The Big Picture - You Must See ‘You Can See Everything.’ Plus: Judd Apatow!

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

We’re not deceiving you: This is the movie of the year. Sean and Amanda open today’s show by reacting to the first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s much anticipated ‘Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,’ discussing the news that Zendaya will star in Alex Garland’s next sci-fi film for A24, and also breaking down how the show will cover a handful of fall movie releases. Then, they dive incredibly deep into Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s three-hour documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, ‘You Can See Everything.’ They briefly discuss the film in a spoiler-free conversation and give it the utmost recommendation possible. Then, they go (as best of memory) beat-by-beat of the film and dissect all of its wonderfully captivating and fascinating twists and turns. Finally, legendary comedy filmmaker, showrunner, producer, and documentarian Judd Apatow joins the show to talk about his two new documentaries: ‘Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story,’ and ‘Norm: The Tale of Norm MacDonald.' (0:00) Intro (1:25) ‘Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew’ trailer reaction (12:33) Zendaya to star in Alex Garland’s upcoming science-fiction film (14:16) How we’re covering upcoming movies this fall (18:34) ‘You Can See Everything’ (35:37) SPOILER WARNING (1:50:25) Awards and box office chances (1:57:49) Judd Apatow joins the show! Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Judd Apatow Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture A Conversation show about seeing everything. Today on the show, we are diving all the way into You Can See Everything, directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. That is one way of describing the movie, at least. Another way is to call it a form-shattering examination of celebrity, non-fiction, science, power, love, and epistemological truth.

This is simply one of the most fascinating, entertaining, entertaining, and provocative movies of the year. We will talk about all of it on the show. this episode, I'll be joined by Judd Apatow, legendary comedy filmmaker, showrunner, producer, and documentarian. Judd has not one but two new docs on Netflix this month. The first, which is now available to watch, is Norm, an intimate portrait of the late Norm MacDonald, one of my favorite comedy voices of my lifetime.

The second arrives next week. It's called Paralyzed by Hope, the Maria Bamford story, which charts the complex and fascinating life of another brilliant comedy mind. Judd has never been on the big picture before, so he had a great time talking about his dockwork, his history as a comedy filmmaker, his next big movie with Glenn Powell, and a lot more. Judd is a fantastic interview and a comedy historian, so stick around for that.

But first, some movie news, including the Narnia trailer right after this. Okay, the magician's niece is here. The Plummer's daughter. The Plummer's daughter sits before us. We have a trailer for Greta Gerwig's new film. We do. Narnia, the magician's nephew. And I have been...

This almost felt like waiting to speak with you about Digger. Oh, really? Yeah, where I was like, I wonder what Amanda is going to think of this trailer. Well, in grand big picture tradition, I watched it approximately two minutes ago. But in this case, in my defense, it was not because I was, you know, doing other things, living my life, pursuing hobbies. But because I did see the trailer on my phone, actually via your Instagram story, started to watch it, then realized that a horizontal trailer on the vertical setting of my phone was a. not the ideal way to watch anything, and I stopped. And I waited until I could then watch it full screen on my laptop, which is I'm sure how,

you know, the inventors of cinema and Greta Gerwig intended it. Yeah, so let's talk about what we thought about the trailer. And then after that, I'm going to share some feelings about the way that we consume trailers per your note about it. Yes. So this, of course, is the first story in the CS Lewis chronology. Everyone just waiting with bated breath for your thoughts on how we consume trailers. They absolutely are. That's why they're listening. What did you think of this trailer?

Listen, the stairway is directed right to me, even though it would seemingly be just directed at Rock Dads, but stairway is very big in my house right now. Stairway to heaven, the Led Zeppelin song, which soundtracks this trailer. Yeah. Are people listening to this review of a trailer without watching the trailer themselves? Of course they are. People are entering this space with no context. They're firing up and being like, what's going on in movies? I'll check out what Amanda and Sean have to say about the latest movie news.

I appreciate that, but I also want more for everyone. Well, this is broadcasting. Sure. We provide context for everything. Here we are. 42 on Netflix. Anyway, stairway, yes, everything else. I mean, I just, I do not like CGI worlds.

I just don't like CGI worlds. It doesn't matter who's making them. It doesn't matter what the story is. I would say the visual aspects of this that are imagined that have that video game quality are not to my taste. I think I knew that that was going to happen in one way or another as soon as this project was imagined. And obviously, I've just seen a trailer on a laptop.

I did not see the full movie in IMAX. But we've been talking a lot about identifying what is your taste and what is not your taste. This is just that aspect of it visually is not my taste. So I was a little bummed by that. Reminding me again, you didn't read these books growing up or you did? I haven't read The Magician's Nephew. I did read Lion Witch in the Wardrobe.

Okay. And I had a full paperback set of these books, or at least that series. I'm not really sure where the magician's nephew fits in chronologically. And I also had to go to a school, I went to a school where you had to read the old and the New Testament. So, you know, I'm steeped in some of this. Wow. You didn't know this? How did that go?

Some of it stayed with me literarily. Yeah. And some of it I've rejected. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that has really come to the surface with the news of this adaptation is that I don't think I fully realize that Greta was a person of faith. And that these novels obviously are very much an allegory for

Christian faith. And that's really fascinating to wend into what I think is going to end up being the biggest Netflix movie of all time, whether it's the highest grossing or the most watched. We'll see, but it seems like it's a very expensive proposition. I really like this trailer for one simple reason.

I just think that Greta clearly has a take on the movie. And the take is to move the storyline 50 years into the future to post-war England to include a kind of rock and roll rock opera-centric vibe to the filmmaking. It looks a little bit like if Todd Haynes tried to make Lord of the Rings. And there's something appealing to me about that. I agree with you about the CGI.

I think a lot of that stuff is looks sort of almost unfinished to me. And it's in real contrast in this story, unlike a lot of other stories like it, because the stuff that takes place in the real world of England at that time, I thought, looked quite good. Yeah. And so I'm not thrilled about that. The question I've been asking myself since watching it is, what is the alternative when making a movie like this?

And I have read The Magician's Nephew recently. And so in my head, as I was reading it for the first time, I'd never read the book before. I was thinking of many of the worlds that the two children go to as more forcedly. like, for lack of a better word. Mm-hmm. And maybe they would be fantastical in certain ways, and there would be these kind of thrilling phantasmagoric moments with the White Queen. But I don't think I envision them as like this kind of blur of objects floating all over

the place. Sure. Or outer space in many. There's, I mean, there are kind of a space movie video game reference to a lot of them. Yeah. I think I was hoping for the Lord of the Rings, Peter D. Jackson's style interpretation, which is using a incredibly beautiful part of the natural world on Earth to represent an imagined world.

Yeah. To me, that doesn't automatically make it good, though. And I'll tell you how I know, because I just recently watched the Chronicles of Narnia trilogy of films that came out in the 2000s. Sure. And they're not good. They're shot in real places. But the story is, like, the film is not well made.

It's not well told. Totally. I think just to the point of how to realize a world that is imagined and old. only on the page. And, you know, again, as I said, CGI would not be my choice. Yeah. Yeah. The other alternative, obviously, would be to even if you don't set it in the natural world to just use more practical effects, you know, to just create more like more puppets, I guess, more things that. We've been on a puppet run this year. You know, I just watched the new VHS and there's a whole segment that is the Jim Henson Creature

Shop, like it helped to create. It wasn't a great segment, unfortunately. But yeah, we're in a puppet moment. I'm pretty torn on this. My other take on it is related to the point that you were making, which is when we were kids and you would go to the movie theater and you would watch the trailers, that was the first time you would see the trailer on the biggest screen imaginable with loud music. And this movie has licensed stairway to heaven, which has never been licensed in any movie

or television show ever. And I'm sure they paid an extraordinary sum of money to Page and Plant to get this song in the trailer. I think, and it effectively conveys at least her idea of the movie, you know, the sort of majesty and rock god vibe that they're going for. But I watch this on a laptop. You watch this on a laptop. I then went and watched it on a large television after that just to get a little bit more of the vibe. But we complain about movies on Netflix all the time because of the compression and the way that they look and the way that the audio is very rarely as good as you want it to be.

And so it feels weird to be consistently judging trailers, especially those that are not meant to be seen this big in this way. And so maybe I'm just giving a little grace to Greta Gerwig, whose movies I like, although there was a similar reaction to the Barbie trailer. You may recall. People were like, what the fuck is this? That's true. Though that movie was made very practically. Yes. And once you saw it on a big screen, you could tell.

Also, you know, the response to the Barbie trailer online. had many layers before you added in Hillary Clinton Right, right Because that's a story about a woman Getting what happens to her In Barbie or Hillary Clinton Let's move it

Keep moving What happens to Barbie at the end She goes to the gynecologist? Yes, yeah She goes to Century City Which when I was recently in Century City And I was like, you know what? That was funny That was a good joke

Great ending Narnia the Magician's Nephew comes to theaters, February 12th. Yeah. Will this movie be a big box office hit? I have no idea. I was watching this and thinking, oh, it's a children's movie, which is obvious, but because of Grewig, because of Barbie, because of, you can, it is, it is coded and energetically that it was communicated to me that this is for children, which is wonderful, because I want good things to. take my child to. So I started doing the math of like, is this going to be too scary for my four-year-old, but probably will go anyway because he'll just stand up and yell stairway.

I hope it's in the actual film. And so in that sense, like a kids movie that people, that is made with effort that people want to go see, there's some possibility. I believe February 12th is Super Bowl weekend because the Super Bowl is on Valentine's Day, which is another thing. It's also going up against, you know, Valentine's Day people, whatever they're doing. That's not something you participate in? I do. Though, don't you feel a little lame now, like getting a babysitter for Valentine's Day proper? I do.

I guess I haven't really thought about that. Why? Just because you're feeling like you're in a different era of your life? Has the romance gone away? What do you mean? Well, I'm just like, are we really going to spend this much money to do? It's, you know, it's kind of like, it's New Year's Eve. it's like a holiday for newbies, you know?

And like we're married, we can do it another time. But are we actually going to be observing Valentine's Day on Valentine's Day? No, I don't what you mean by that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. But also, this is the M. Night Shyamalan Nicholas Sparks weekend, I believe. Is Remain all? I thought Remain was the 5th. Oh, so they're doing it early and then just advertising it is Valentine's Day.

This is like Resident Evil coming on September 25th. Yeah, I think Remain is the 5th. They are saying this Valentine's Day in the trailer, but you are right. That is February 5th. So, yeah, I think you're right about the kids. movie thing, and I'm glad you pointed that out. I was on another text chain with some friends talking about this trailer, and a lot of people are like, I'm pretty concerned about these visuals.

And my response was what you just said. I'm like, this is a movie for eight-year-olds. Yeah. And I'm sure it'll be a movie for 40-year-olds who read the CS-Lewis novels growing up and have a big emotional attachment to them. Or who have eight-year-olds. Or who have eight-year-olds. Will not surprise you to learn that my daughter was like, put this on right now? This is the most important thing that's ever happened to me. And also,

Aslon, the Lion, And that's like, that is not only a god to C.S. Lewis and to Greta Gerwig, but also to my daughter. Yeah. Have we decided on a Halloween costume yet? Is it too late for the lion? Now I've pivoted to like a fairy. I don't know. Every day is a new idea. Well, since it's a weekend, it seems like there could be several options. Yeah. Yeah. We also have multiple events that day. So because of that, maybe we'll cycle through some of our options.

I haven't figured out my costume yet. So I'm strongly considering Elizabeth Holmes. So, yeah, we'll see about the magician's nephew. A little bit of news that just broke this morning. Zendaya, to star in Alex Garland's new sci-fi movie for A-24. Not the movie he's making right now, which is an adaptation of Eldon Ring, the video game, but his next movie after that, which I guess starts shooting next year. You say what?

She has cool taste, and I like that she's doing these things. Even if I have a mixed record on Alex Carlin. Garland's directorial work. I don't. He's a genius. One of my favorite living filmmakers. That's cool. This is very exciting. This is very exciting.

This is this generation of actors is doing everything I hope they would. They're cool. This is so exciting. I mean, come on. She doesn't have to do that. It's true. She could go make a stupid franchise movie. That's true.

She could be like, all right, well, Spider-Man slowing down. I know. No, she's fine. Fred Astaire. Come on. That's true. I'm excited. I know.

I'm excited. The kids are doing great. This is such a relief. Two thumbs up. This show is going to go on maybe three or four more episodes after the X-Men movie. Okay, so this is going to shoot in 2027. Yeah. So are you thinking?

I think the old-in-ring movie is 2008. So maybe this is like coming later that year or in 2029. Right. I'm just trying to project how long we're doing this. Okay. Well, we'll see. I mean, maybe actually what this could be is it could be a much more stripped-down movie. since he's got a huge production of Eldon Ring going.

So maybe it'll be like a more of an ex-Machina kind of film. That would be wonderful. And then he can squeeze it in between the release of Eldon Ring, which unfortunately for you, I think, will also feature a lot of CGI. I know how to do that. It's an adaptation of a video game. It is, yeah. It's okay.

I've never played it, though, and I think I don't want to say anything about what I think it is because I don't know what it is. Okay. I wanted to give the listeners at home an update on how we're going to be trying to cover movies for the rest of this month, too, because it's been a little confusing even for me. I had some big plans for what to do When to talk about these things I was talking to Eileen last night Because she's now seeing two movies

In two consecutive days And she's so she's seeing You can see everything in five hours Okay And then she's seeing She's seeing Digger tomorrow But she was like Should I see Digger or LeBolenegra

And she was kind of stymied Because she could LeBolinegra is not wide Like it's not in like every regal theater For example But it's just on AMCCCCDDG So you said go see Digger before it is removed from theaters and begins its Academy Screener Campaign Extraordinary.

Which, listen, that is happening. Oh, my God. It's really, really intense. I was telling you. Well, I know, but I wonder if we're almost going to boomerang because this is so intense now. People will be like too much. Yeah, people are like, no, no, no, no, diggers. Like a masterpiece, the most important thing I've ever seen, you know, 45 nominations.

Neil Young said it's the greatest film ever made. That was awesome. Right. So are we going to come back around to like, hmm, interesting. Some points were made, but I don't know if this is the best thing ever. I am also like once the movie we're about to talk about gets out in the world, once some other movies that we've seen get back in the world. But, you know, the digger hive, you guys are doing the work.

Absolutely. You are doing your work. Yeah. And as I said to a friend, you know, you got to have a reason to get up in the morning. So I'm glad they found it. Completely. Thank God for Neil Young continuing to wake up every morning to work on behalf of Digger. She's seeing Digger. Okay.

And that is related to what I was trying to set up here, which is that we'll cover LeBolenegra a little later. It is officially in movie theaters, a good number of movie theaters around the country, but not a lot of movie theaters. And I think it's going to have a pretty long lifespan in movie theaters, but we'll probably more likely cover it when it hits Netflix so that we can have what I think is a movie that is worthy of a big, long conversation. Yes. That said, we would encourage you to go see it in a theater. It is a movie that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible for a number of reasons, but there is a, just there's a scale to it. Agreed. Related to that, the original intention was to cover Fjord on the show this week, and I was confused and I'm still a little unclear on how much Fjord is going to expand. It's in three theaters in Los Angeles right now. I don't know if it's going to more over time. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But what I didn't want to do is another movie that I think is worthy of big discussion and has already provoked a lot of debate already.

But I don't want to do that because that's annoying, I think, for the listeners when they can't see it at the movie at all. And it's not, I don't even know what the horizon of releases for that movie. So maybe we'll just table it until we know what it is. And it would be a very text-based discussion of what is actually in the movie and how it is shown in the questions raised. So there would be no frame of reference, unlike our spirited. Narnia trailer breakdown. That's right. Well, everyone can check in on that.

It is a little confusing that Fiord, the release schedule for Fiord. I don't get it. I'm not sure I follow it. I mean, you and I were speculating that that's a neon film. It won the Palm Door and was tipped for best picture from the very beginning, but now it sort of feels like neon is putting its resources elsewhere. I agree. Well, I mean, it's got artificial.

Exactly. And so, you know, now it does feel like a lot of, and they have other films, obviously, but it does feel like some of that energy is going over there. The other thing that is coming out this weekend is the Devil's Restoration, the Ken Russell film that I had a chance to see at Cannes. Chris and I will talk about that on the show at the end of next week. So when we do our annual horror episode, The Devils is in many ways a horror film, so we will get into it there. Whalefall and Sense and Sensibility are out this weekend. They're both being covered on this show on Monday.

Correct. Tuesday, I guess. The only living pickpocket in New York, the new John Trituro film directed by No. and Misty Green, Chris Rock's movie, we'll talk about at the end of this month. But all of these movies are either in theaters or expanding this weekend. And so we have yet another weekend where there's just a ton to see, a ton of options. And yet, I think there's only one movie to see this weekend if you can see it. Yes, correct.

That movie is you can see everything. So I'll give you some details in this movie before we dig into it. Directed by Fielder in Oppenheim, as I mentioned, the film stars Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, Billy Evans, and others. Yes. Okay. We're going to have a brief, non-spoiler discussion

of this movie. Okay. And then we will spoil the fuck out of it because it is impossible to talk about in full. And you and I

have not discussed this movie yet. I guess that's true. No, we had one text conversation about one aspect of it. Did we? Okay, I don't even remember that. The story of the movie,

I'll share with you, 34 days before she sent to prison, Notorious Silicon Valley founder, Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon soon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. Now, for those listening at home who don't know anything about Elizabeth Holmes, I'll provide some context. Sean, tell us some facts. Elizabeth Holmes founded the blood testing company

Theranos in 2003. She raised $700 million up to $9 billion on false claims that its proprietary machines could run a wide range of tests using only a few drops of blood. The company secretly relied on conventional third-party commercial equipment and manipulated results. In January of 2022, a federal jury convicted Holmes of conspiracy to defraud investors and three counts of wire fraud. In November of 2022, she was sentenced to 135 months in federal prison. That is effectively where the movie starts. Now, Elizabeth Holmes, you might be thinking to yourself, gosh, I've seen the Alex Gibney documentary. I read John Carrey's Bad Blood.

I watched the Hulu series The Dropout. How much more Elizabeth Holmes do I really need in my life? Is she really worthy of a three-hour documentary all these years later? And I would say, maybe not, but that's not entirely what this is. So I'll start by asking you, what did you think of you can see everything? So this is the movie of the year, right? Pretty clearly. At least from the perspective of this podcast and the things that we're interested in.

And I think it's the movie of the year for two reasons. One, just because of what it accomplishes as a film and an exploration of its subjects, which are Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, documentary filmmaking, the nature of truth, quote, unquote, how we speak to each other as people, and many other interesting questions that bubble up as you watch it. I think the other way that it is the, quote, movie of the year, which is different than my favorite movie, though this is one of my favorite movies of the year. It's just that it is very much of this moment of movie, both of movie making but also societally and what it says about where we are as a country and as people who spend time on the internet, certainly.

But then also, you know, it's released, the surprise quality of it, A24 really just like finding the heat once again. This particular class of filmmakers led by Nathan Fielder, but also Lance Oppenheim, you could put the safeties in there, I think. Emma Stone and Dame McCrary as producers. So it's just, it's kind of located everything that is big and exciting and surprising and new about movies right now. Yeah, it's, it is all those things. Like, it is clearly a very, very buzzy movie that has been well marketed and well handled. I shared on the show my experience of seeing it for the first time at Telly Ride, which I found to be like an utter delight and mind-blowing in such a fun way.

And for the most part, I think the surprises of the movie, you also were not revealed to you beforehand, right? No. And so it's hard to communicate about the movie, and I'm quite curious to see what the reception of the movie, how different it is when the cat is out of the bag. And I would imagine that by the time this episode is out, the cat will be out of the bag about some of the choices that the film

makers make. But I echo your thoughts entirely. I think this is, it's very rare for a movie to metastasize a feeling in the culture, to the sense that you, we don't feel like we can trust anything anymore. And as someone who's been obsessed with documentary for a very long time, I don't spend enough time thinking about what its goals are and what its purposes. And this is a movie that is entirely concerned with the idea of what is the truth and is there such a thing as an objective truth, especially when it comes to human failure and human frailty. And it's a movie that is about a person who we think of as a con person, a con woman. And it's a movie about a woman and not a man, which is really interesting. It is a movie about a woman.

But made by a man with a very particular sensibility around the truth and. and human failure. And all of Nathan Fielder's work feels like it has been working towards this. But this movie also strips out, I think, a lot of the artificial convention that he builds around his projects.

And I think this is really where he and Oppenheim's collaboration becomes, makes it more special. And I'm such a Nathan Allegiant. I think everything he's done is like, at worst, fascinating and at best, among the smartest and most creative thing that we have in movie and TV and film,

culture, but Lance is a real documentarian. He's a proper documentarian. And so his filmmaking skill and style colliding with what Nathan wants to do when getting this really intimate look at the Holmes family and Holmes' story and then everything that transpires after that makes this just a special stew. And there's not a lot of examples of this where you've got two distinct creative figures who are like, hey, we have some stuff in common, but we have some stuff that is different. What if we worked together to execute on a project like this?

And so in that respect, too, I think it's like a wonderful, like a sign of the future. Like, I would love to see more people trying to do something like this. It expands the Nathan Fielder project while also engaging with it and exploring what it means to have watched all of those things. I do feel like I've had a lot of conversations with people who say like the Nathan Fielder of it all makes me very anxious. I can't really sit through that stuff. I can't bear it. And I don't think that the project is in that tone because you have, you know, Lance and his team as intermediary and also kind of studying that tone itself. Yes.

So you don't have to be a disciple of Nathan Fielder in order to enjoy this. I mean, it's a bigger tent. But also, if you know the work, then there is a level of richness to it. Yes. I can definitely affirm that. So there's something interesting about it that happens in the. the opening moments of a movie that is not really a giveaway of any sort before we start really digging into the text, which is that the film opens in a very traditional documentary style, very verity style, where the first thing that we see is Billy Evans, Elizabeth Holmes'

husband talking on the phone. But I think not legally because of money reasons. Oh, they're not actually married. Are they actually married? I don't know if they are. I never heard them specify that. And I think that they probably are not because their finances are kept separate. Yes.

they're together though and they have a family together and he's on the phone speaking and then we see Holmes with her child through her son's crib and she's behind bars

that's like the first time we see her very purposeful choice and the film starts to play out in the first few minutes and we think that this is going to be a pure fly on the wall doc about how these people are living in these final 34 days before the family's broken apart. And then there's a

cut to Nathan Fielder who is standing about 10 feet away from the family in the living room looking on quite faux malevolently. Yeah. Like a figure of doom and the score shifts and

as I was watching this for the first time and I've now seen it twice, I was like, okay, this isn't going to be a Nathan Fielder thing. Like we're doing the rehearsal season three. And I wasn't against that, but I was like, okay, this is, and the movie I think actually continues to set you up for what it thinks you think it's going to be, and then it kind of drains that, because to your point about this not being just like another Nathan Fielder thing, the way he comports himself in this film as he becomes a major participant in speaking to Elizabeth and Billy and

the other people who appear in the movie, he's not really performing in the way that he usually does. He's not going for laughs. He's not doing that like very purposeful, awkward, if I say this to you, what weird response will I admit from you. Like, he actually is working more as a journalist or like a detective in the film. Yeah. In a way that I wasn't expecting, which I think is what you're saying is like complicates the movie in such a great way where I'm not sure if we're getting the real Nathan, but we're getting a different Nathan that I thought was like a brilliant choice on the filmmaker's part. Yes. And there's even one scene where you can, where he, the character, is kind of introduces himself into the scene and to the narrative of what you're watching.

And I remember thinking, okay, so this, a normal documentary filmmaker would not do this, would just observe the moment, keep the camera running. And that would be enough. And the moment itself is very telling. But it reveals something about Nathan that he inserts himself into it and also reveals something. something about the structure of the film, and so you're already thinking about documentary choices. But you can also tell that it's not quite a character. There is something impulsive about the moment, so you also know that you're getting a different Nathan than the rehearsal.

I would just like to add something, which is that at the screening Amanda, you and I were at afterwards, Lance and Nathan gave a Q&A with Bill Hader. And they said that the original plan was not to have Nathan so. in front of the camera and they kept feeling Elizabeth's pulling him in and pulling him in to a certain point where they just gave away. He said the same thing at our Q&A and he basically said that Billy and Elizabeth would just turn to him and ask for his point of view on something while they were making the movie and that that invariably kind of drew him into the conversations, which is interesting. I just want to say, I was talking with a friend of the show recently and that friend suggested maybe we should be skeptical of everything here. Yes.

In a way that maybe I hadn't fully thought about and that there may be even more construction going on, even more artifice going on than we realized. But I will just say for the first time that I watched it, I received it as documentary. Like, I received, there are parts of it, obviously, that extend well beyond that that we will talk about. But I didn't feel like I was being put on when I was watching the movie. What did you, how do you feel about that? I don't think that I was, I guess I watched it as self-aware documentary. I was aware of the construction, and there are a few choices that they make in the edit to make you aware of the people behind the camera and their involvement.

And not, you know, not just Nathan himself. And so I think Nathan, to me, is a character throughout. And it's funny, that moment where you cut to him the first time you see him and there is this kind of like overly. foreboding score. But in my head, reflexively, the Curb Your Enthusiasm score just started playing because there is a moment of humor in it. And I do think that the filmmaking

communicates some sort of structure and something that, and choices. It's designed, but is it fake, I think, is the question that I'm asking. Like, the person was insinuating to me that some of this might be fake. Oh, that they staged it. I'm not sure that I saw it that way.

I'm not sure why I didn't. But I think because some of that self-awareness that you're describing makes me think that that would be really elaborate. The other thing is that I'm not sure that Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans would be able to operate successfully inside of a fake environment. I don't know that they really... Or are they operating inside a fake environment all of the time? Well, right. Could they operate in someone else's fake environment, I guess is the question, you know? Well, but as Jack pointed out, the fact that they are constantly pulling Nathan into the narrative,

themselves, you know, suggests a level of awareness. And I mean, and that is one of the ultimate questions of this entire project, right? It's like, what is purposeful? What's manipulation? Like, who's in control? And the movie definitely kept me guessing on that throughout. What do you think about Elizabeth Holmes? What do I think about Elizabeth Holmes?

So she's roughly my age. I guess I have a lot in common. Thanks so much. So, thank you. One of my friends, one of my best friends, you know her, went to high school with Elizabeth Holmes. No kidding. And so anytime she was in the news, my friend would always text me and say, oh, I know. Yeah, she would always say, I knew she was a fake because she was only in honors chemistry and not AP.

Wow. Which I. What a kill shot. Which is a kill shot. And also is just all I've ever thought about whenever she comes up. But so I was in New York working in magazines for the first round of Theranos and the, and all of the photographs, including the very famous one that is referenced in the documentary. And I was actually working at Glamour when she was a woman of the year and was scheduled to receive the award on the night that John Carey, you published his first.

That night. That night. Yeah. And so if memory serves, we didn't really know what to do. and then I believe that the only person who would present her award was Jared Letto. So, um, I, listen, I'm pretty sure I'm right on that. Wow, that's a great story. I've never heard that.

People, people can correct me. Did you interact with her at all? No, I didn't. I was assigned to some other woman of the year that year. I can't remember who. Wow, interesting. You can't remember her name. Which is just to say that I've consumed a lot of Elizabeth Holmes content from all different

areas as, you know, as a person watching this story in real time, who doesn't know anything about science, as a journalist who is confronting some of that, like, what's true and what's not here. And also just how are we going to present this to the world? Even, you know, I was just adjacent to it. And I did watch the drop out. So I do think that she is a character of our generation. No question.

And so I was interested, just in a plain document. about her, especially from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. I was like, oh, okay, if you guys want to do this, sure, I would love to know more. Yeah, I'm very similar. I didn't work at glamour and I didn't encounter her in that respect, but otherwise, same. I thought she was, I'm not sure that I thought she was fascinating, but I certainly thought that story was fascinating. And I didn't listen to the podcast and I didn't read the book, but I did watch the doc and and watch the television series. And I think she's representative of kind of, um, WebTech Founder 2.0 syndrome.

And we're in kind of 3.0 now. You know, we're in the Sam Altman era of this sort of thing. But she precedes him. She's not Steve Jobs and she's not Bill Gates. But she was literally working in the image of those figures and aspiring to be just like them. And there's always people who reach high and fall hard. And she's a classic version of that Icarus story. Right.

And it is also, it was 2015. I believe the end of 2015. So we are in Scammer 2.0 era. And we are also in the Donald Trump is running for president, but he can't possibly be president, right, phase of. And then fast forward. And more innocent time. Yes.

And a time where we didn't understand the world that we were living in where people like Elizabeth Holmes could thrive. I think that sets her up really well for what this movie is attempting to do because, you know, she was convicted of some of the, the charges. But not all of the charges. And that's very important to her and Billy in terms, and they clearly have some things that they really want to get across to Nathan and Lance in the making of the movie. And I think this is probably the time to say that we're going to start to spoil the movie. I think we did a pretty good job. Yeah, this is, I could not agree more

with the movie of the year's sentiment. It's certainly among my five favorite movies I've seen this year. I've seen it twice now. The second time was very different, and I can talk about that as we get into it and how in terms of how I received it and what I liked more or less or whatever. But it is a hearty recommendation from both of us to check out the movie. We will spoil it now. So do not complain

because there are some stuff in here that you're going to want to see for the first time without knowing it. Okay, three, two, one. Here we go. There's something really interesting about the truth aspect of the movie because one of the key turning points

very early on in the film is we see in bed Elizabeth and Billy reading a New York Times profile by Amy Chosick that has been written about Elizabeth Holmes. Yes. And there's a very particular moment where there's a quote in the piece that says,

at one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. Holmes replied almost reflectively, they're not playing me, they're playing a character I created. Now, both Billy and Elizabeth sees on this moment, but Billy a little bit more aggressive.

than Elizabeth. And Elizabeth seems confused, like that's not something I said. But then Billy starts imagining what he believes she did say. And then they start taking issue with the entirety of this profile it's been written. Right. And they say they've recorded tapes. Because their crisis team told them too. Yes. Yes.

I believe that Risa Heller is name checked. At least there's a Risa. Yeah. Would make sense that that's the person who is consulting with them on how to handle her pre-prison experience. But this quote and the nature of reporting becomes this kind of stand-in for the big question of, is Elizabeth Holmes a lying fraud? Or is she a person who is just sort of like railroaded by a series of powerful men and people,

or in competitors and people who wanted to take down a strong young woman with a big idea that could change the world? And it's a really interesting and skeptical movie about journalism as well, I would say. Sure. In terms of the way that she's framed. Well, also trying to do journalism itself and finding the act of journalism very hard and ultimately subjective, which I think any real journalist would tell you that it ultimately is. You try to get as close to the truth as possible. You try to lay out real facts.

And there are still facts in the world. But how you put them together, it really depends on the person. It does. There's something interesting, too, about Holmes at this stage of her career. We've talked about this a lot because of the work that your husband does, because of the work that we've done over the years, there is a difference between a broker profile and an act of investigative journalism. And Elizabeth Holmes was kind of the subject of both over time.

Right. In this case, this is really more of, like, her team probably sees the nearer times profiles and opportunities to kind of humanize her and redeem her before she goes to prison. Right. The Times may have a more skeptical point of view, but there's also been so much reporting about what she's done. She's literally gone to trial. We never hear from the New York Times reporter in this movie.

And the New York Times reporter is not named in the movie, which I noted. Probably purposeful. I assume legally. Yeah. But ultimately that person never provides the notes that were taken from the piece, nor do Holmes and Evans provide the supposed audio recordings of the interview. And so I just, I latched on to this part. of the story so deeply because I've done just done this work before and I've done I've written

profiles where I've relied on my notes and I've written profiles where I've relied on the audio recording and neither is 100% accurate is what I would say like even the way that you frame contextually right a quote and the movie is also in addition to being this kind of fascinating portrait of all this stuff it's like it's a movie about language and the way that we use language to deceive each other or the way that we can be misunderstood by not clearly communicating I think about this all the time on the show so I feel like I say something on the show and people like you said this and I'm like I didn't say that but you hear what you want to hear right yes they're fixating also on the the I in the sentence they identify they're playing a character I created and

they say maybe you said they're playing a character they created but they have one very specific linguistic um but you know important because it changes the meaning of the quote complaint that could be clarified by tapes and they would say over and over and over and over over and over again that they recorded all of the... We've got the tapes. We've got the tapes. They never produced the tapes. At the very end, the tapes were never produced.

Yeah. So, you know, then you're like, you, there is... It's plausible and it could even be proven and they're making like a decent point, but also they don't have the evidence. So what are you supposed to... No, neither side has the evidence. It clearly animates Fielder's imagination around this because, um, he is looking for any opportunity in either direction to say someone's working against her and she's not receiving any kind of empathy in this experience or here's a smoking gun.

Yeah. This just confirms what everyone thinks, which is that you're duplicitous, that you are working only in service of yourself. And you're always constantly claiming that you're being, you're Cassandra, right? You know, you're not to be trusted. And so... Cassandra is right. Is it that no one believes Cassandra? Yeah.

Sorry. Cassandra, what's the opposite of that? Boy you cried wolf? Yes, I think so. I think that that's a major part of... Is that social reckoning? Yes, that's right. That's why I'm thinking of it. We see also like the artifice starts to appear where there's a moment where Billy and Liz are still miced.

Yeah. And they go and have a conversation in another room. It's really the only time. that the documentary does this? Because at some point, Billy and Liz become aware and ask them to start

cutting the mics. Yes. But in this one, they're having a conversation and they're also having a conversation about what's being shown because Liz is

working on a memoir throughout the beginning and so she has her laptop and she's kind of trying to cover it. And so the conversation is about Liz saying they were trying to film

or they were filming what I was writing, but I don't want my memoir as a part of this. but I don't, the whole point of this project is that I'm supposed to be revealing, you know, to show that I'm, have nothing to hide, that I'm not duplicitous. And, you know, Billy takes the other side of you got to stick up for yourself and you got to decide what you want and you don't want. In pretty short order, it's clear that Billy is going to be a much bigger part of this movie than I ever would have imagined.

Yeah. And that he is a very interesting character to say the least in the aftermath of that secret conversation where they sort of demike about five. minutes into it. Billy kind of takes center stage in the dock. He, it's clear that he sort of runs the household in a lot of ways. It's clear that he is a kind of protector figure for Elizabeth Holmes, that he is clearly a bit obsessive, that he shares a kind of unbroken eye contact oddity in terms of the way that he like communicates and interacts with people. Zach Woods would play him in the fictionalized version of this. Very much. Very well, I think. Yes. There's a moment where, you know, the movie starts to become this kind of series of personal encounters between Nathan and the two of them in their own home while they're attending to their children or having other people or taking Zoom calls. And at a certain point, Nathan's like, what are we going to do next?

And Billy's like, well, I'm going to the gym. You can come with me if you want. And in my head, I was like, why the fuck would we go to the gym with this guy? Who cares? Again, a very important moment in the movie because this is a person who would love to be filmed while working out. And that also, I think you can see Nathan kind of coming to an understanding that we're going to show everything up to and including Billy in the shower. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Full frontal.

Uh-huh. In full. It's so funny how, I mean, that is a very funny and literally as well as emotionally revealing part of the shower, but of the film. But I looked at it and I was like, all right. So there you go. Cool. And both you and my husband have like really fixated on this part of them. It's such a huge choice.

In fact, I saw the movie a second time. I don't really care that much about it. I ran into Matt Bellany and Craig Horleback outside because they were seeing it for the first time. And Matt was like, the big question is why the dick in the shower. Yeah. You know what I was like? But this is kind of, this is sort of a summation of like the philosophy behind dick picks in general, which is like the people receiving them, the women at least like don't really care. We don't understand.

But the men are like, this is the most important thing I can send you. Well, it's related to the Nathan experience, though, for me. Sure. Yeah, of course. Because Nathan threw out all of his work, and this isn't the only kind of recurring theme that will come up. But he is always, like, kind of the beleaguered man, the lesser than, the less masculine. He's a man who's intimidated. And also very lovelorn in a lot of ways.

And he keeps kind of circling back to like Billy's success with women. He has a conversation with Billy about meeting Liz for the first time. And he's got a lot of, like a lot of serious. questions about the nature of their meat cut and he seems suspicious he's clearly well sure because they did meet after elizabeth holmes was uh if not i don't believe she had been through the legal process yet but you've been disgraced effectively yeah yeah yeah so pretty thoroughly yes and you know all of this stuff is all working together the conversation that they're having about their meet cute at a party where liz is wearing a hat and she's got a band-aid on her face and he didn't know who she was he didn't know

who she was and we start to become really suspicious of billy in general that he seems like a bit of a huckster figure. We learned that he, because Nathan directly asks him about it, that he comes from some wealth, some personal wealth. And then he's a very ambitious person who's trying to make a name for himself in some ways. And so he has kind of latched on to Elizabeth Holmes so much so that they're in a relationship together. They have a family together.

And the flip side of this is that the movie also seems quite fascinated by what could also be described as, like, they're very pure and true love story. and where is the line between obsession, need, what decisions you make when you have a family and how you commit in a way? This part of the movie is so interesting to me and it's not the most, it's not the stuff that's going to get the headlines, but watching it a second time,

whatever it is between Billy Evans and Elizabeth Holmes actually I feel like is maybe what fascinates Nathan the most even beyond his own personal interactions with some of these people. Right. Because there are times when you're looking at these two people and you're like, this is the phoniest, most bullshit relationship of all time. Right. And then there are other times, especially because of the way that they're filmed,

where you're like, this is a real family that loves each other. Yeah. Despite all of the absolute weirdness of their lives. And so I really liked the movie as this kind of like push-pull between those two dynamics. Yeah, I think to me the movie is, I agree that what's going on between them was kind of like this central question because in some cases or in from some perspectives what's going on between them ultimately answers if you could understand it then you could understand everything that's going on right in in this situation you could understand

the questions that the movie asks and wants to answer um i do it's funny like all of the family stuff they do seem like they love each other very much I was affected by it very, very differently, which was just, like, I found it incredibly sad. And they're, they're, the film to its credit, but also maybe to its manipulation, but then also maybe to Elizabeth Holmes manipulation to agree to do it in the first place is very aware that you are watching a family and two small children's and this tiny chunky baby who is nursing Elizabeth Holmes, like with Elizabeth Holmes all the time. And then it's just kind of like slung over her shoulder. in the last time that they're going to be together, like, as children. It's a huge part of the question of the movie is why has this family in this, the most vulnerable moment of their lives, agreed to allow film crew and celebrity Nathan Fielder

into their lives. Nathan, to his credit, seems to be baffled by the decision to allow the family into that, you know, them into their lives. Ask several times. Like, do you want me to go away? Do you guys want a minute? Are you sure? that you want us here

this is your last time before you're going to prison for 11 years. That's her sentence. Yeah. And there's sometimes we see them together when they're talking about their work and they're throwing a lot of buzzwords around

and they're talking in jargony fashion but in the way that the film is cut in this very kind of excited way where there's a montage in particular where it seems like they're kind of building Theranos 2.0 out loud. Yeah. At some point during that and I've only seen the film once

but during that montage I thought to myself, is the reveal going to be that they figured out the technology? I was like, oh, is the reveal that actually Theranos is real? And they fixed it. And, like, congratulations, the world is saved? Well, they're speaking with such excitement and such confidence that at first, it could seem like an insight. Wow, are these people actually pretty smart? And then the reveal is actually like, well, this is, they're con, they're con people in a way.

They're aspirational. They're honors chemistry. Sure. Yeah. They're trying to build something. And the truth is that many people, which is cited by one of the science. who appeared later in the film, who have big dreams and big ambitions, they start saying what they can do before they can do it to kind of manifest something.

And that, you know, if you looked at Elizabeth Holmes in a more generous light, you could say, well, she was pushing us towards an inevitable future that we need to fight for. I don't believe that, of course. But the movie kind of also jostles with that concept. The one thing I just wanted to say quickly about Elizabeth and Billy, too, that I find interesting, is like, you see this in a lot of relationships. Two people who are obsessed with each other, but maybe don't understand each other, but they're obsessed with the idea of being with that person

and that they then like compel themselves to be in that relationship forever. I find that very interesting. I see this all the time, like subjective, from my own subjective perspective. Sure. Yeah.

But I, there were times when I'm watching the movie where I'm like, Billy really loves this person. And there are other times where I'm like, Billy is the biggest bullshit artist in the history of time. And he just wants as much attention as he can possibly acquire so he'll do anything he can, including taking care of two children.

children by himself after his wife goes to prison to prove the point that he needs and desires this level of attention. And I love that the movie jostles with that. This isn't even like the most interesting stuff in the movie per se, but my mind is going to it as we're talking through it. You know, I've found the things that I keep thinking about are like the shots of the kids. Yeah. Which are like used very purposefully. And then I start wondering, okay, but does, did they know that that would be affecting to me? And is part of this campaign here of, look, your whatever you think about, you know, prison or Theranos, you're separating like a young family. That's right. Also, again, this is based on one movie and the footage that was chosen, but I'm like,

I don't know, Billy seems like a good dad. He's offering Nathan Fielder waffles and bagels on a regular basis, which is very, very funny. Very dad coded. You don't offer people waffles. I have a waffle maker. When was the last time that you used the waffle maker? For guests, never. My daughter and I made waffles a month ago. Oh. Mickey Mouse waffles.

That's very cute. We just do frozen waffles because I'm real mommy, not other mommy. I don't think Alice knows frozen waffles exist. Yeah. And she won't learn yet. On the flip side of this stuff is there are moments like the egg beating sequence, which recurs a couple of times a moment where Billy or Elizabeth Holmes is preparing to make maybe waffles. We don't know.

She's beating some eggs in a bowl. Yeah. Maybe it makes scrambled eggs. and Billy, who's talking a lot in this three-person conversation, takes the bowl of cracked eggs away from Elizabeth and starts beating it the way that he believes it should be beaten. Yes. And Nathan, you know, master of the awkward encounter that he is,

asks why Billy has taken the bowl away from his wife while she's beating the eggs. And Elizabeth attempts to deflect by saying, like, oh, he doesn't think, like in a kind way that I know how to do this. No, no, he's... I don't remember who answers first. but his answer is because I wanted her to be able to focus on talking to you. And she explains he wants me to beat them more quickly because then it at,

she has almost like a scientific, like the science of cooking explanation. And it makes them taste better is what she says. Yeah. And. But it's his OCD that is drawing that. And his need for control. Is it his OCD? Is it his just basic domineering?

Let's do it my way. And I say that. There's a collision between those two ideas. And I say that as someone who truly understands the impulse to watch someone doing something, whether it is like my husband chopping herbs or my son putting on his shoes and to reach and just do it myself. Right. You know, because like, can we just? So you're more of a billy is what you're saying.

Can we do this? Okay. You know, all of these moments are revealing. And then we see them like a second time because of where the movie is headed. And you tell me when you think we should get into that. Because what I did was after I saw the film a second time, I just raced home and I just raced home. I was just like, I'm going to try to write down as much of this movie as I can remember, because every incident feels valuable. And in fact, many of these incidents are recreated or discussed in real time in the movie.

And so... Yes, but not yet in the movie. Not yet in the movie. You're still getting... I mean, I do think that there is something ingenious and essential to the experience of the movie as an almost two-hour, if not, like, traditional documentary, but Verite, here is what. what is going on with Elizabeth Holmes, you think that you're just in it, in like, the experience of being with them for the last 34 days. And your questions are about, why are you letting us see this? And what do you want me to see?

Both Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, you know, what is everyone involved want me to take away from this? And then the movie, like, quite literally engages with those questions. Yes. So before we get into the engagement, it's a tale of two halves. Yeah. The first hour and 20 minutes is inside of this home, which I should say is in San Diego and Delmar, a home that they're renting before eventually she has to go on the beach. On the beach. Before she has to go to Texas where she'll be in federal prison. But there's a moment where Elizabeth's parents come to the house and visit one day.

And this is where Nathan being in the movie is so crucial because he can become this kind of interlocutor interrogator of anybody who cross paths with them. Yeah. And one of the more upsetting moments in the movie I found was this comment. conversation that he has with her father, where he talks about, Nathan asked him very frankly, like, why do you think this has happened? Yeah, because he's already asked Elizabeth that. He said, where do you think all this went wrong? Why do you think you're in the position you're in?

And she's like, I don't know. I wish I could understand. If I could, I could fix it. And then he asked her dad the same question. And he says, well, she was raped. And so that's where, that's how all of this happened. Which is just devastating. Yeah.

And the bluntness with which he delivers that verdict. And like maybe it is true. But maybe it is too boiled down to ever understand like someone's psychology in such a simple way. But like the fact that he says that on camera to Nathan, I don't, I'm not. I still don't know what that reveals about the dynamic of their family and Elizabeth's psychology. Right. Because he's also, her parents are not, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. they are obviously of a different generation.

They're very buttoned up. Yeah. Very traditional. I think Nathan, very soon after that in just kind of like a classic whiplash moment is like, so you worked at Enron, right? So good. Which I think is factually true. So it is true.

And but so you're watching him try to keep up with the entire narrative around. like his daughter and this person who he has raised, but has then gone into the world, become a sidepost for an entire generation of an entire way to talk to each other. And then has also, he's been given talking points about like, no, this is like our version of what we think's going on. And you're almost just watching a man who it's like, it's like too much, you know, to, to fully digest and process and interact with. And the, way the parents are filmed the rest of the time, they are, they're not really engaging. They're just observing kind of in a way that, to me, telegraphs regret and dismay. A lot of the, a lot of it is

the filmmaking choice. That montage I mentioned earlier of them kind of developing Theranos 2.0 together, the parents are present for that moment and, you know, they train the camera very closely on their hands and the way that they're kind of like, you know, calming each other, but also stressed and kind of like need to have movement without actually communicating. And that conversation that Nathan has with her father clearly kind of narrativeizes. It puts words to this idea that Elizabeth is a person who keeps falling in with these kind of like manipulative, dominant, in some cases even abusive, older male figures. Yes.

You know, and that, is it Sunny Balwani? Is that his last name? I believe so. who was her longtime partner, both in the Theranos company and romantically, and who was also charged with crimes and, you know, who she puts most of the blame for what she's convicted of on him. And he was convicted of all of the charges that he faced. Yes.

But then as we're watching the movie and we're seeing the way that Billy has a kind of domineering quality and the way that he has like simultaneously maybe fallen into her trap but also taken over at the same time. and the convoluted power dynamics that are going on between them? Well, then it becomes, for me at least, what is the nature of the trap? And there are two specific sequences that are incredibly memorable, one that can versus capable conversation, and then the who's on first. Yes.

That I would like to talk about in great detail. It's essentially what comes next, which is that there is a semantic discussion of a quote that Nathan plays out loud for Elizabeth during one of many conversations that he's having with her throughout the movie. They're all kind of finally cut together. But they are also,

they are at least telegraphed as in the course of daily life, Nathan says, okay, I'd like to sit down and have a conversation with you. I'd like to interview you rather than just kind of doing my observation thing. So they've sat down at a table together

and he wants to ask her some questions. Yes. And so one of the questions that he asks her is about a quote the sheet gives around the Theranos technology that says that they've developed a device that can run any test. Yeah. And that this is the primary focus of her legal troubles and that this is where the defrauding comes in. And it becomes this long semantic discussion about what it means to run any test versus run every test. and the implications that are made by changing one or two words in the delivery in a journalistic setting or in a public forum.

And Holmes eventually busts out all of the tools that she has, like all the broken down pieces of Theranos device to explain literally to Nathan how it might work and what she meant by what she said. And they kind of effectively, like she does sort of convince him a little. bit that she's been misunderstood because maybe she doesn't have because of the way that her mind works, the ability to differentiate the nuance in her claims. Right. And we don't quite know. So Nathan is kind of like chewing on this. And he's trying to figure out, is he being scammed in real time by the way she's talking?

Is it possible that she is like, I think there's a lot of questions of, there's no other way to say this than to be frank about it. Like, is Elizabeth Holmes on the spectrum in some way that she maybe doesn't have the ability to communicate, or she isn't communicating in the way that we are receiving her information, and that if there is this kind of loss of, this inability to connect properly, where two people are not saying to each other what they think they should be saying to each other, then is that enough that someone's life should be destroyed because of their ambition? And this becomes like kind of a central, intellectual question of the movie.

And the way that Fielder chooses to animate it is so funny. And it's such a perfect, like, you need a comedian to do this to make this work. The only thing I want to note about the other scene is that before she gets the device out, she is, he's asking her broad questions about therenos. And she is referring so heavily to printed notes in front of her. Yes. And the camera trains on the notes and trains on her looking down and then looking up. And I don't know what to take from that, whether I'm supposed to take that she doesn't know what she's talking about.

and so she needs notes or whether she's in such legal peril and has been crisis managed into an inch of her life, or she's just nervous or to the point that we're about to do that she doesn't know how to communicate. And has some awareness that she has the way that she instinctively wants to communicate is not getting through to people. Yeah. Though she doesn't seem to have enough of it to circumvent any of her other problems to be discussed in the scene, which I'm glad you think it's funny. I found it incredibly sad. I think it's so illuminating and so, like, I... Well, okay, to me, I found it to be a little shattering, certainly, but also really important.

Yeah. Because as a longtime Nathan fan, Nathan's, I think a lot of his comedy and sort of the brilliance of the way that the schemes in his mind work is this kind of unspoken feeling where we're like, is Nathan on the spectrum a little bit? Like, is his inability to communicate or connect with people in the way that he wants to? Is that sort of his superpower, the way that you hear that described for people who are on the spectrum? And in this scene where he plays the famous Abbott and Costello who's on first comedy routine, he is dropping all of his comedy artifice. He is, like, actually genuinely curious. Yeah.

And whatever the performance of the Nathan Fielder character is has, like, officially gone away. And he's like, I thought of something while we were talking the other day. Yeah. This is the most famous comedy routine of all time I'm going to play it for you. Right. And they watch, did you watch Who's on First as a kid growing up? Were you familiar with this bit? Yeah, of course.

No, because I think to most people, or at least people who spend their time caring about words, then. And I think that's another thing to note here is that we're not doctors. We don't even have to talk about spectrum or whatever, but that Elizabeth Holmes has a number. mind and a science mind or at least wants you to think that. And neither she nor Nathan Fielder follow what is traditional societal norms, which is where Nathan's success and comedy comes from and where her issues come from. Right. So yeah, of course I knew about it. And I know it's like it's a reference as a, it's not just a comedy routine, but a shorthand for like miscommunication. Completely. I'm sure I'm like many,

people growing up, but my dad love this routine, love Adam McChastell. I watch this over and over again. So when he busted it out, I think I immediately knew what he was doing, which was showing you that gaps in linguistic understanding can sometimes lead to extraordinary misunderstanding. And Elizabeth Holmes knows that it's funny or that it should be funny. Right. But Nathan, very pointedly, after they watch it, asks her why it's funny, why people think it's funny. And she does not know. Yeah. Or at least she says she does not know.

And I think he even asks her, what is the name, what is the name of the baseball player on first? She does not know. She says, I don't know. Yeah. She doesn't get it. And I don't think that's a performance. I don't know if it's a performance, but I don't think it's a performance.

I also responded that it was not a performance, that it was like an astonishing and ingenious act of psychological insight. Not even psychological. I guess just internal insight as well as like amazing journalism. Like, oh, this can actually, so much of this can be explained so clearly. Yes. It is him using the Nathan Fielder strategy but not doing the character. Yeah.

Which is where he presents people with a way to kind of draw information out of them by giving them the opportunity to like discuss what they think something means. And it's fascinating and it's also a great insight into Billy who, attempts to be as a sort of like uniter peace broker person in this moment where he's like I'm so glad you've done this Nathan

this is why Elizabeth is so special it's because she's different she thinks differently she doesn't quite understand this in the way that you might imagine and that explains this big problem that we're having

yeah he's like I think this is really perceptive I think it's a really good point and he's really smarmy and at this point we pretty much don't like him but also maybe he's right a little bit. You know, like there is kind of something going on here where you're like, could she be a con woman and also innocent? Like, I honestly don't know. Right.

Same. I don't know. But this moment does isolate for me. I was just like, oh, you know, and sorry to say Billy is right just in this one instance. But like, yeah. There is something different about her. There is something that is not just ambition. and, you know, maybe she's not pathological,

as I understand the definition of pathological, that there's something else going on that I don't quite understand, but that also makes me feel like there is a misunderstanding here. Yeah, you felt sympathy for her in this moment. Yeah, totally. And also she has nursing a child. Right.

Literally, while all of this is happening. I mean, there's a whole, like, postpartum thing, too, that is not even explored that you could, like, very easily, if you wanted to say, well, also at this time in her life, with all of this pressure that she's feeling about going to prison and being separated from her family, plus she's like, I mean, how old's that baby? Six months old? Less.

Then they watch the dropout together, the Hulu show. Yeah. And it's clearly just too much for Elizabeth Holmes. They watch a few scenes. It's edited tightly together, and particularly a scene between her character and Sunny is very painful for her, and she kind of falls back and stops watching.

And the days are counting down. Like we're getting down to the final days of this experience. By this point, Nathan has already moved in. He lives at this house in San Diego. We see that montage of them rebuilding Theranos. And then we have yet another conversation between Liz and Nathan on the deck where they're talking in depth. and she is not breaking eye contact, hardly blinking, and she's trying to be as sincere and persuasive as possible

to get him to believe that she does not believe that she ever did anything wrong. And he asks her point blank, have you ever lied? Yeah. And it seems like she honestly tries to answer, I've never lied. And he starts to say, like, not even like somebody's going to an acquaintance's party that you didn't want to go to.

Like, you never lied about that? And she's like, a bit dumbfounded about how to like answer this question because it's like is she worried that she's going to be indicted for anything she says or is she actually a person

who wouldn't know how to lie? I gotta say my wife is one of those people who's like I don't know how to lie like she doesn't really like she gets anxious. Right. And so

I was trying to figure out like again with Holmes I'm like is was this true? Unless she sort of she attempts to redefine what he means by lies. the concept of a white lie is introduced, and she's like, well, you know, and then that, but a white lie is something that you would use to, like, smooth social interactions,

which is also, you know, like a frequency to which she's not, like, totally attuned as evidenced by what happens next, which is the single most incredible thing that I've seen on, which is then she goes to the beach. Well, one thing, I just want to point out one thing that happens, which is that this conversation is interrupted by Billy and the kids because they want to go to the beach. And the movie creates this series of moments where just as Nathan is getting to the bottom of something, somebody comes crashing in and interrupts.

Sometimes this is a conversation with Billy, sometimes with Liz. But it's almost like a sitcom style editing where like every time we're about to reach some meaningful understanding. Key the curb music. Exactly. And so they go to the beach and Nathan stays on the deck. And seemingly while she's on the beach, she texts Nathan. You can totally see everything.

And the frame of the shot is that you can see her in the background of Nathan is on the deck. She's on the beach in the background because they have a lovely beachfront home that they've rented. And you can see her on her phone. She's not in focus. And then he gets a text message. And he's like, you just watch it happen. He's trying to figure out what it means, how he's supposed to respond. That's so weird.

And he gives her the thumbs up And then they cuts to a shot of her Looking at the phone And almost like Affirming the thumbs up And it's like This is a houseful of very strange people You know?

This is a very bizarre Social environment That we're watching in real time And you know movies very rarely make space For this kind of strangeness at length There was something so Like freeing and beautiful About that though to me

Because don't you feel that way all the time. Every day you just want around and like people make choices and do things and you're like, why are you doing that? Yeah. What's going? You treat me that way very often. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't not text me from like 15 feet away on the deck while I was at the beach and then like do a thumbs up. But you wouldn't, you wouldn't say anything like that. You know, open. I wouldn't say you can totally see everything. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you're the Nathan in this, obviously. Sure. But there is just something I really do walk around feeling

like everybody's just crazy all of the time and I don't understand why they do it and this validation that's not me and that there are just really really weird people out there appreciate it. Yeah, the movie is really good about that. Eventually, the final days arrive. There is a long drive to Texas.

The movie starts to get quite sad where everything is really dawning on Holmes that like she is going to prison. Yeah. Nathan is sitting with them in like their awkward final hours drinking cold brew once they arrive in Texas. Right. And he keeps saying, do you guys want me to get up so like you can go have sex? And then there is a break and then he says, how was it?

Yes. When he sees them again? Her reaction to that too is fantastic. People will have to see this movie. But that also, I mean, that scene, I've been thinking about it for many reasons. But he does again try to do like a Nathan type thing. He has a gag gift ready for her. that he presents, but his heart isn't in it because of...

Right, which he also acknowledges and he's like, normally I do this, but this is not really appropriate. Like, I'm sorry. And, you know, even, you know, you wonder whether that is sort of like a meta-awareness performance, but it is a very interesting creation or examination of the Nathan character in that moment. Yes. And then she says, I left some milk in the fridge for Ivy and starts crying. And that was when I was just like, oh. It's very sad. It's incredibly sad.

Yeah. And the tears are genuine, even if the decision to put all this in front of cameras is to make me feel sympathetic. In that moment, I was like, wow, this is brutal. Or were you just being taken in by this sociopath? Maybe. I mean, the movie consistently confronts you with moments like this. Yeah. Because this moment happens.

And eventually, you know, Nathan and Holmes have this final conversation outside the car. where she essentially is like it's going to be okay to him before she gets into the car and drives away and they go to prison. And I got to say when I was watching the movie at this point in the movie, I was like, well, where do you even go from here? Like, this is over. Like, you've lost access to Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah.

This was interesting, and I'm glad I watched it. Yeah. I wouldn't say I was, like, overwhelmed by how great I thought it was. I thought it was a very fascinating portrait of a person at a critical moment in their lives and also a kind of desaturation of the Nathan Fielder experience in a way that I really liked. And then it cuts to two years later

and almost exactly the halfway mark of the movie. And we're back in Texas, and Nathan is visiting Billy, and something feels different. We see that Billy's got like a Komodo dragon that is wandering around the house. We can hear the ambient sounds of the kids. Again, there's a lot of Lance Oppenheim's filmmaking stuff going on here

with the kind of curious roving camera in places you wouldn't expect. The sound design where you're picking up a lot of audio in outside spaces that really provides this sense of like discomfort, I would say, while you're watching. We see Billy on a gun range. Yeah. And, you know, we've been hearing for years about people moving to Texas,

no state tax, getting away from the government's intrusions into their lives. And, like, he kind of seems like he's becoming one of these guys. Yeah, though he is in Texas because her crimes were committed. In Texas. That's the other thing. Yeah, because Enron, that's right. So that's where she was. And so that's where she is in prison.

So we start to see the venture that he's building up on her behalf. And there's a fascinating interview with one of the scientists he's working with, which is now oriented around lasers in an attempt to rebuild Theranos. And Nathan is attempting to get information about why this, he thinks the scientist thinks Theranos didn't work the first time around. Billy interrupts the interview and comes between the kids. cameras in Nathan, and he's very mad that questions are being asked, that he doesn't want portrayed in the documentary.

And then Nathan becomes very agitated by Billy attempting to control the documentary. And then we can really see that, like, this is going to become the fructive component of the rest of this movie is who's going to have control of this movie. Yeah. We then also see that Billy is in contact with a man named Ryan El Hossani, who is, I don't know if you've seen these billboards up in Los Angeles, but the Elizabeth Holmes billboards with a website called justblood.com on them. And apparently this is a guy who's developing a similar technology,

a blood testing device of his own, who believes Holmes was innocent and railroaded, but also he's involved in some sort of like experimental theater telling her story and, you know, grifting off of her fall. And Nathan is very disturbed by all of this. And Billy is kind of letting it happen and maybe even consulting with this man. Right.

And Billy's... I'm like meeting him in parking lots. Yeah. And Billy's grift is coming to the four, I would say. His business doesn't seem that credible. No. And then I just have to say the sound editing and this, the amount of sniffling. It is quite audible and suspicious.

And then there's a hard cut. Yeah. And we see Amanda Seifred. Yeah. Who is the star of the dropout? Yes. And she's sitting on a couch in her home. Her New York City apartment.

I believe I saw that one, that architectural digest tour. Was it the apartment and not the ranch? I thought I recognized it as the New York City apartment and then later they go to the ranch. I could be wrong. I don't want to docks her here. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was in Architectural Digest. Yeah. It was in the film.

Yeah. And Amanda and Nathan are sitting together and they're watching the footage that he, has captured all of which we've already seen in the movie. Yeah. So some of the most memorable scenes, like the egg beating sequence, for example, or the sequence of watching scenes from the dropout. Amanda Seifred is watching. And, you know, I've been talking about this about her, like, over the last five years,

where I'm like, this is really one of the most interesting celebrities that we have because she seems like she's extremely comfortable with a level of candor that most celebrities are not. And I don't just mean about being like politically outspoken or things like that. She just seems like a little kooky in a very entertaining way. But also perceptive and paying attention. She's smart. She's in Instagram comments, you know? Like she's a poster.

Yeah. She's a little bit of a poster. She's getting involved in a way that like you're not supposed to get involved. And so when she shows up, there's something very like at the telly ride screening where nobody knew anything about this movie. There were gasps. People were just like when we saw her in a way that was so fun. Yeah. And she, I would say she lives up to the billing in terms of what she does in this movie.

Well, yeah, but you don't even know. So when you see this, you think that they've just are scrambling for a way to flesh out the end of it. They're like, we don't have access to her anymore. And so we're going to show Amanda Seiber. And they're watching on a laptop. And her earrings look so great. If someone could ID those, that earring stack for me, it would really. But I just got my ears pierce.

So I was like, that. That's what I want. Okay. some sort of filler. And she has some, and they have a conversation about it. And it is a good conversation. And it's almost like, in the conversation, they're once again finding the third act of the movie

and they realize like, oh, this person, this person has some insights. They have something that she could bring. She's our pathway to figuring out how to continue this story in a lot of ways. And it's in part because she is this incredibly perceptive person. So when she's watching the footage, she's like, and she's talking about this on camera.

Yeah. She's like, oh my God, Billy, like, who would ever want to, you know, no woman should be with a man like that. She's like, you got to find some dirt on him, so they break up. Yes. She says that just like, which is true and instinctive. And she also like very naturally puts herself into the position of the, there is suddenly a like a woman, you know, perspective on this film, which is, which is important. And she is right. No woman would want to see another woman with a guy like that. like red flag central immediately. Yeah. And she's totally activated by the material that she sees. And then she starts talking about how she's becoming intrigued by playing Elizabeth Holmes again.

Now, for Amanda Seiford, who's like an Academy Award nominee and as like a big movie star, you know, it was in the House Made last year. The dropout is the thing that she has gotten the most acclaimed for. She won an Emmy for it. That show was a big hit. And I'm not sure if it's that, you know, everybody's seen Mean Girls. She's been in a lot of successful stuff. but it could be the role that she's most closely associated with. And you can see the kind of like fertile and hungry mind of an actor being like,

there's another chapter here that is so interesting. And I will say she does put herself in some positions to be extremely like heroic and lovable in this movie. And also in some positions where she doesn't not look that great. She looks thin-skinned. She looks a little bit like compromised because of some of the decisions that she's made. In a way that I find is really is a credit to her. that she would allow herself to be included in this way. Totally.

And she's immediately engaging with one of the questions of the film, and particularly her involvement in it, which is that she was like, did I do something wrong by participating in this? And who did I, if I did, who did I wrong? And what are my responsibilities as an artist? What are my responsibilities as an artist versus this project as a documentarian? Or, you know, it's what are my responsibilities as a person, a woman?

And she is defensive of herself. while also definitely engaging with the questions because once again she's a poster. So it's cool. She's so game. Like from the outside and you can feel on that couch that she's just going to go for it, which then leads to just some things

I never thought I'd see on screen. It also just clearly animates Nathan. Nathan is just like so excited by how excited she is to be doing this and they agree to go to Texas together to go to Visibilli. And he kind of clearly softly lets Billy know that maybe, you know, he's become friendly with Amanda and maybe she'll come along. But they go visit Billy and the kids in Texas to find out what the status of everything is that's going on in their lives.

And also to give Amanda an opportunity to confront Billy, it seems, or at least get more information. And at first, this scene is so remarkable in so many ways. But at first you feel like she's been completely cowed where she's like, this is a nice guy with his little. these beautiful little kids. Right. And Elizabeth Holmes calls on the phone. And she's so embarrassed that she's there. Well, and you only get two minutes from the call from prison.

And so they, she doesn't want to get in on the family time. And the kids are like, hi, mommy. How are you? Like on the speaker phone. And they're treating it as such like a normal part of day-to-day life. This is how they are as a family now. And but it's also obviously quite sad. And she's a human being.

So she's like, oh, I don't want to. You have a beautiful family. Your kids are very special is what she's saying on the phone. And then. Even the way she's talking to her kids, I'm like, oh, that's how you talk to, like, your friend's kids. Yeah. You know, where you're, like, talking about their pajamas and, you know, like, what they're drinking and all that stuff. She's very clearly a mom.

But then 30 seconds later, when Elizabeth Holmes gets on the phone, and she's like, did you know I would be here? And she's like, I think I kind of knew or I kind of didn't know. And she's kind of waffling. Maybe she says, I don't know if I knew. Right. Right? which, you know, which Amanda Seifred immediately seizes on. Yes.

And it's like, I don't know if I knew. What does that mean? You know, instincts in the moment. And that's also just fun, like, watching the seams. And she's very much an audience stand in, but she's also showing you how this all works in real time. But also an active participant, because the first thing she does is she calls Nathan over

who couldn't hear what was being said on the phone and says, this is what she just said to me. And so the movie kind of flips into this, like, buddy cop detective story where the two of them are trying to figure out what's really going on after they get off the phone later

they're eating takeout with Billy the kids are gone to bed and they're drinking wine together and the cameras are trained on them just want to note like there was definitely both red wine

and a lighter rosé at some point which just like that is our number one Amanda right there yeah I mean you have an Amanda cohort Amanda you know she seemed like she had a couple of drinks

and she's getting in the mix with Billy in their conversations and we learn a bunch of stuff during this sequence, we learned that Billy hasn't been late in 899 days. Pamela Hanterson. Yes, he's been spending some time with Pamela Henderson.

Which they think is hysterical. Actually, Nathan thinks it's hysterical and absurd, but Amanda Seifred immediately knows what he means by that. That he's been posting as Liz on X.com. He thinks he's great in bed, which Amanda Seifred immediately undermines.

And, like, the most obvious way of like I faked it with every guy I've ever been with, which is like, a tale is all this time. And Billy looks like stunned. He's like so, he's so hurt by the suggestion. This is also what, like, so they are positioned around the table where Nathan is like kind of at the head of the table in the middle.

And he's just sitting there like, magic is happening. And I also don't know what's happening and I'm no longer, I'm just going to sit here. It's just reaction shots of him. They're really good. They're working on a Liz hologram. She'd been photographed previously. in the film, earlier in the film. And so there's attempt to use AI

to kind of regenerate her so that she can participate in the family's house. But also possibly in business projects. Yeah. It's very confusing what's going on. We learned that Billy has power of attorney. We also learned that

he's not afraid to punch back at Amanda Seifred. And as they start getting into it a little bit over some of this, especially the outrage that she has about him posing us her on social media that he says, I wouldn't be taking advice from you, certainly not about social media, because she had just

been dragged for some comments that she had made in the previous couple of days. And then they really start getting into it. We learned that Billy is a Charlie Kirk supporter. We learned that he is somebody who believes he is well-resourced and good at strategizing around how to take people out. He's very unclear about what he means by that.

And Billy kind of pulls the mask off. Yeah. And he seems like a real shithead. And Amanda provokes him to pull the mask off that he's been able to keep on around everybody else. But she keeps pushing. She keeps asking questions.

And she even says something on their way to Texas or before about, just like, no, I'm going to come. People talk to me differently than they would speak to you. And she is quite right. 100% right. And they get so much out of Billy that Nathan never could. And he seems like a really unseemly character after this conversation. Absolutely electric seems.

It's phenomenal. And I mean, and she's like, to Amanda's enduring credit, like, it does not seem at all scripted. You know, I'm now thinking about our friend who is like, can you trust what you see? But in this moment... I don't know how you would do that.

Because you're even cutting to Nathan Fielder who's like, wait, what am I watching here? Like, what's happening? Billy would have to be a world-class actor to make that be an imagined sequence. But also, I mean, such respect to her for just staying in the moment. She is, though.

I mean, she does. She's defensive. Yeah. You know, she really is, like, you can see he's getting under her skin. Of course. He's really bothering her with some of the things that she, and there are times where she doesn't have, like, she doesn't always have the like, boom, gotcha response.

Like, she gets him at first and then he says a couple of things where she's just like, oh, whoa. And then you can almost feel her mind turning over with, like, not what have I gotten myself into per se, but like, am I complicit in something that maybe I hadn't fully considered before this? And that plays out as we go further into the film. One thing I just want to note about Billy that is so funny. And this is maybe just the way he's portrayed,

but he's always eating or consuming something. And to your point about the sniffling, it's like, he's eating pizza, he's eating dumplings, he's drinking a spin drift, he's drinking a cold brew, more cold brew later on in the movie. Yeah. He's just like... The eating kind of undermines my assumptions from the sniffling, but, you know, still. He's a consumer, though. It's really, really, really noticeable. It's very suspicious.

Yeah. Wouldn't be stunning. Yeah. That energy is there. Yes. After this meeting, though, it becomes clear that Amanda will be recreatable. her role as Elizabeth Holmes for the purposes of this film.

And there are a number of ways in which that plays out. One of the ways is that as Nathan starts to describe certain things to her about conversations that were had between he and Holmes that were not filmed, we then have them recreated for us with Fielder and Holmes. Yes.

And Billy, who was portrayed hysterically by Christopher Abbott, the actor. That's the really, really incredible. That was a full guffaw in the theater. The way he is revealed and he enters from off screen is just fantastic. But one of the conversations is about, you know, around whether or not how much she knows about what's transpiring here. And Fielder shows Cyphred a clip of Holmes saying that she doesn't know that she doesn't believe she's being financially compensated for this documentary.

Yeah. Right. And it's not even, it's not that she doesn't believe it. She says, I'm not benefiting financially from this. So why, you know, wouldn't I do like X, Y, Z? She almost introduces it into the conversation. Nathan then recreates the entirety of a business meeting that transpired between Elizabeth, Billy, two executives from A-24, Nathan and Lance. Yes.

Lance plays himself. Lance plays himself. Very well. Good job. In which they negotiate certain terms of the deal. and the meeting opens in a Beverly Hills home apparently with Elizabeth reading from her memoir, which she did not want portrayed in the movie,

which sounds horrible. I mean, it's just so terribly written. The reactions of everyone while that was so beautiful. Yeah, so thank you for sharing that. Back to Amanda Seifred. He was just like, what? That stuff is great. They're sitting outside at this point,

apparently at Seiford's Ranch. And then I was going to say, Amanda goes up, but Elizabeth Holmes goes upstairs because she hears her baby crying to go take care of the baby. And then after that, Christopher Abbott playing Billy Evans then asks for financial participation in the documentary. And then this becomes a crux point because that's not something that Nathan Fielder wants or Lance Oppenheim want. They want to make a real documentary. But then Billy has some points about how there are other films, this is the case where the participants are able to be included financially. A-24, we learn eventually agrees to this. And Nathan and Lance is,

do go forward with the project, but then there becomes this big question of what did Elizabeth Holmes know? Was she a conspirator in this deal or not? Or was she just a person who is yet again aligned with another duplicitous male in her life? Is she being taken advantage of or is she part of the architect of this? I mean, it's notable. So this meeting happens before everything we see in the first half of the film. But they are in Los Angeles at a friend's house, presumably taking meetings in order to facilitate this project. So, I mean, that's, you know, an important... Who else did they meet with?

I'd love to know. Sure. I'm sure other filmmakers, I wouldn't be surprised to learn. You know, eventually, that dynamic between them is wonderful where Cyford is trying to figure out. Is Holmes guilty of something? Is she a victim of something? Nathan confronts Billy about this back in, I believe, are they in New York or as you go back to Texas?

It's unclear. The movie starts moving very fast at this point. We're kind of in the home stretch of the film. And then after he confronts him, Billy is pretty honest with him, even though he seems really smarmy at this point, about how, why he's keeping things from Elizabeth and what he needs to do to kind of keep the train

on the tracks of all their projects. It seemed like they were in like a soulless Austin office park at that point. Yeah, like a we work maybe. Yes, it is because there is then that establishing shot of the woodwork. Which again, another, like, the rise and fall of the WebTech 2.0. And then we have a cut, and Nathan is in New York, and we learned that he's going through a breakup, and he desperately needs to get in touch with Elizabeth Holmes. He really wants to speak to her.

He has not been able to speak with her. He's alone, sad, and disconnected. He's staying in a hotel, and he writes her a letter. And in the letter, he communicates how alone and sad he's feeling, but also how he's thinking about her, and he has some questions for her, and he wants to connect. Because he's concerned about her relationship with Billy and how. how much she's being taken advantage of, and does she know of these things?

Yes. And he is, or at least the character of Nathan within the narrative of this film, has taken on the most sympathetic view of her. That's right. He's being drawn magnetized into her space. He hears from Billy about this, who doesn't want her to talk to him.

Yeah. Because he demands context for what the nature of the call is. He then says that he doesn't want her to get in trouble. If he records that conversation, You don't even know if that's really true, but he suggests that she could be shipped to another facility. Yeah, the warden is not playing ball and I don't want to move to fucking Arizona is a real. And it's so interesting how Billy is handling all of this with like a mixture of a very corporate smarum. Even the, I really need some context for this.

All of this is handled in that sort of like like bloodless HR speak. That's right. With threat engineered And then Arizona's the only time You hear the real Billy like breaking through It's true While staying in the same hotel room Eventually Liz calls

Yeah And when she calls He does not record the conversation But it's clear that it's been transcribed Because the next cut is to Amanda Seifred in a studio Recording the audio with Nathan And he's sort of giving her notes

Yeah On how to do the performance Pullback from the mic a little bit Slow down, take that again Right And the artifice comes to the fore this, so then it becomes, you know. It becomes a meta-narrative about what is the nature of what's been said, you know?

And like the exact issue that he's been trained on her early in the film, he starts getting caught in the slipstream of his own memory about these interactions that he's having with her. And, you know, she draws him in pretty well. And she's very empathetic and she's very warm. And she's like coaching him. I'm like, you're going to find somebody. You're going to be happy. And she's shifting the attention away from herself. and onto him in a way that is...

Right. ...con person moved. And so the whole thing is fascinating. Beilder, after this conversation, decides that he has to go visit her. And this is the final set piece of the movie. So he is going to go visit her in prison using the information that he knows about how Billy operates and on what the visiting day is and how he can get there and have some alone time with Elizabeth Holmes to confront her about what he believes Billy is doing. and just to get maybe even some closure

on this story that he's been trying to tell. And so the way that that sequence is represented is a full-blown recreation, effectively the dropout part two that is a meeting with Elizabeth Holmes in the prison in Texas. And it's intercut with a conversation between Fielder and Seifred

in which she's reading the script that he has written for her to perform. So we get this real-time interrogation of his memory of meeting with Elizabeth Holmes in prison with her asking questions about it. And then we are watching her perform what Nathan has written for her. It's a real mind fuck. Yeah. It's wonderful.

It's like to me it's like the apotheosis of the Nathan Fielder Project. I was like this is, and it is not confusing. No. It's totally cogent. It gives you a lot of room to think about what's actually happening. It's suspenseful. it's fascinating I'm not sure

that we really like learn anything but Seifred in the performance totally embodies Holmes yeah we don't know how accurate a representation it is I tried to do for this movie

what Nathan does for the conversation which is I just raised home and just like wrote down everything I could possibly remember so it's not going to be a pitch perfect accurate representation of their discussion but it feels like it could be close because a lot of what Holmes is doing is she expresses tremendous frustration with Amanda Seifred about the way that she portrays her and the way that the makers of the show portrayed her on the show.

And Seifred is reading this in real time and getting super defensive and sad and looking for the words to find a way to exonerate herself from the feelings that she's having. And she doesn't quite get there. No. And that to me is an incredible insight into this whole project. Totally. I mean, to me, the insight also that the Holmes character, at least in, Infielders' recollection is so fixated on the dropout.

And she even says, you know, in prison, it's just the, like, someone came up to me and said, you're a bad person. I saw that TV show. And that the TV show has overtaken, honestly, anything else that negative that has happened to her in terms of her lot in life. Yes. Which, you know, says then an amazing thing about the recreations that they're doing and also this project. It's astonishing. They pivot the conversation into Nathan trying to.

discuss with her. I mean, there's a lot of wonderful little details about, like, getting her snacks. And she looks longingly at someone else eating food and she wants to have some food. So he gets food for her. And that kind of like the way in which they're connecting with each other or that she is connecting with him. And then he starts confronting her about all these things that Billy is doing. She seems completely nonplussed. She's unbothered. She trusts him completely. And then she pivots the conversation into the nature of their love. And the way that their love is intertwined with like what she thought faith was supposed to be is actually like God is just their love and that like they're building monuments to each other and all of this stuff that we've also heard Billy say on the other side.

Yeah. That she trusts him implicitly and that they're connected in a way that we will never understand. And it doesn't seem untrue. It doesn't seem they may be deluded, but it doesn't seem like a lie. Yeah. And I'm like fascinated by all of this. You can see Amanda Seifred in real time is kind of like, what? Does this mean?

Like, how could they possibly be so enthralled to each other? Or, like, and then Nathan, you can almost feel him feeling like maybe he failed in his quest to get to the bottom of what was really going on with this person, with this couple, with this most stage of their life, with the nature of all these big ideas that are at the forefront that we're talking about here. Amanda asks at some point, like, are you protecting her? Is that why you don't want to commit to X, Y, Z? So it's, I mean, it's so beautiful that she is also there as the interlocutor for the audience. And for anybody else who's like, why aren't we answering these questions? But then there's this other thing that kind of swoops into the movie that has always been there the whole time that is an absolute feature of every Nathan Fielder project, which is that he portrays himself often comically, but also with a bit of sadness as a very lovelorn, alone person. Yeah.

who's always looking for connection and romance in the female figures and the stories that he's telling. You don't need to know that when you watch this movie to see that the movie is sort of telling you, like, did Nathan also become ensnared in Elizabeth Holmes'? Right. You know, like her tractor beam? And Amanda Seiford is also realizing in real time that maybe he did. And she's questioning him about it. And then...

But also the tractor beams. not for him, as he learns, because in his recollection of the Elizabeth Holmes conversation in the prison, she's just only talking about Billy. That's right. And then Billy eventually arrives. Yes. And the family is reunited in the prison, and they're going to have some time outside together, and Nathan leaves.

Yeah. And then the film closes with two very memorable images. The first is Elizabeth in her jumpsuit in prison with the kids playing, and she's being tracked from outside the gates, and then she sits down with Billy as the kids play together, and they are the picture perfect family behind prison bars. Yes. And then a second cut to Nathan and Elizabeth swimming in the ocean together back at the home in Del Mar.

And I just want to say the score that Ari Belugian does for the movie, especially on all of the beach sequences, is so reminiscent of the score from the master, the Johnny Greenland score, specifically the instruments that he's using, like the block and the sort of like the chime sounds. And this is sort of atonal music. And it does feel a bit like the master where you've got like two people who like are in love with each other maybe or maybe one of them is manipulating the other one. And it felt like such a, such an echo to me of that kind of a story.

But that Fielder and Oppenheim would choose to end the movie on this moment. Yeah. Where is it Fielder imagining a happiness with this con person? Is it the potential for true love? Is it a representation of like what could have been? Is it the last time Elizabeth Holmes was ever free? Like, you're going to read so many things into it. She's leading him through the water.

And I think that that scene is the conclusion to a conversation that's showed in the first hour, which is about how she wants to go to the beach and he says, I'm afraid of cold water. And she's like, I'll help you. And then she is kind of grabbing his hand. It's so funny, though, because in my, I forgot that shot. It's very affecting. But in my mind, the last shot is the shot through the prison.

of the family. Right. Which is how the movie opens is her in prison. Yes. And that she's been imprisoned and is it her fault or is it someone else's fault? And then we see it again. She's in prison. But that's not the way that the movie ends.

And then the movie does become a movie about Nathan. Yes. And not about her and not about Billy and not about Amanda Seifred. Phenomenal choice. The second time I saw it, because the first time you watch the movie, there's so much information. And I give you so much credit for having such a grasp of the material, like having seen it over a week ago. I mean, you have a. a script here, not like a script, but you're, this is very useful, much like the notes were

useful to Elizabeth Holmes in that scene. But it is funny also, what stays with me and what I remember is very different than the emphasis that yours is. When you sent me this script, no mention of the kids. That's true. And I was like, that's what I've been thinking, you know, and it was funny, the things that stayed with me. And you're right that the movie.

And the movie is very much about Nathan. And it ends on Nathan. But to me in my head, the movie ended with that shot of seeing her family through the prison gates. I don't know whether it's a happy ending. I don't know to me. Well, you know, and even that's it. Here's the perfect family. And like they're all together and it's a perfect love.

For Nathan, it's not. For them it might be. Right. But again, I don't know whether I believe it. And so, you know, the question of what am I supposed to believe? and is she being taken advantage by more people, including maybe the filmmakers, though I don't think that she is

because she, you know, was participating in this, but it raises the questions of, is this person in control or is this person not in control of anything? I still don't know where I stand. The movie is called You Can See Everything. Yeah. But I think the movie is about how we can't really understand everything.

And I... I'm not saying that I don't know as a criticism. I said that's one of the exciting things about the movie and one of the movie that the questions asked. I just, I interpret it very, not very differently, but the emphasis points to me are very different. I mean, it speaks to me specifically because I've spent my entire life and career being a person who's like, I understand. Yeah, I know. You know, and I'll let me explain it to you.

Like, that's my whole personality. So to be presented with things that complicate that and shatter that so deeply is just really exciting. And also just that it, like you said at the beginning, it speaks to the act of trying to make a documentary. The purpose of this is to reveal something. And we learn a lot. But do we really get to the bottom of anything? And I don't know if this was true at your screening, but at mine, Nathan and Lance, Nathan in particular was like, I still don't really know what we did or went through and like what it means. And I'm still working through that.

And to your point about the children, I don't know if Lance and Nathan will come on the show. I hope they do. But I wanted to ask him how they felt about. including the kids, and whether or not that was a decision even that they would consider, like, trying to get between Elizabeth and Billy and say, like, are you sure that you want to do this specifically? Right. Because it's such a fraught circumstance with going behind, going into prison and, you know, like what their lives are going to be like for, and now what their lives are going to be like after this movie, which is obviously going to just make a huge impact on the culture. Right. And a lot of people are going to see it.

I told you I, like, moderated a conversation between Lanson and Nathan. when I was in New York for the movie. And, you know, the people who were in the screening were, like, the most famous people. You know, I was just like, this is going to be a huge deal. Oh, yeah. And it's going to put her right back in the center of the world for at least a period of time. And I feel for those kids. Like, I don't feel great about that, you know?

Like, I don't know. But by the same token, I was like, they seem like good parents, you know? Like, there's something really fraught about all this. They're visiting every Saturday and they were playing in the lawn. You know, it's, and the kids seem. They know how to talk to her on the phone? Like they clearly talk all the time. Totally.

They have a routine. This is their routine. This is their way of knowing their mom. So it's, they seem okay. Such a fascinating thing. And then the decision to include them ultimately was the parents. Because I don't even think that they could be featured without a release. Yes.

So then you begin to wonder, if I feel bad about it, why do I feel bad? Do I feel bad because I don't think the kids are okay or do I feel bad because I feel like being had by these people. I don't know. I mean, maybe they're being used as props, or maybe their kids will be just like them. You know, there's no way to know. It's an amazing choice to pursue this.

You know, Fielder said that this started in 2023, and that the story that Lance has been telling is that they went to the magic castle together. Did you tell this to you guys? Yes, yeah. And they were in the close-up magic room, which is one of my favorite rooms in all of Los Angeles, the close-up magic room in the Magic Castle.

And another chill I felt after I'd watched the movie there telling this story. And one of the magician who was performing in the Magic Castle called for the name of a famous person so that they could perform their next trick related to that person's name. And someone called that Elizabeth Holmes. And then that led to a conversation between Nathan and Lance. And then they had both heard that Elizabeth Holmes was maybe shopping around for the chance to make a documentary like this.

And that led to them making this movie together. But specifically the choice of her for both of these filmmakers Who I think are both Can be quite humane and can also be quite cutting about humanity And a lot of Lance's docks You see people in a very raw way But using her as the microscope Into all of this stuff that we talked about at the top of the episode

Could not be more perfect And you know we haven't really talked too much about the filmmaking But the filmmaking changed a lot It's amazing It's like a three camera setup in the house It seems like originally they were trying to make it like a pure Lance movie with this really deep focus shot on anamorphic. And then they had to change it to be a little bit more like the way Nathan would do it with a lot of coverage.

I mean, Lance said that they realized a few days in that they just were missing everything that they wanted and they just completely changed it. I mean, he worked on this with David Boland, who is his cinematographer on all of his projects. And looks really good. That's another thing. Our Q&A was with Bill Hater, who was just like, hey, why does this look so good? How does you do this? Yeah. I mean, it looks like a landstock to me. like they all really look good. They have this really like profound, deep, subjective gaze on the characters that they're looking at. But he also, you know, he does these great kind of Altman-esque slow zooms throughout the movie where you can hear something happening and something, you're watching something else on the screen and the kind of the conflict between those two ideas or the synchronicity of those two ideas.

A lot of shot, reverse shot, a lot of like, we're over Nathan's shoulder. We're over Elizabeth's shoulder. If you feel like you're in the middle of a conversation and that is very intimate, you know, Elizabeth Holmes's face is just kind of captivating. She's just a great subject for the camera, you know, that unbroken stare and that the, the, she never gives away the game. There's no irony. There's no sarcasm. There's no bitterness. She is just an open subject.

She's not looking for an out. Nope. She doesn't find. It's almost like she doesn't experience awkwardness, which does also seem to be Nathan Fielder's superpower at times. Making people feel awkward. Yes. Yeah. But also then just not breaking eye contact or.

or wanting it out of the conversation. No, completely. It's like it's the immovable force versus the unstoppable object. I think people who interview for a living, including my husband, would tell you that that actually is the secret to being a good interviewer and asking question is living with the discomfort. And that, you know, that most interviews, especially like in the podcast era, just don't really want to give you the discomfort because no one wants to sit through it. but if you just sit there, someone's going to fill the silence. It's true. You just have to endure the silence.

There's a huge difference between the video-audio version of that and the written version of that. Yeah, totally. And this is interesting because Nathan leans into the awkwardness in the filmed version of that, you know, which is very rare, as you say. Yeah. What a movie. Absolute banger. Really, really cool. I think is rewarding on second viewing because you're not.

as like wow. I will say it plays a little bit more durational for sure because there's a lot less like oh wow happening in the moment but you can really focus on the choices that they're making in the edit which makes the movie more impactful.

Amanda Seifred, legend forever. Can she be nominated for an Oscar for this? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about what's going to happen with this movie. It's opening in 800 theaters. I think it's probably going to go

to $1,500 in the following week if I had to guess. That's just a guess. I hope so. And then it's a real proper wide release movie. It has a chance to be one of the most successful documentaries, roughly of the last 10 years. We had a period in the 2000s. You know, some of the Michael Moore movies are really huge. I don't know if it's going to quite get to that level, but it is like a true word of mouth sensation style movie. Let's say for the sake of conversation, it gets to somewhere between $25 and $50 million. That'll make it one of the biggest docs last of the century. She should be eligible. She is eligible for supporting actress. She's giving a performance. Yeah. I think she'd probably be nominated more for what she achieves when she's not acting in the movie in a way, where her finest work is as a person experiencing the circumstances of this story. But her acting is also brilliant. Yes.

Has there ever been a documentary? What are the rules of, what are the rules of acting within the confines of an Oscar nomination? I don't think she can get nominated. I'm not. Do you mean like according to the rules? Yeah, like the Academy's rules. Okay, well, let's pull them up. I'm looking at them now.

I'm trying to figure this out specifically. I thought that there was word that she could be. I thought that that had been reported. This is interesting. I'm learning here that Amanda Seifred publicly denied being involved in the project. They're really trying to hide this one. If she can't be, that's interesting. I would say that it's a mistake.

Performing in a recreation is absolutely a performance. Yeah. There's a bigger question. here too about how the doc branch will receive this movie versus whether or not people will perceive this to be a best picture candidate. I thought Matt Bellany made it the great point that this could very easily go into best picture and not in best documentary, for one reason, because there are 10 best picture slots and only five documentary, but also the documentary branch is particular, shall we say, and resistant to celebrity documentaries in all forms.

If I had to put money on it today, I would say that that is what happens. I agree. That it does not get in a doc and that it has a chance, like a legitimate strong chance to be a Best Picture nominee because of the amount of attention and excitement that the movie is going to generate. I could be wrong. A documentary has never been nominated for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. But this is something beyond a documentary. I completely agree.

Also, I think the last five years that the Oscars are changing so rapidly that everything is on the table. I think it'll happen. I don't think it'll happen in documentary. And then maybe they'll finally reconfigure what's going on in that branch. That would be a fascinating confrontation with that. You know, you mentioned the A24 thing, and it's like they've got the debut, they've got Club Kid, and they've got what's the invite. Sure.

They've got a lot of contenders. I genuinely feel like this movie is at the front of the line. Yeah, I think so. I mean, some of that is recency bias right now that we're just like we're in the season and we're, what, three weeks? out from Primetime, which is also a hit and, you know,

Robert Pattinson coasting on all of this goodwill and press into a best actor. Totally. I could see it. Yeah. So I think this and the invite

are probably still tied. I can't tell whether people over 55 are going to like this. Like, I don't know whether my dad sitting down. My dad, who is like a very sophisticated filmgoer,

is going to quote unquote get it. I don't know. The other thing to consider is that Nathan Fielder is a very specific flavor. Yeah. And if you're not, you don't have to be all in, as you said, earlier to get this. But even still, you're on the ride with him the whole time. He is your true guide through the movie. So if you don't love him, then it's not going to be as effective.

Because he lives in a kind of awkward, cringe comedy space, for lack of a better phrase, that not everybody loves. But I think as an interrogation of celebrity and truth and a big national news story, this holds a lot of appeal broadly. So yeah, man, we'll see what happens. Good job, everybody. Yeah, you guys did it. You can see everything. You can see everything in the movie theater.

Any closing thoughts? I'm so mad if people listen to this without seeing the film first. People do it all the time. Well, I just, I don't approve. the audience for the social reckoning episode was unusually high relative to the engagement with the film at the box office. Yeah, of course.

The same is also true of the Digger episode. Like I said, we get a lot of looky-lose. Yeah, yeah. Did we say that, so, Billy, did we talk about the cards at the end? Oh, no. Because... Good point. So at the very end, it is revealed, as we discussed,

that the New York Times stands by at story but never produce evidence of the quote, nor did Billy and Liz. That shortly before the film was released, Billy renounced his profit participation in the film. At our screening, they shared that Billy had still not seen the film. And I'm just curious where that's going to go.

I mean... He's been posting about it on Elizabeth Holmes' account. I have seen that. Yeah. You know, In many ways, one of the lessons of this movie is that this is wonderful for him. It makes him more famous. Yeah. It makes him more well-known in a certain kind of way, which is clearly something that matters to him.

He can speak about his political ideas and his ideas on the future of tech more easily because he will be the subject of a great many interviews in the aftermath of this movie. The way that he handles it versus the way the subject of Lance Oppenheim's other movie, Chris Hansen handles it. be interesting. Yeah. There's this new tactic when you become the subject of like an unfattering portrait in the media of like responding to it in a way in a very grand eloquent way of being like, and now it is my time to reveal my verdict on the thing about me. I suspect we'll get the same thing from Billy.

Yeah, but with like more of a shit poster flavor, I would believe. Would it, would A.I. Elizabeth Holmes video be surfaced to respond to the contents of the movie. That seems totally plausible given what we see in the movie. Yeah, we live in hell. We do. As evidence by this film. I just tried reading as much of the Academy's specific rule set to every award. And I can't find any language that is for this specific issue.

So I wonder if it's like uncharted territory gray area kind of thing. I think so, but I think that's good for Amanda. Yeah, for sure. I mean, even better. Even better if we have to have some sort of like rules of engagement discussion about what is and is not a performance in a film. I look for it. It's great for us as well.

Okay, thanks for listening. Let's go to my conversation now with Judd Apatow. For the first time, Judd Apatow is here. Very nice to see you. Sorry, I'm sorry. It took so long. No, that's okay. Long Island Brethren. So we share that.

Huntington Station. Dad moved to Huntington when my parents got divorced. Wow. And there was like this old, maybe it was an elementary school, and they turned it into condos. So it was like my dad lived in a classroom. Wow. My dad left Huntington when my parents got divorced. So we traded Dad Space.

Let's talk about your movies because you have a, you have two, two docs right now. And I'm, I'm fascinated by like your pivot to this. I think it's, I think these are your fourth and fifth full-length documentaries. I think more. It might even be like. I was going to say about comedians. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, you know, obviously you've got the Ava Brothers film and you've made the film about our beloved Mets.

Yes. But like, comedians, I know when you were a teenager. that you sought them out and interviewed them. Exactly. And now it feels like on this side of your life, you're sort of doing a similar act. I know. I just realized that recently that maybe I'm mirroring the time when I was 16 with just more, you know, money to do it, you know, with cameras and budgets.

What's still drawing you to them? It's a good question because when I was a kid, I just so wanted to know how it worked. And I was looking for a way to talk to people directly. So, you know, when you watch a star on TV or if you love comedy, you know, you'd think, God, it would be so fun to talk to John Candy. So it was almost like I was manipulating this high school radio station that we had to meet people because my friend, Josh Rosenthal, he would do it with musicians and he would go, you know, interview R.E.M. in, like, 1983. And he was like, you should try to do that with comics. And back then, you know, there was, you know, there was no internet. there wasn't a lot of long-form interviews happening.

So if you called up and wanted to talk to Jay Leno, and he's just playing rascals in New Jersey, he doesn't mind giving you an hour even though you're a child. And so most people said yes, like 50 people. And I would just say, you know, how do you do it? How do you get on stage? How do you write jokes? How do you direct?

I interviewed Harold Ramos right as he was prepping National Lampoon's vacation. He was literally in his office prepping, which is so weird now when you think about it. And he just walked me through everything. And people would be so nice. And then years later, after I dropped out of film school, I realized I had learned more talking to these people. Although now I do realize I did learn things at film school.

Every once in a while I'm like, oh, yeah, that's from when I took Sid Fields class. When you were, I mean, were you 15, 14? Yeah, 15, 16, 17. Were you nervous in those environments? A little bit, but I was kind of like a lunatic, I think. You know, I think like when you're young, maybe you're genetically programmed to figure out

how you're going to survive in the world. And it's funny because I'm just finishing up a documentary about Billy Strings with my friend Chris Wilcher, we're directing it together. And he's, you know, one of the great guitar players in the world, bluegrass, but he can play everything. And I was thinking, why am I interested in this? And I think it's also because he had this slightly,

you know, driven aspect to him of like, I need to survive and I need to skill. One of the things that I really like about the comedian documentaries is that you seem very interested in their humanity, like who they were as people. Yeah. And you explore them in different ways in these two movies.

But when you were a teenager, did you feel like you were thinking about these people as people or just these sort of like ends towards understanding something you were obsessed with? Yeah, I don't think those interviews were emotional. Okay. It was really like, what was Saturday Night Live like in 1975? I mean, I hunted down almost all the original writers from Saturday Night Live.

So I'm interviewing, you know, Don Novello, who did Guido Sarducci and James Downey and all those people. And but I didn't know to ask them about their lives and their feelings because I didn't know what life was. I was just a kid. So I probably couldn't even make the connection that, oh, this pain in your life led to that. And when people would open up, I didn't really know how to handle it. And I always remember interviewing Harry Anderson, the great comic magician con man from Nightcourt. And he started talking about his childhood. And I don't even know if this is true.

But he started talking about his mother turning tricks and this rough childhood. And lately I'm like, was he making all that up because I was a kid? And it was just funny to shock me. But let's assume it was true. I didn't know how to have the conversation about how did that affect you. And that's what I'm interested in now. So if I talk to Maria Bamford, I want to know how her life made her this brilliant comedian. So which of these two came first, Norm or Maria?

Maria came first. I always wanted to do something with Maria Bamford. I wasn't sure what it was. In the beginning, I would try to get her to write something or think of a movie idea. and she never would do it. And then she had her TV show Lady Dynamite, and one of the episodes is about me trying to get her to make a movie and her refusing, because she just, you know, she walks her own path.

And so then in my head I thought, maybe she should do like a one-woman Broadway show where she takes the best of all of her jokes and tells her life story. And that would be pretty amazing. And then one day I thought, I think it's a doc. I think it's a doc. And I called my friend Neil Berkeley who did the Gilbert Godfrey documentary, which is amazing.

And I said, let's try to make a doc with Maria. I'm going to call her and see if she'll let us. And I called her. And I said, could we come over tomorrow and just start? And she said, you can come over, but you have to bring me $500. And I said, why? And she goes, because nothing ever happens. And my time is valuable.

And it's a way of showing myself respect. And it's kind of a beautiful notion. Of course. And also, you know, a veteran of the bullshit of show business. Totally. So, you know, we went to her house. We just started shooting. No one was financing it, which is kind of how you had to do it because we didn't know what it would be.

We wound up following her around for three years. And I gave her the money. She was very happy to get it. And then in the middle of our first conversation, the doorbell rings, and it's CVS delivering all of her antidepressants. And then she started just going through her antidepressants and what they do. And it just started this conversation, you know, about comedy and, you know, mental health challenges.

And then while we're following her around, just so many massive life events happened. And she, she handled them so gracefully and with such strength. So on one hand, we're telling a story of how hard it's been for her. but then you, you know, you get to see in real time how much she's evolved and how strong she is. So, you know, it ultimately becomes very hopeful and inspiring. You know, just hearing you pitch the idea of her doing a one woman show in which she puts her best bit, you have such a great producer's mind. But I feel like with documentary, the approach to producing it, you just have to be much more open to just things unfurling.

Like, how do you think about balancing the kind of polish of show business that you really understand with the ethic of documentary? I just said there are certain documentaries I always loved, so I'm sure they're in my head like The Devil and Daniel Johnston, you know, something like that. It's a very good comp for this movie. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the great ones of all time. I love the Scorsese documentaries about George Harrison and Bob Dylan. That was another big inspiration for the two-part doc

where you could take the really deep dive because a lot of the problem with docs about artists and performers is they're too short because, you know, You know, you just can't cover Mel Brooks 99 years, now 100 in two hours. Right. And I think, Gorsese was the first person to go, I need almost four hours to cover Bob Dylan. And we were all happy about it. And so not all of our movies are two-parters, but we've done that with George Carlin and Chandling and Mel.

And then you can really slow down and get a sense of people. Yeah, there's something interesting about those first three where obviously Mel is still with us, but the other two feel very retrospective. And it feels like you're trying to piece together what those people meant to you and what they mean to the history of comedy, whereas Maria is still working. You know, it's still an active comic.

Like, did that change the way that you thought about portraying her or what kind of, how to put her on screen? Yeah, it's completely different because I didn't know her that well. I just knew her from, you know, doing comedy with her over the years. And I didn't know what we would find. So you're trying to be sensitive to just taking it in. And then over the years, you start going, oh, I think this is what this is about.

But you don't know in the beginning. In the beginning, it's just history. And I wonder what will happen. So you think, well, we'll follow Maria around. Maybe she'll work on a new act. And we'll see how it develops. And we'll intercut this story of how you write a set with her history. And then very early on, it became clear, Maria wasn't going to let us do that.

Like, that's not kind of how she works and, you know, the way she writes. You know, she doesn't want us paying attention to the creative process. So she wasn't like, yeah, I'm going to do all my new jokes here and here and here. She kind of was like, that doesn't feel right. You know, so then we're finding ways mainly kneel to, like, go around the country and see her work. And then it becomes something completely different. which is she was dealing with, you know, several, you know, very important deaths in her family. She was affected by the Altadena fires, and we got to see, you know, as it happened.

And it's very moving. And it becomes unexpected, and you feel very close to her. And the funny thing about it is, you know, she's talking about intrusive thoughts, that she has these OCD and intrusive thoughts, which basically, basically means where you might be driving in your car and you can't stop thinking about it would be terrible if I hit a chipmunk. That, to her, expands another 25 levels. Right.

And I think when I watch it, when people watch it, I think most people think I'm like Maria. Like, I have those or I have depression or I have something. And she may be a larger version of it, but I'm really relating to these like daily mental struggles, you know, that I go through. And so that's something that was also surprising to me, that it became very relatable. Yeah, you didn't perceive that before you started making the doc, that that would be something. That it was about me. That's usually what happens. All the work is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, on some level, you go, why am I fascinated with this person with having mental health struggles? I'm not depressed. I don't want to know the answers or how to

survive. How does she feel about it? Because it's very, you know, her work is also vulnerable. And she has like a real kind of meta-consciousness, I think, about how she's portraying something that she's struggling with. But watching yourself in such a raw way, especially going through, as you said, these sort of like tornado of personal events that happened to her during the making of the film. Yeah.

Can she watch it? She does, and I think she loves it. And I didn't know is the truth. She's written books about these stories. She's basically told all these stories in comic form and her stand-up. So the idea of her telling them, the true story and then showing how it became art was a big part of this. But to her, it's kind of funny because what she says at least is, well, I lived it and it's not even that interesting

to me. You know, she like laughs. She doesn't like say, that's devastating. She's just like, yeah, that happened. Yeah, that happened to me. Yeah, I remember it. Yeah. So you're just showing me something that I went through. Also, no self-consciousness about it is interesting, too, because you'd feel like some people would feel just a little awkward about sharing those things, but maybe that also doesn't, Well, the whole thing is about sharing all of it. Right, right. And you really want to get someone that wants to do it. I think that sometimes you see these documentaries and they're clearly PR pieces.

If anything like, that's what Pop Star was about. The movie that, you know, The Lonely Highland did. It was about a certain type of Justin Bieber-esque one-direction documentary that was just a fluff piece. And so, you know, their idea was what if that went terribly wrong and everything went wrong while you were making the fluff piece? And so I'm always looking for people that will tell me the truth or a family that will allow me to go deep. You know, Kelly Carlin, George Carlin's daughter, she said, my dad would hate this if you didn't go all the way. And Shannon's cousin and the people from his estate, you know, we're comfortable with, you know, telling that story. But I think most of the time there's someone saying, you can't.

Or there's a person saying, I'm uncomfortable with that piece of information. And it's very rare that you have the ability to be completely honest. And I think I've gotten very lucky with that. I want to talk about Norman relationship to this specific question. But is it better, worse? How different is it if you do or do not have a personal relationship with a subject when you're making a film about them? You know, I'm not sure because I think the people that know them

could maybe judge how we did. So with the George Carlin documentary, you know, his daughter, Kelly, who's amazing, was very, you know, involved and became. a key part of telling the story, so she was really happy with what the story was. But I don't know. You know, with Shanling, I kind of know how I did because I was close to Gary. With George, I hope we did it well, and I'm glad that, you know, the family thinks that we did. And yeah, it's different because it's also, I'm trying to figure out someone that I don't have

observations from life. Right. With Gary, I had some observations, some turned out to be correct, some not. But I had a lot of experience with him. And, you know, with Norm, I didn't know Norm that well, but I knew him for a long time. You remember when you first met him? How I met him was he just moved to town. And this would be around 89, 90, I think.

And I saw his HBO half hour special. I think they were called One Night Stans. And I was just blown away. I just thought, this is the funniest guy. and this attitude, just all of that. Everyone's why you just fall in love with the comic. And I was always coming at it as a fan. I just love finding someone that I enjoy more than anything.

And I remember taking the tape out and showing my roommate, Adam Sandler, because I was just so excited that this guy was this funny. And Adam watched for a while. And he's got great taste in comedy. And he just went, I don't care. I'm trying to get famous. So, yeah, let him go. go do his thing. I got work to do. And then, of course, he became the biggest Norm fan, and he's in all the movies, and they toured together.

Of course. But I was, you know, very excited, like, this is one of the greats. And that's kind of how I was as a kid. I would see a comedian on TV, and I would track them like they were athletes or something. Yeah. And so then Norm and I get hired to write jokes for Roseanne. And this is like right around the national anthem era, the peak of Tom and Rosanne. And I had written some things for Tom, and now Rosanne liked the specials I wrote and some jokes for Tom. And so me and Norm, you know, went over to her house and, you know, we would go there, like, and not many times, like, on a Sunday and sit at a table like this. And Roseanne would bring out, like, a stack of legal pads with joke ideas. And she just starts going through these concepts. Like, you know, one of the concepts was this. because we would have to turn it into a routine. She's like, I want to do a bit about how it's better to suck dick than kiss ass.

Because when you suck dick, it's like it's a deal. It's a negotiated deal. I will do this and you will do this for me. But when you kiss ass, you're doing it with the hope that they'll give it to you. And so then, you know, we would. She had a special comic mind. Brilliant. Amazing.

And it was truly like the peak of her powers because it was right at the, you know, it was like the Beatles in 1964. The show boom. And she was so funny. Yeah. But we're young and, you know, we're trying to write for a 40-year-old woman. And Norm was so great that very quickly she just said, I'm going to put him on the TV show, Roseanne. And so now he's gone.

And I'm doing it by myself for the next year. And then maybe within the year he got hired. by Saturday Night Live and was doing update shortly after that. So his thing really took off. Were you in touch with him at all after that period? I asked because my experience of him is so represented in the film,

which is so mediated by just watching him in short form. You know, that like our relationship, like I'm like so many people in my age, just such a massive fan of it. Just the most influential, funniest person. And but, you know, when he passed, everybody was just like, what I do is to comfort myself. I just watch him on YouTube.

Exactly. We all had that experience. But if you were crossing paths with him and watching him kind of work behind the scenes without the persona forward, what did you guys keep up in that period? Well, Adam, you know, left to do Saturday Night Live. You know, one day he's like, I'm going to Chicago to audition for Saturday Night Live. And then two days later he's like, I'm moving out and so I'm in the apartment alone. Adam left all his stuff.

He literally didn't even take his stuff. Like, I still have his driver's license and his wallet from 19. 1991. And I would go visit Adam and see Norm over there. And then hear from Adam how everything was going. And I wasn't like a big part of that scene, but I certainly was like trying to watch. And oh my God, springsteen's on.

And I fly in to watch the show. Sure. I remember seeing Bonnie Raite. I remember all the people who were the musical guests. Like what was that band that sang groove is in the heart? Oh, D-Lite. I saw D-Light. Sure.

But I remember going to see Adam and then Norm was there. And I said, hey, Norm, you want to write some update jokes? Because we used to write jokes together. I'll help you write some update jokes thinking that's his job. And so we go in his office and shut the door and there's some newspapers. And we both are just looking at the newspapers. Maybe I pitch him a thought. And literally after like two minutes, he goes, hey, Judd.

and I leave and I'm like Norm, I'm trying to help you I thought you'd need jokes for update and he's like, I want to leave It is perfect In terms of trying to capture him These two docs are very different

It's kind of structurally stylistically where this is, there's no talking heads It's entirely archival Why did you do that? I think the idea was that we're not going to really figure out completely who Norm was. And even his closest confidants are not going to tell you.

And even they probably couldn't really make it clear and probably don't fully know. Just because he was a fascinating person. And, you know, even like everyone that went on the road with Norm, you know, they all love Norm, but they would still say, I don't quite get it, like what all the motivations and levels are. because he was so smart, but in a devilish way sometimes, didn't always tell the truth, was provocative, and so it was hard to know exactly who he was. And so the thought was, well, we're not going to crack that code, but we could make a documentary

that shows what Norm put into the world. And maybe by arranging that, you would get like a sense of who he was. to what Norm says about his novel, which is it's not true, but hopefully it adds up to something even more truthful. And so that's what we did. And as, you know, we researched, we found that Norm would talk about himself, but it would be like all over the place. Like, you know, he says something to Mark Marin on WTF that feels truthful. And then you would listen to like an interview from morning radio in Maui. And for some reason, Norm opens up for an hour to just some random morning crew.

And so, you know, piece by piece, we could figure out maybe what he was thinking at times. You know, he was sick for nine years with cancer and only told a few people. And if you look at all of his work over those nine years, you can see what's on his mind. And he's doing jokes about cancer, but it's happening to other people. And you're seeing that he's opening up and he's becoming this more spiritual person, the more loving person, but he's not telling you why it's happening. The movie is really interesting because you frame him so well,

and it's sort of a literary device as an unreliable narrator, like where we literally don't know from moment to moment if what he's saying is true about whether he has siblings or what experiences he had or, like, very specific things that seem like they would be verifiable. And yet he has this kind of like Mark Twain character quality to him, which is just so unusual in contemporary times. Because nobody is a mystery.

Everybody is just in your face all the time. Like, they're so willing. So I'm kind of curious, like, did you feel like you were, were you withholding what you felt to be truths that you know in order to create, like, an interesting perspective on him? No, because I don't think that even while I made it, I got an enormous amount of new stories or insights. You know, sometimes when you make a documentary,

you find out things you didn't know, shocking things. You know, the George Carlin documentary, Kelly talks about being in bed and her dad being like on drugs and laying with her and talking to her. And some of it is very like unsettling. Yeah, yeah. But with Norm, I did talk to all of his friends. I definitely like did the research to try to get more insight. And I kind of landed at Norm was just this kind of brilliant, funny, strange, mercurial guy who love jokes, who loved being a part of.

of comedy and loved his family above all else. And at the end of the movie, you see this footage we found of him with his mom and his son. Incredible. And you've never seen him more at peace or happier. And I just thought, oh, that's norm. You know, he has other gears. So it wasn't like all this other stuff came up that revealed this other thing.

It was, it seemed to me simpler. Do you have, like, is there effectively a team of archival producers who were hunting for? any living material of him that exists. And then how are you guys going through it and figuring out how to construct something like this? Because it's so different from camera on Maria. And then we'll use what we get from Maria to sort of stitch together a narrative. Yeah.

I mean, there's like six months or more where we're not even starting, where people are just looking. The funny thing with Norm is, you know, I went online and I said, hey, if anyone has any Norm stuff, send it to me. And people had videos and photos with him. And some people had stories. the first thing we did is, you know, I said, okay, let's print every tweet he ever made and read them and see what was in there.

It was like 25,000 tweets because he would watch golf and do play-by-play for three hours. It's like he didn't care if he lost all of his followers because he was just doing this thing that would just, you know, stuff up your feed. And then, you know, we had a whole team of people transcribe every episode of his interview shows. And then at some point, you need a group of people to read everything and recommend because,

you know, I can't watch 300 hours of stuff. So you have to spread it out and know, what in those tweets do you think is worth us paying attention to? And then, you know, they might go, here's a thousand to look at. And then that process is happening. But literally last week I saw a clip of Norm I had never seen book before. that was really funny and bizarre that I thought, ah, I couldn't, I didn't get that in. Do you have a favorite norm joke? I mean, I think about the old ones because it's when I really came to, like, love what he was doing.

And I don't know what, you know, the words were, but he had that bit about how no one talks about the Doberman anymore. Everyone's afraid of the pit bull, but what about the Doberman? Yeah, that's really great. I was wondering because you're making these movies now, I feel like for the previous 10 years you were seen as like the ambassador to and the explainer of comedy, of contemporary comedy. You've had such amazing success in making comedy movies and television shows

that people always come to you and they're like, what's going on? What does it all mean? Where does it stand? But I also feel like maybe in simultaneously, you're trying to chart it more sociologically or historically with the docs. Like, do you see it as part of a process

or, like, a mission that you're on in some way? I mean, it's just instinctual. I, you know, I'm really into, like, pop psychology. You know, I'm obsessed with, you know, therapy ideas. And it's partly, you know, started with Shandling. Just his whole thing was, like, why do we behave the way we behave?

And that's what the Larry Sanders show was about, just getting to the core of people and their motivations and, you know, what life experience led them to wear the mask that they wear. And that's what Chandling has always talked about, that just everyone is wearing a mask and is putting on some kind of character. And it's very rare that they're completely honest and the mask comes off. And that's a little bit what all these documentaries are about is, you know,

how people of all kinds use art to make life okay or to answer questions or to heal themselves. And, you know, I've done that in, you know, writing movies, you know, like funny people, or this is 40 or, you know, King of Staten Island where it's the same process. And with the documentary, you're just dealing with what exists. And you're looking at a real person, you know, so if I'm, you know, writing with Pete Davidson, you know, we're, even though it's fictional, we are just sitting down going, how are you doing and how did you get here? And what do you think is going to happen next?

Like, how can you heal? You know, what would it take? And that's a big question whenever I work on a screen. play with someone else, I just say, what do you think your problem is and what would it take for you to get it and make a change? Those movies are so interesting, funny people, and this is 40, because they are so transparently personal in so many ways. A lot of the choices that you make, who stars in the films.

And then it did feel like you made a kind of a transition to looking for other vessels to help figure out, maybe some of your own stuff, but also tell their stories. I'm just kind of curious, like, why you made that decision to start working with people like Amy or with Pete to make movies like that. At some point you feel like you've really mind your vein for the things that trouble you or built

you. And you're just waiting for more stuff to happen to have another one of those. Yeah. Yeah. And also sometimes you write something. Like I wrote a movie you know, around COVID time and I worked on it for years and then it just fell apart. And you go

oh, that would have been the next one like that. Oh, okay. And I just, you know, for a bunch of reasons, I couldn't get the whole package together. Why is that, that's another thing that I think people maybe would be confused by because you're you. Yeah. So why would a movie that you're working on that is very personal? Like, why would a movie like that fall apart? Well, it was, it was probably a little edgy because it was about comedy and why certain things are funny and why certain things are offensive.

and it had a very specific casting idea that when that fell apart, it literally couldn't be made without the person. Got it. And I couldn't crack because I had just tailored it so specifically. Yeah. And that happens every once in. You realize, oh, I just lost years.

So I'm usually balancing, working with people, writing my own stuff, and then certain things happen. And if nothing's happening, I'm also making documentaries and I'm just kind of going with the flow. Did you feel like you were able to tap into some of those ideas and feelings through Norm? Because that's something that he obviously, at times, he would explore stuff with bits that was on the edge that made people really uncomfortable. And he always kind of managed to dance through the raindrops a bit because he was so revered for his, like his wit and his intellect. But I don't know if that was something that kind of drew you to that too.

I think unconsciously, you just think, why would I want to talk about Norm for years? And you don't really sit and ponder it. You just know you want to. And then in the aftermath, you go, why didn't I even do that? I mean, we all love Norm. But to spend years thinking about Norm, is that what most people are doing.

And then it has to be personal on some level to go, I want to understand that mind and that humanity. And, you know, it's funny, I did a show with Norm a couple of years before he died. And it was at Largo, and I do a show there once. month and it's always for a different charity. And Norm was there and I hadn't seen him in a while. And he had a great talk and then he went on stage and he did this set. And, you know, he was funny as

always. And then at the end of the set he gets like very emotional. And you could see it. It looks like he's like beginning to cry. And he says something along the lines of, you guys are so great, but now I got to go over there. But you guys, I like it here, but now I got to go over there. And then he says, I don't know what to say. I love you. And he walks off. And, you know, we're all kind of blown away. Also because we don't know he's sick.

And that might have been part of it where you want to know how did he get there. And so that's the last moment of the documentary. Because it is an arc towards love in some way. And George Carlin had that as well. In most of the docks, you see people, you know, you go through your life and you're crazy and you're trying to get ahead and you have all these battles and some things go well. Some things are terrible. But on another level, you're having the spiritual journey to figure out, you know, what is the point of all this? And hopefully for most people, the point is connection and love and, you know, being there for other people and finding your purpose.

Carlin and Norm are such interesting contrast in styles because, you know, I also loved obsessed over Carlin and listened to everyone. record and watched every special. And, you know, he felt like as he was getting older, he was getting angrier and more ferocious and more unsparing in his comedy. And Norm, as you say, like, something softer kind of entered the frame. And I'm curious, like, what you make of that. Like, what's more consistent with comics that you've observed over time? Well, the funny thing about George Carlin, you know, according to his family, is while he was getting darker, he was getting lighter in life. So he wasn't the bitter guy. Yeah. But he would go on stage and go, it's a big club and you're not in it.

And he saw something. And what's interesting is when we were making the George Carlin documentary, me and my partner, Michael Bonfiglio, we were like, should we make this montage of current visuals over him talking about America, the American dream, and this famous routine? And we're like, is it too political? Is it too much our politics? And we thought, no, I think we should do it because he's talking about something very specific that seems to be occurring, which is this idea that the whole idea of the government caring about you is an illusion. And you don't even know what the real reasons for anything is. And they're very happy for you to have sneakers with lights on them. That's what you say.

You have two political parties and 36 flavors. I always think of if you're pre-born, you're fine. but once you're born, you're on your own. Exactly. That's one of those things that he had so many insights like that. Well, all these words, too. He was always talking about like these Orwellian words, even just like Trump saying,

let's call it super intelligence. Like, you know, he was very aware of that before anyone talked about it. Yeah. And I think that he got some comfort in giving up. Now, we don't really know what his full intentions were because my instinct is by telling people the system's not fair, and you don't even care, and you're not going to do anything about it, it is a call to arms, but it's like a mocking you call to arms.

It was like challenging you, yeah. Like, see, no one cares. Don't even pretend you care. Yeah. But I think down deep, he wished everyone cared because he was a hippie. Yeah. Well, you'd watch him on Larry King sometimes, and you feel like he would remove that a little bit and would be like frank,

but kind of doing the material, but not as jokes. Yes. And it was much, it was more nuanced in that way. but it's just a fascinating to put them side by side because they're both, I feel like stand in similar, they're in similar standing where people are just like, I don't know how this person did this, but one was so dark and one became more light. Or they're both equally dark in a certain way. Right.

I mean, you know, George Carlin was talking about a certain kind of corruption, which is now laid bare for all of us to see. So he would have said, all your politicians are ripping you off. It doesn't matter what side they're on. And then we look at and go like, yeah, the Democrats trade stocks too. Yeah. And that's the most painful part of George Carlin is he attacks both. Oh, yeah.

And he indicts the entire system. And, you know, there is an aspect with Norm that is dismissing the system. And he was asked about his politics. He said he thought it was funny that people thought he was more right-wing. And he kind of leaned into it because it provoked them. Yes. He got a kick out how mad that made people. But he also said that he agrees with a few things from each party, and it doesn't make any sense that anyone would pick one party.

And that seemed to be where he really stood, which is it doesn't make sense. You know, that like I have to, if I want to be a conservative financially, I have to be violently anti-abortion. Right. And so, you know, he would always say that he wasn't preaching. He also would talk about that he didn't seem to like comedy where people were. were just venting all their emotions and their pain, which I always thought was funny because we all love Richard Pryor. Right.

And so, but that was a funny thing with him where he said, it's all about the joke. I'm just trying to make you laugh. And so even the opinions, you're not sure because he's just trying to get you. Yeah, he does, but then you go looking for the opinions. I mean, it's a good thing about the film is that you do go hunting for intent and feeling and what did he really believe, even if you can't ever figure it out. You know, you mentioned Larry Sanders earlier. Larry Sanders and the Ben Stiller show are turning 35 next year.

Jesus. Cable guys turned 30 this year. 40-year-old virgin turned 20 last year. Even train wreck was over 10 years old. Do you think about the body of work and legacy and those things? Because you've had obviously a very big impact over the last 40 years on American comedy. I was saying to something yesterday, you get to a certain point where you go, if I die, the real will be good.

You know, if they had to do a little real, like a special sad, you know, the thing on the Emmys, you know, there'd be some good jokes. Yeah, sure. So that's a big accomplishment. And they'd be different. It would end with Martin Star turning on the TV by himself for sure. Yeah, yeah. But it's funny because, I don't know, so much of it is driven by insecurity and the lack of self-esteem,

which is a real engine for, I got to make another one. That didn't make me feel solid. And so it's kind of positive and negative because you shouldn't feel that way about yourself. You should be able to appreciate that some things made people happy. I relate, obviously, and a much lower level I relate.

But recently I had to rewatch knocked up and this is 40 because they're preparing the 4K versions. Wonderful, great news. So I had to watch both of them and I hadn't watched them since the day they came out. And it's not really on purpose.

You know, I'll look at an Instagram video or something. And I'm not even sure why I don't. It's not like a theory or anything. You know, I'll watch the movies I produced more. So I'll watch Step Brothers all the way through every time I see it. But for some reason, I'm just like, ugh. Is it because you think you would have done something differently, or is it too personal?

It's almost like going back in time and having to, like, experience something. Good and bad, mainly good. but just, I don't know, it just feels very powerful and emotional. So my instinct is to not do it, which is probably dead wrong. It's a dumb instinct. So I had to sit through both in the same day. And it was hilarious because I'm watching and I'm just cracking up. I'm just laughing so hard because to me, they're perfect because everything in it is what would make me laugh.

It's like if someone from the outer space made a movie that would, like, The AI knew me so well that every joke would make Judd laugh. And I just sat there laughing. And I had literally forgotten 80% of it. Like, I didn't know what was coming in terms of the jokes. And I was so amused by how funny everyone was, just as an observer that everyone had, like, the eye of the tiger. Yeah. Like, no one looks like they're walking through it.

No one looks like this is movie 30 and they're cash in the check. They all look like it is life or death. comedy time, whether it's, you know, Leslie or Sandler or Seth or Craig Robinson, just whoever, you know, you're like, God damn, are they rocking it right now? And I felt a distance from it where I could appreciate, like, look how funny Hegel is. I think that when we were watching those movies, we felt that same level of like, you know, you talked a lot at that time about the way that you would direct and throwing lines at people and being, you know, more open to things unfurling in real time. And then when we became aware of that as viewers,

then we almost felt like we were watching that happen in a way in a way that didn't interfere with our enjoyment in the movie. But you know, you're working on a movie that's coming out next year. Like, do you still have the same relationship to directing? Do you still do things the same way? How does it operate now? Yeah.

The movie, I'm just finishing up, is called The Comeback King, and I wrote it with Glenn Powell. And it's about a country music star in Free Fall. And it was funny to do it with Glenn, because Glenn hadn't made a movie that way. And he's a great writer. And so, you know, I said, you know, we're going to work really hard on the script.

But every day we're going to shoot the script and then we're going to toss it and do both. And it was fun watching him acclimate to that because he was amazing at it. But to see the letting go of this isn't a one-plan shoot. Right. It's like, we're going to shoot the scene. Then we're going to loosen it up. And then we're really going to loosen it up. And we're going to just see what feels right.

Because, you know, as soon as people are on the set, it feels different than when you're in your room and your underwear. And as soon as they start talking, you're like, oh, now I know what he would say. And so I wanted to be able to, you know, tap into that. Yeah. To take advantage of it. And then you hire people who you have a feeling that they have a lot to give to it. You know, so, you know, Kristen Miliotti is in the movie and Madeline Klein and they're just so funny. And they have a lot to do, they think of that I would never think of. You know, I'm always I'm always aware of, you know, I'm not Kristen Miliotti, how she's going to react to Glenn Powell in this funny romantic scene is going to be interesting.

And I probably can't even anticipate it. So I have to talk to her about it and rehearse with her and let her play in addition to the thing I thought she would do. Interesting. What happens when somebody isn't good at it? You don't have to name any names, but I'm just kind of curious, like, how do you figure that out when someone can't roll with it? Well, hopefully they don't have a really big part. I haven't had it with someone who's got a huge.

part. Because usually we can tell. Yeah. You know, sometimes you might get a day player where you go, oh, I thought that would hit harder than it did. But it's rarely in a moment, you know, that's essential. But also sometimes the day players come in and they're so funny. Yeah.

You know, in this movie, there's a comedian who's from England named Jin Howley. And every word out of his mouth, he's like tearing down the house. And he's a, you know, I mean, he's a. He's originally, you know, from China. And he's just very gifted, but also does it, has never done it before. So he doesn't, he doesn't have that stress because he's never made a movie and have it come out and been judged. So he's in that perfect place of pure inspiration. And it's really fun to see someone just take off like that, where you go, oh, this is, this is like a McLevin, Melissa McCarthy, you know, Christmas Plus situation where people love this person.

and they have no idea who he is. That's exciting. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? Do you watch a lot of movies these days besides your own? I watch, yeah, I think I probably do watch a lot of things. I'm trying to think, what is the last great of everything, movies, TV? Anything.

Just watch a documentary called Mind Over Murder on HBO Max. That was a multiple parted, and not just a group of people who all, except for one, like six people confess, and they didn't do it. And it's just fascinating. I mean, it's funny because there's so much crime on TV, and I watch so much of it. Do you? But I also know that it's like knocking out our ability to get all of the things we want, like Errol Morris movies and things like that. But they are endlessly fascinating because it's human behavior.

Right. And so, like, you know, at night sometimes we'll watch, like, date line and we'll go through, like, we go through the list of the date lines to see which ones we've seen, which is like almost all of them. And then we're, like, trying to decide, like, who we want to see murdered tonight. Like, oh, I don't want to see that kind of person murdered. Let's see a grandpa get murdered. You know? But yet, every once in a while, somebody does something incredible. And I'm looking forward to this, this, this, Nathan Fielder.

Yes. Oppenheimer movie. Have you seen it? I've seen it twice. Yeah. It's in your wheelhouse. Yeah. It's in everyone's wheelhouse.

It's the thing you're describing, the human behavior thing, and also comedy. And so maybe more documentaries like that. Judd Appetow, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. That's fun. Thank you to Judd Apatow. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support.

As I said earlier next week, Whale Fall, Sense and Sensibility. best picture power rankings gotta make some room I want to introduce another idea around the power rankings by the way I want to start doing cross-offs movies that we are eliminating from contention

They're out? Yeah They're voted off the island Yeah Can we get some sort of props? Yeah what do you say? Can we? What kind of props?

I don't know something where I could like actually Visibly throw the name you know Off the table I'll take a look at the budget You don't want to cross it out You want to throw it out?

We don't have the telestrae yet. Yeah. What's up with that? You're going to get I can't speak? Yeah, sure.

Whiteboard? We'll figure something out. Should we do the whole all of a sudden episode on a whiteboard? That would be awesome. We should actually do that. That's a good idea.

We're like we're standing and we might have to have lob mics. Okay. People will find be able to see my legs. That'll be a huge thing. They can see them now.

That's true. They can see everything. Okay. Bye. Bye.