I actually T-voted or DVR'd it, whatever term I use. But it is, well, I do think Vampire in Brooklyn is probably Wes Craven's movie. Oh, you're right. So we could definitely. Touche. But I do, I love Wes Craven. I think there are movies where I think he was too much of a, a gentleman to call things paycheck movies or,

but this always felt like his paycheck movies were kind of weirder and nastier than his, the ones he really wanted to do. And this definitely falls in that category. And I think it's, it's a pretty famous death scene. If I remember, that's been a meme slash basketball.

That's yeah. Yes. One of the first gifts I think really started popping on the, on the proto dark web in the early aughts, late nineties. Um, yeah, but it's,

it's, it's a really fun, you know, that eighties, eighties sci-fi horror is a really rich, ridiculous, um, genre.

And I still find stuff that I love in it. So I'm glad people can rediscover deadly friend. That's great. Perhaps you and I can do an eighties sci-fi horror episode in the near future. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Anything you want to plug? Anything to look forward to?

No, I mean, I think my awkward plug of my 1999 book was just so smooth. It's such a great segue. But, you know, Gene and Roger are still up. I'm still hearing people about that, which is great. But other than that, I mean, I'm just trying to build my robot for the forthcoming Solar Flare. The most important thing, the only thing I can do is buy it a good parka.

I can't build anything else for it. Best of luck in your shopping and robot building. Appreciate your time, Brian. Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Jim Cummings. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. What a delight to have Jim Cummings on the show. Jim,

thanks for doing it. Thank you for having me. Jim, last time we spoke, it was 2018. You were about to release Thunder Road, an independently financed film from an award-winning short. So tell me every single thing that has happened to you since then. Wow. Let's see. There's been a global pandemic. I made a studio film called The Wolf of Snow Hollow with Robert Forrester, who plays my dad. And I got trusted to make this movie that was 10 times the size of Thunder Road, which is insane. I was 31. I shouldn't have been trusted to do that. But the movie turned out really well and I'm very proud of it. And then we immediately raced into doing a crowd equity campaign to finance this film, The Beta Test, for, again, a tenth of the budget of the big studio film. And I had 16 months to edit the film, which is insane. You never have that much time to finish a film. It's screened at Berlinale and Tribeca and Deauville and a thousand other incredible festivals. It has been all over the world and very well received and people are laughing, which is good in the crowd. And I've kind of created a studio out of my garage on accident.

It's very lonely. It's just me doing all of the, all of the mouse clicks and keyboard hits. But we were able to completely finish the film. I had final cut. PJ would come over and get tested and spend a week with me and we would do everything on our own using exclusively Adobe creative cloud software. You can download and yeah, it feels like we were spreading the rumor that you could create a studio on your own when we were doing Thunder Road last time we spoke. And now we've been making that rumor true for the last three or four years,

and it's been working out for us. I'm curious about that kind of immediate after shock of Thunder Road coming out. I profiled you and the folks that you work with to make that film and I was fascinated by the idea of independent cinema. You guys were really sticking to a clear vision of independent cinema in 2018. Did you get a lot of calls from agents, studios, Hollywood at large saying, we want you to be a part of this? Or was this just like you were charting a course independently now forevermore? Yeah, I mean, not really. I wish I could say yes. But when you start to establish yourself with your team as the competition and not the subordinate, it's very lonely. Nobody reaches out. But then that's not been true for the client list. So like, although Hollywood hasn't really

knocked on our doors, a lot of people like celebrities have reached out and congratulated us and become very close friends and confidants and just fellow travelers. So I think really, although the system doesn't necessarily support the way that independent filmmakers are making movies in America, a lot of people who like feeling something when they watch a movie did reach out and say hi. And audiences like it. So yeah, we try not to stay focused on the system and Hollywood and instead just focus on the summer camp that we run a couple times a year and make movies. You had such a clear plan in 18. I'm curious if anything didn't go according to planner that made you kind of pivot at all for Wolf of Snow Hollow or now for the beta test. Well, the Wolf of Snow Hollow was a difficult one

because we expanded the production team tenfold. So the nature of getting tax credits in another state for a large enough film as the Wolf of Snow Hollow had to be meant that at any given time, there was 50 or 60 people on set, and I wasn't allowed to touch the camera. And it was like taking an aircraft carrier to the grocery store. It took forever to do anything, especially in the snow. I mean, it was very stupid to write a movie that has nighttime exteriors in freezing temperatures. The whole

joke on set was the next werewolf movie that you make has to be on a beach, which I thought was very clever. So yeah, it was very difficult. It's difficult to make a movie at that point, not just a great movie. And so there were a lot of lessons to be learned, most of them in diplomacy and not in cinema. So a lot of it was trying to make sure that everybody was happy and content and not getting frostbite and not hating the 31-year-old that's making this movie and bullying them into staying up all night in the freezing cold temperatures. And then with the beta test, I had complete freedom. We went back to a team of six people in camera and sound. And it was working at my tempo. It was like racing through these things to get the schedule to be what it had to be. We shot it in 18 days, 17 days, something like that. And it was a sprint, but we'd already made the movie in podcast form.

And so every member of cast and crew could hear it. And then they were able to elevate it in each department and in each character. And so it felt like we were all speaking the same language and flowing much quicker and better because it was a smaller team. Given how quickly you made this movie, it's amazing how good it looks. It does not look like an 18-day shoot. Dude, I cannot take credit for that one. Yeah, the movie costs $250,000 and it looks like it's a $4 million movie or something. That is entirely Ken Wales, our cinematographer. This is his first feature making a movie as a cinematographer,

but he's been working as a DP for years and as a gaffer for years and has shot smaller stuff for us at Vanishing Angle for too long. And then for this one, I was like, I think he's the right guy. He had done pickup shoots for the Wolf of Snow Hollow and he was just my best friend. He was just like, it was like, I think I love this right guy. He had done pickup shoots for The Wolf of Snow Hollow. And he was just my best friend.

He was just like, I think I love this guy. I think he's going to do everything for us in the future. And now I'm just going to kidnap him. Now I'm just going to have him do all of my movies. And he was like, after doing the beta test and seeing how much work I put into the edit, he was like, I know what we shot. I know that these are the best takes that you got. It's so difficult to do that.

He said, even if Marvel calls and tries to book me and you're doing another movie, let me know because I'll do your film. He's amazing. Wow. So the beta test is interesting because it feels like a reaction to a world that you've been living right outside of for the last five, 10 years. It's very much a movie about Hollywood. It's very much a movie about masculinity in America in 2020 and 2021. Where did this movie come from? How did you, where did this idea come from? Tell me about it. Yeah. So the movie's about a Hollywood packaging agent who gets a letter in the mail that sends him to a hotel room where he's supposed to have an anonymous sexual encounter with an admirer. And he goes, and it's wonderful. And then he never gets another letter. And all of that is compounded by the stress of the shifting

landscapes of Hollywood and how the internet is replacing him as somebody who has relied, as an industry that has relied on connecting people, being their power. Now the internet is replacing, Instagram is replacing that. And so he's very stressed and has this kind of personal, you know, midlife crisis meltdown throughout the film. And it's very fun to watch, but it is based on a lot of the frustrations of lying and cheating that we've had to deal with in the film industry. Everybody has to deal with in the film industry for the last 30 years. And it is changing post Harvey. There are no jerks allowed or the jerks have to pretend to not be as much, which is also equally funny to watch somebody trying to pretend to not be who they are. I guess that's kind of every movie that I've made is that someone trying to pretend.

So yeah, I don't know. It was built up on a lot of the frustrations that we had of friends of ours being screwed in the film industry. And then I reached out on Twitter when I was researching the movie to say, if anybody is in the agency world during the WGA packaging fight, please let me know. I'd love to know. We're doing some research and stuff. And I had a bunch of people reach out and give us testimony, 11 people at the end of the day. And they were all really dying to talk about it, where so much of their life is this culture of silence. They're not allowed to talk about, they're not even able to describe what it's like to work there. They have all these NDAs and stuff.

And it was finally a dishing therapy for them to say, you know, my two bosses work in the same office. They share an office. They're 45. They make 40 grand a year apiece, and they live in an apartment together. And they, you know, rent a Tesla to try and seem very cool. But they watched Entourage at the fraternity in college, and their parents have money. And I can't say any of that stuff to anybody. It's really a toxic, scary work environment for women, particularly because of this corporate doublespeak and testosterone-driven workforce. But everybody was down to make fun of it and they let us. It's kind of a perfect universe for the Jim Cummings leading man, this sort of fragile, manic, trying to pretend everything is okay guy.

Now, I've now seen you do this in a few films, and I even saw you do a little bit of it in Halloween Kills, which I want to ask you about. But you're formulating an on-screen persona, and I'm curious about that. Is that something you're hyper-conscious of? Is that something you want to be doing as an actor? Definitely not. I've kind of bullied myself and my team has bullied me into continuing to play these guys on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And it's exhausting to have to live in uncut gems for four years, however long I've been doing this. But no, I think in the future, the two new films that we've written, none of us are acting in. It's all for other characters. So we have to bully someone else into, into doing it. But no,

I think really you're right. This film, particularly twofold, not just because it's about this industry that's changing and people pretending to be something they're not and watching someone flail for comedic purposes, which we were seeing in the Hollywood reporter every day, there were news articles coming out about agents doing insane stuff.

It seemed, but also I am the ultimate independent filmmaker. So it felt like I was the right person to make fun of this stuff. And when we got a little bit of a clout and people were taking it seriously from an audience perspective, we realized, oh, we should be the people who are going to talk about this stuff because nobody else is. What about your career as an actor? Obviously, you've put yourself in the center of a few of these movies. Seeing you in Halloween Kills got my wheels turning. I'm like, what do you want more? What are you most interested in

right now? Yeah, I'd love to do it. Nobody knocks on my door. In fact, like David Gordon Green, who directed Halloween Kills is a pen pal for many years. And he had seen the Thunder Road short film because Danny McBride had sent it to him was like, this is ridiculous. And he's just another Southern filmmaker who I've looked up to for years. I saw his film, all the real girls when I was in high school. And that was a real wake up for me that other Southern kids can make movies and be taken seriously. And now he's just a friend.

And I feel like I've made it. It's, it's, it's unbelievable. He's one of the nicest people I know and is a big champion of mine, but he called me cause he saw Thunder Road again on an airplane. And I was like, Hey, you want to come to Wilmington? I think you could do a good job in this part in this movie. And so I did it because David called, he called my cell phone and I was like, of course I'll do it. And we went out and did the thing and I'm happy. I thought that was a lot of fun and I'm decent in the, in the role. I was nervous. I was going to ruin the whole movie. But yeah, it's fun. It's weird to hear you say your career as an actor. I'm not a trained actor.

And so I feel very inadequate in that space. I know I really commit to doing the thing and making sure that I don't ruin the movie. And I want to work hard for other people who I love. But David was the first to say, yeah, I want to work with you. And then Nick Cage is the other one. Nick Cage became a pen pal when he saw Thunder Road. And we're trying to find something to overlap on, but it's rare. It's few and far between.

I need the Nick Cage, Jim Cummings movie. That's a home run. We tried to do it, man. We tried to make a Western about six months ago, and then it didn't pan out. But I would have killed to do that. There's like a bad guy. And I was like, oh, i could do the kind of michael keaton bad guy kind of funny bad guy and the director wasn't having it nobody was having it this was like all right well we'll find something to work on that's funny um so as far as you know pivoting back to independently

financed film like this is that do you think that's the course you're planning to stay at this point like do you want to make 50 movies this way uh i think so i'd like there's a picture of alfred hitchcock standing next to all of his scripts um and it's like a giant stack he made like 100 films and i think i think if you know i'll probably i want to do that at some point i want to have a collection of films i can look back on and be very proud of um but with with crowd equity making movies this way, I think it's the only way to do it. Like, otherwise, I'd only make six movies, I'd only make five movies, it takes so long to go through the conventional studio system and Hollywood system, that you kind of have to do one for you and one for them. And if you can be doing this one for you, this crowd equity,

Kickstarter, WeFunder style films, it usually takes forever to get the other one going. So you can do these ones on the side. We were doing pitches for a TV show about astronauts coming back to the suburbs, and we've been doing it for five years. And I've been able to make arguably four feature films of my own during that time that has only made us better candidates to do this TV show because it just takes so long to be greenlit. Well, I remember when we talked, and we're talking three years ago now, and so you were telling me about that show

that you were pitching, but you also said you had a werewolf movie, and I was like, what the hell are you talking about? I had just seen Thunder Road, and I was like, how is this guy going to make a werewolf movie? 18 months later, you had a werewolf movie, so it seems like you can make it happen for yourself. Even high-tone genre, if you can raise enough money, you can make it work for yourself. Even like high tone genre,

if you can raise enough money, you can make it work, right? Anybody can, even if you don't have the money. So like Trey Schultz, one of my favorite people on the planet, made Cretia, it was a movie he made for $35,000 in his mom's backyard starring his family.

And it shot on red. It doesn't feel like a mumblecore movie. It feels like a Terrence Malick, P.T. Anderson movie that he acts in about alcoholism and drug abuse and how it affects families during Thanksgiving. And it's something that they made for almost nothing. And it was based on a short film, they expanded into a feature, same kind of thing. It's very doable. And that feels much more like the future of independent film, truly independent film, where you don't have to wait around to

convince people who don't know what they're talking about to give you a million dollars to make something. That's never going to happen. But if you can focus on making something small and growing slowly, you can have a career for yourself before you realize it. Yeah. I remember when we spoke, you talked a lot about Europe being a place where the films could succeed in a surprising way. And I'm wondering, if a film does well in Europe, what does that mean for your ability to make another movie? Are there financiers who are more interested? Was Thunder Road just kind of a surprising, because of the kind of story that you were telling, a surprising success overseas about an American man kind of falling apart at the end of the 21st century. Yeah, particularly about French audiences really took to Thunder Road.

We made 200,000 euros in the first two weeks of it being in cinemas there, which is obviously more than the budget of the film. It maybe cost 190 grand shot in Austin. And so a French audience really taking to this goofy American movie. The French tend to see American films like documentaries more than narrative fiction, where they're like, we're getting an idea of what is going on in a country. And that movie is about this authority figure with a gun getting drunk and losing his mind. And that's kind of what Trump was at the time. And also it's a bit of slapstick. So there's a lot of like, you know, following the tradition of Jim Carrey or Jerry Lewis um and so the French really took to it

and now we're having conversations with big buyers in Europe based on the sales of a movie we made four years ago like and there are governments that have all these art funds in France uh 10% of every ticket sale that goes to cinema goes to this art fund to support filmmakers. It was created by Truffaut and Godard in the 1950s. And so there's a lot of money to then scrap together and make independent films. But I don't know, I'm really enjoying this pretending to be, you know, a startup and an entrepreneur and making movies on our own because we've been successful. Like the beta test screened at Berlin Hall in Tribeca. And then we were able to make the entire budget back from a single territory with ROI for our buyers.

So yeah, I don't know. I'm really enjoying making movies in my garage. And when someone comes along and knocks on our door and says, hey, we're taking you seriously to make that big movie you've always wanted to make, I'll listen. But I'm going to keep doing these smaller goofy things in between. we're taking you seriously to make that big movie you've always wanted to make um i'll listen but i'm gonna keep doing this these smaller goofy things in between there's something so interesting about this friction with the beta test and your uh savvy and your your willingness to talk about

the business aspect of of movie making and the fact that so much of this character that you play and you know this kind of this universe that you're portraying is about the grossness of packaging and the complexity that the wga was you know having in the fight that they were going through and it's weird because i think people want to know that they can make something and then they can have some control over something but i think a lot of people feel like whether it's agencies or studios or even just the like broader apparatus of hollywood is an impediment to them and if they're not accepted they can't do anything I remember we talked about the water bottle tour a few years ago and the idea of kind of taking generals and meeting people. Are things harder than ever? There are more places to sell things now. So I'm kind of fascinated by like, is it as hard as it was 10 years ago? How much of

what you're learning about after making this movie, like what is the state of this kind of concern that this character has? Yeah, I mean, although there are more places to sell things, it's still becoming, a lot of it's becoming merged. You know, MGM just bought Amazon.

There were like two enormous purchases of giant studios within a week, within two days of each other. So it's kind of like we're editing the movie and watching the news and I'm like, oh, this is what we just did. So it is on unshaky ground and nobody knows what's going on and everybody still wants to be Harvey. Everybody still looks up to this guy as a role model. And so it is a really turbulent time in the film industry. And I think, I don't know. I mean, I've been very successful doing this stuff on my own. And I just hear horror stories from all of my fellows and peers that are doing stuff adjacent to us. And they'll get, you know, 10 years into development on a film that never ends up happening. The vast majority of movies that end up getting bought for development at Amazon never get made. I think like my buddy used to work there as a studio executive for the feature film narrative stuff. And at any given time, he was working on

80 projects. And I think during his tenure, they made four films. He was there for four years. So it was like 80 films a year that he was in development with. I think it's just, it's too big of a risk to waste your time when you can be doing stuff on your own. That's such an amazing concept of like burned creativity, just vaulted creativity. I mean, it's obviously been happening for a hundred years in Hollywood, but it does feel like that is the downside maybe of there being all these places to put things. Think about all of those teams that are working and taking notes on a project that never is going to happen. And it's just so heartbreaking. Like, not only are you lucky as a screenwriter to get your movie made at

all, you're lucky to get your movie made and have it be any good, to have it not be mediocre or, you know, for any given reason, a movie can come out and not be very good. I think just having the control of your future and of your present, I think is something that's very new because of the technology that we have at our fingertips. What was something positive you learned from the Wolf of Snow Hollow experience, just having those 50 to 60 people on set? Something positive I learned. If it's nothing, that's an interesting answer. I think really the thing that I learned was that you can take these risks with characters and still have them be likable like really the wolf snow hollow is about this guy

who's convinced that there's no such thing as werewolves and he's a complete asshole to everybody but because he's good at his job um and adamant and competent in a way that the rest of his team is not, the audience appreciates him. It's like the Tony Soprano problem of like, this guy is a monster at times, but he's very good at his job and he's fun to watch. I like taking those risks and making something that the audience can feel better than the main character, but also be fulfilled by the main character at the end of the day.

And in the edit, um, taking these risks and never knowing, we never had screen tests. We never had a test screenings or anything like that. And so to finally watch it in a cinema last week for the first time and hear people laughing, um,

and, and gasping, um, it's like, cool. The chemistry equation that we built over 10 months works. Does it matter to you where people see your movies? It depends. So like, I mean, there are times when we'll get a review and someone will say like,

oh, it looks very flat. And that's instantly like, well, you're probably watching it on a shitty screen. You know, like I have no control or you didn't see it in the cinema. Like obviously the movie's not playing anywhere near you. But I don't don't, I don't know. I think, um, I'm very agnostic to that and I never want to control how people see something. I see all of this stuff from directors who are very adamant about how people watch their films. And it just feels like control freak instead of letting somebody have fun. And, you know, I do every other decision in the film. I edit the thing, do the sound design, do everything. The audience should be able to decide how they watch it.

They're grown people. Where do you think this is all going theater-wise? Having lived through this pandemic, and obviously it has kind of kneecapped a lot of the theater industry over that time. What do you predict? It's the same. It depends on what day you ask me. I think that

audiences that go to cinemas are incredible cinephiles. They go to it for church reasons. They go for the community and to leave the cinema and talk with people. And because of the windowings, theatrical releases come out first. And so people get to have the experience of having seen it before anyone else, which is such a valuable experience for a great film to say, oh my God, this is life-changing for me. I saw Children of Men the day it came out in cinemas. I watched it twice that day. And like, it changed my life. Actually changed my life for the better. And, but I don't know. I mean, the technology is going to get to a place now where you can wear a pair of glasses that could record 4K video and stereo sound for three hours. How is that going to function with

cinemas? Anybody could walk in and just wear these glasses and film the screen and it ends up online. So like every time I hear Tarantino or PTA saying, you've got to see it in 70 millimeter, we're going to have this special screening. All it takes is one person walking in and doing that. And then immediately everybody's watching it digitally the next day. So I don't see, because of the technology and Moore's law and the exponential growth in technology, I think that we're going to get much better home viewing systems and movie theaters will be more like concert going in the future you remind me so much of speaking of uh tarantino and pta you remind me so much of the sort of like writer director producers of the 90s who are also very conscious of some of the

sort of business model aspects of this and the best way to get their movies seen i'm wondering long term do you see yourself more as a writer director more as a producer like what what do you want to be doing because you own a company and you're now building out this kind of world of filmmaking so what is the most appealing aspect going forward all of it I mean yeah I grew up reading Ted Hope's book and following him and the Hope for Film blog um you know he produced all of Ang Lee's stuff and was very savvy about the film industry and very open and transparent in a way that nobody else was that I could find. So yeah, I'm very much a child of Ted Hope. And I think it's important. I'm trying to send the ladder back down for creatives in the same way. I'm using Twitter instead of a blog. But I think it's very important. So much of the failures of people who are starting out is educational.

They just don't know what they don't know. And so it's very important for people to send the ladder back down. If they've gotten any height, it's two different analogies in one. But, but yeah, no, I, I think, I think everything is fulfilling to me being on set and playing the lead actors, a lot of fun, but then it feels great to capture the set and playing the lead actors, a lot of fun, but then it feels

great to capture the footage and feel like you've scored a touchdown with your team. When you get something that's really funny, everybody laughs and it's just, you get to, it's incredibly fulfilling. All of your endorphins are released when you are writing, directing, and acting. It feels like you're walking this tight rope. You get to pretend to be Jackie Chan, uh, you know, on camera and do all this stuff. And it's the most alive I ever feel. So although I do executively produce for friends who are having trouble raising the funds and I'll put my name and help them run a WeFunder campaign and share about their project that I think is important. I think really the future for me will just be

writing and directing and trying to sculpt some funny stuff that I'm missing at the cinema. What's, what's the next movie? Uh, PJ and I, PJ and I wrote, uh, writing this movie, um, that is this Victorian horror movie. Uh, it's a buddy romance, uh, comedy that is about installing electricity in this old Victorian mansion and how that new technology reveals scary stuff from the past. Um, and it's a bit of a metaphor about social media, but,

uh, it's a lot of fun and we're trying to write it right now. And then trying to ask Eddie Izzard if she will play the lead, um, so that I don't have to. That sounds wonderful. You named five genres as usual for your next film, which is great.

Jim, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? What is the last great thing you've seen? I really loved watching this movie called Corpus Christi, which is a Polish film that is on the Criterion channel. And it is about a young juvenile delinquent who impersonates a priest and gets his flock for a year and is an incredible priest and then gets found out. And it is really

beautifully crafted and very funny. And you fall in love with the main character over and over and over again. And I really loved that film. American remake starring Jim Cummings. I don't know. I mean, I would love to play a priest, but I probably, I mean, that power dynamic is so interesting to me and I, but I would love to play a monster of a priest. If anybody's listening and they have a monster pre-script, I would, I'm in. You hear that America. Sign Jim up to play a monster priest. Jim, good to see you. Thanks for doing the show. As always. It's great to see you, dude. Thank you for having me. Thank you to Brian Raftery, to Jim Cummings, and our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on

this episode. Later this week, Amanda will be back and we will be breaking down one of her most anticipated movies ever. It's called Spencer. It's about Princess Diana. Kristen Stewart is the star. We'll see you then.