The Bill Simmons Podcast - Celts-76ers, Kanye's Fall, 'First Man,' and the 2017 Oscars Fiasco With Van Lathan, Damien Chazelle, Joe House, and Sean Fennessey | The Bill Simmons Podcast (Ep. 429)

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Immediately after watching the Celtics-76ers season opener, HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Joe House and TMZ's Van Lathan to talk 2018 NBA speculations, the NBA's generational progression, nightclubs, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Drake, and more (2:38). Then Bill sits down with Sean Fennessey and Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle to talk about his new film, 'First Man', the actual moon landing, 'La La Land,' 'Whiplash,' taking creative risks, and more (1:01:50). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download the SeatGeek app or go right to SeatGeek.com. Taping the first part of this on a Tuesday night, we just did the Ringer's NBA Preview Palooza. We did 12 hours of content. All of it is now available on our YouTube channel, on our Twitter channel, slash feed, which is at ringer NBA or at ringer. You can check us out on Twitch.

You can check us out. Some of the Instagram stuff. We did some great stuff. Culminating a live watch tonight. Celtic Sixers. Vane Lathan, who is not, you haven't been on this podcast yet, right? I have not. You have not been.

It's my first time, man. Sweet. So he was in the live watch. We pulled him in. Joe House is here. Joe House has done an incredible amount of content today. I'm honored to be here. You haven't really been fed, have you?

No, I'm hungry. I'm legitimately hungry. We're at the point of the evening. We did multiple things on the Ringer channel live. Live. But we also taped something for your podcast. House of Cards. Then you taped something else for your podcast.

That's true. And now we're here after a two and a half hour live watch. Yeah, he was talking about Popeye's chicken. You know how you know somebody's hungry when they see a commercial on TV and they go, damn. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was Popeye's also. You like Popeye's?

Oh, I'm an enormous Popeye's fan. It's documented Popeye's. Loves the Popeyes. So coming up, we're going to talk about what we saw tonight and some other stuff. And then a little bit later,

the Oscar winner, Damien Chazelle, came out with me and Sean Fennessey in an interview we taped yesterday. It was really interesting and really good.

So that's all coming up at First Pearl Jam. All right, it is Tuesday night. We're between games here. We're taping this at 742 at night Pacific time. The Celtics beat the Sixers. The Warriors are getting their rings as we speak. Van Lathan is here. Joe House is here.

He's hungry. Yeah. So all the ringer people, we do that live watch, and they're all trying to start Celtics shit after. There's no way the chemistry and all that stuff. I will say I did. They benched Kyrie. people we do that live watch and they're all trying to start celtic shit after right there's no way the chemistry and all that stuff i will say i did they bench kairi i mean kairi was terrible tonight hopefully it was an aberration they benched him the last four minutes jalen brown sits out in crunch time in favor gordon hayward right rogier and smart were fantastic and yet

you know they're out of the game in the fourth quarter. It was the first time I was like, oh, man, we actually have enough talent here that this actually could become a problem. What was your takeaway as a Laker fan who hates Celtics? Well, first of all, I don't necessarily hate the Celtics. I just. I hate the Lakers. I despise the Celtics with a seething White House. For me, I'm, the only sort of positive I could take away

from the game is that it's all going to blow up in you guys' faces. I know that the ship is sinking. We're polishing the brass on a Titanic.

It's all going down. But seriously, all jokes aside, if I'm Kyrie Irving and I came to Boston to be the guy that closes out games because I didn't want to share the ball with the biggest basketball star, maybe in three or four, whatever. That's got to sting a little bit that they don't need you to close games for them, that they have a guy who does it a little bit better than you.

I think Tatum was getting any shot he wanted. He was scoring in the half court. He was scoring in ISOs. a little bit better than you. I think... Tatum was getting any shot he wanted basically that whole game. Tatum was getting any shot he wanted to. He was scoring in the half court. He was scoring in isos. He was scoring in transition. He was doing whatever he wanted to do. And he was showing some dimensions that, you know,

maybe Kyrie doesn't have. No, come on. I'm not... When I say doesn't have, I mean, like, Kyrie Irving is a fantastic one-on-one ISO scorer. I'm looking at this situation and I'm going, maybe perhaps there's got to be a change in the guard in Boston at some point.

Maybe he shouldn't be the guy. House loves this. I really love it. The stark difference between what I would say Tatum, Smart, Rogier, Brown. Those guys look like they played in the conference finals two weeks ago. It looks like they took a two-week break. Which they basically did. Yeah, and came in firing on all cylinders. There was no shakiness to any of their games.

Roger especially looked incredibly confident. Smart's always going to look confident. Love that guy, man. And watching him grow up in the playoffs in the second half of the season last year, you don't want to see him take a step backwards. You want to see that young guy keep getting the ball and keep getting this chance to shine, man. You want to see him keep building on it. So this is the challenge for the Celtics.

Now, I will say we're doing this one game punditry. One game. Which is 48 minutes. No, it's one game overreaction stuff. Yes, exactly. But it was seeing all the toys under the Christmas tree at the same time. Really, man, that's a lot of toys. Yeah.

What do we do? I can only play with five. Right. They still won the game by what? 17 points. I know. You know what I'll say? The game was never really in doubt.

There was never a minute where I was like, oh, the Sixers really have a chance here. The Sixers are going to have to shoot lights out to beat that caliber of talent. Now the Celtics, by all estimates and expectations, are either the second best or third best or fourth best team in the league. They're in that conversation.

They're right there. I didn't look at a box score until right now. My guess was that Rozier's plus minus was going to be great because every time he was in the game, the Celtics just played better. He's like plus 22. Plus 22 in 27 minutes. You got five minutes for that guy, man.

Smart was only plus three. You got to be on the court. Yeah, look, it's going to be a work in progress. i think i was the most surprised that they relied on and played hayward as much as they did because he looked pretty rusty and he was playing crunch time it seemed like they're trying to show him some faith i think yeah part of that is when the game wasn't in doubt and you know when they had a nice cushion you want to see him get his timing back get his rhythm back and make sure that he that he because part of coming back from an injury that's that catastrophic is having faith in your body and having faith in what you're able to do.

I know he's been working really hard, and he wants to make sure he gets the game burn that he needs. That's a positive thing, though. You want him to feel that way. It's a positive thing unless you're Jalen Brown and you've heard the whole summer how good Jason Tatum is and your contract's up a year sooner where you can start thinking free agency and you start thinking like,

maybe I should go somewhere where I'm more appreciated. I don't think that. I'm worried about that. I'm worried about that storyline. This is Bill's overreaction Celtics situation. No, no, I'm just,

we look so good, I have to overthink it. But I am, I have worried about that Jalen Brown thing this summer because it's been a lot of, even we were talking about this

when we were doing the live watch. Tatum, Tatum, Tatum. Next day, he could be the MVP someday. Guy's amazing. Just give him the ball. He's the go-to guy. And Jalen Brown's like, I'm right here. Like I told you, his first two seasons were, he actually had a better first two years than Paul George. Every statistical slash playoff experience checkpoint, he's further ahead. Now you tell somebody that, like, get out of here. I'm like, all right, go find me any statistical evidence,

game evidence, anything that Jalen Brown is further ahead in his career than Paul George is. But nobody would ever talk about that or make that case. That also comes with an assumption that his ceiling is the same as what Paul George's is right now. Do you think that you can make that case? I absolutely think you could. Really?

I do. I do. I do. I think athletically, because Paul George wasn't a scorer at all those first couple of years. I'm saying just ceiling. He could score though. He could,

could a little, but I don't, I think what he's emerged into, I think would have been optimistic after two years. He'd be like, oh, I think people thought of him more as like, oh,

that guy's going to be a great defender and he'll be able to shoot threes, hopefully. He's just not, he's never going to be, the difference is size. He's never going to be as big as Paul George's. He's never going to be as tall as Paul George's. Well, he's like 6'8". He's 6'7", yeah.

Yeah, but Paul George's 6'9". Yeah, 6'9", that's what I think. Right. I just look at Paul George as a rangy two-way player that has like, Paul George is an elite NBA player. And I'm not saying that Jalen Brown won't be that, but what I'm saying is like, at this point, Tatum has obviously showed.

The ceiling's higher for him. There's no question. He's a different type of guy. Is the ceiling as high for Shaq's jacket right now or no? Did you see Shaq's jacket tonight? He's been getting killed on Twitter too. Well, Shaq, Shaq's jacket right now or no did you see Shaq's jacket to me he's been getting killed on the twitter too well Shaq Shaq's now becoming too heavy yo like I'm actually starting to worry about our heavy Shaq say something I was at big guys shouldn't be that heavy I was at Shawnee's crib like two weeks ago yeah and you know talking to Sharif when he was talking about

everything oh yeah yeah yeah and so Shaq comes in. Did you ever see Avengers Infinity War? Yeah. You see like the Infinity Gauntlet? That's what Shaq's hand looks like. Shaq's hand looks like, I'm not like, Shaq's hand, Shaq is so big. Like Shaq comes in there. He's like, Shaq is, it's a hilarious picture of me.

I'm 6'4", standing next to Shaq and standing next to Sharif, looking like a tiny dwarf person. Shaq and standing next to Sharif looking like a tiny dwarf person Shaq is gigantic he's huge and only getting and only getting bigger man yeah I mean but a lot of it seems like it's muscle though I'm not even gonna lie I remember I did a podcast with Dr. J once and I shook his hand and like my whole arm collapsed in his hand his hand was like all the way from my fingers like to my elbow. I've never seen anything like it. I believe it. So was it nice

to have basketball back tonight, House? I'm so excited. It's just the best thing in the world to see. We came in. We were stunned by the Ben Simmons. So House and I bet

this triple-double thing was 12 and a half, which we're going to get. He didn't get it tonight because it was a blowout. But I don't remember what the MVP odds were. And as we're watching that game,

we're like, man, that would have been a nice dark horse pick. The old Ben Simmons averaging a triple-double for a 55-win team. He had 15 rebounds tonight. 15 rebounds? He had 15 rebounds. And athletically looks just the highest level. What was a stark difference in caliber of play,

and I don't want to hyperbolize too much. There was a big, big difference between what I saw out of Ben Simmons and what I saw out of Joel Embiid. What do we attribute that to? Van, make your point about Joel because I thought it was a good one. The Celtics. Or was that Jason's point? Somebody made that point.

Which point? I don't know. It was Shea. Shea made that point. When we're doing the reactions when we're at the end of Livelash. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's like, everybody in the Celtics was going at Joel with a real gusto. They had a purpose to make sure that he did not get off. And they took it personally. People don't like the antics of Joel Embiid.

I tend to like him a little bit. Well, for what you do for a living. You need Joel Emmons. Yeah, he's gold. He's the number one overall draft pick. Yeah, he's the number one overall. He's tweeting at Rihanna. He's doing all kinds of things that we can carry off of the court. So I tend to like it.

It's almost like he's the puppet and you're the puppeteer. Exactly. And you're just telling him what to do. I like that type of stuff. But it's annoying, obviously, if you're an NBA player. You got to be on the court with him. And this guy's talking all of this jack so they he's gonna get that from people i didn't like the way he behaved during the playoffs and in general i think we've entered this weird era of player empowerment slash player player player people for the players which i like

but now we're excusing bad behavior what did did you not like about him? I just thought Embiid was a baby in the playoffs last year. How so? When you lose, like, go stick around, shake people's hands and be a man about it. He like, you know, he's bitching at Baines the whole time. And then he just stalked off right after. It's like, come on, you lost. Like, go shake some hands, dude.

I didn't like when Isaiah did it 30 years ago when he stalked off when the 91 Bulls- Or when LeBron did it. They killed LeBron for it. Yeah. Remember when LeBron lost to the Celtics, left the court, didn't shake- 2010.

Yeah, didn't shake hands. Stick around, shake some hands, man. Right. Yeah, I get that. You know what I liked about tonight, about the NBA being back? What? Guilt-free sports watching.

Because I'm so torn about the NFL. It's such a tough thing with the NFL, and I haven't been watching the NFL the whole year, and I'm a gigantic football fan. I love my Saints. I love them to death, but I haven't been able to watch the NFL because of everything that's been going on, and everybody else is watching it.

I'm catching people telling me Patrick Mahomes is the mixture of Joe Montana, Aaron Rodgers, and Goku from Dragon Ball Z. Like everybody's telling me all this stuff, and I haven't really been seeing it. I feel like I'm missing such a huge portion of sports conversation to know that tomorrow I'm going to be able to talk about and enjoy everything. And that's dope to me. Like I've going to be able to talk about and enjoy everything. And that's dope to me. Like, I've been missing that with the NFL.

The NBA is kind of giving me, I'm back. It feels great to be able to watch this and not feel any sort of political deal at all, man. That's interesting. Guilt-free. So it's so funny to me, like me like house and i are basically the same age how the nba has shifted over like the 45 years of my life especially like when we really loved the late 70s early 80s and it was like this league that was basically going out of business you know and i was like all the players are on cocaine and and then it kind of flipped back during the magic bird jordan and then in the 90s

it started to flip the other way culminating in the spree well thing and i was like these guys are out of control i ever seen all those dudes and then it started to come back and then the artest melee happened and then it hit that dip again now it's like at a at a level i i just never imagine choir boys man they they're nice guys for the most part like i mean obviously you still get some but these are nice guys they handle their business as well as anyone in any field that is in some sort of public eye but also like they're just so famous and so popular and like we were talking about ben simmons like we knew all the people he was dating yeah that was not the case in the in the early 80s.

Spencer Hayward dated Iman, the supermodel. Nobody even knew that. By the way, that's so funny. Great pull by him. So funny that you bring that up. I'm looking with David Bowie passed away, God rest his soul, when David Bowie passed away. He was married to Iman.

Right. And so I'm looking up Iman because I go on these weird Wikipedia runs where I'll look up David Bowie, and then I'll look up Iman. And then I see that Iman because I go on these weird Wikipedia runs where I'll look up David Bowie and then I'll look up Iman and then I see that Iman has like an older kid that's not one of David Bowie's kids and I'm like oh who is this person with I'm like

wait what yeah I'm like huh I never knew that I never knew that that's not that's one of those things that people never talk I never heard that sure I feel like my dad would have told me that but he missed it I think this is the first time I heard. I think I knew they dated,

but I don't think that I ever knew they had a kid together. Yeah. Cause if you took, I mean, one of the great, most fun questions ever is if you just put Wilt in a time machine and just stuck them into right now. Loving it.

But Wilt was like taking out actresses left and right. And nobody, it was all in the down low. Nobody knew. He was so ahead of his low. Nobody knew what was going on. He was so ahead of his time. He would be incredible right now. Wilt moved out here and fucked everybody in LA for like 10 years. Every actress he-

He was literally ahead of his time. He just notched it down. But nowadays- He'd be perfect for this era. TMZ, that would be- We would know everything. Wilt finally polished off his last Kardashian. Because think about what Tristan was.

Think about Tristan, man. Tristan, God bless him. Was just on the road in DC in a club. They caught this dude on surveillance camera video acting up rough. You 16 fam. You're not going to get away with it. Well, here's the thing with will, will wouldn't will would be tmz's best friend because he'd be like oh what time am i coming in here today to tell you about what i

did last night yeah like you wouldn't there wouldn't be a surveillance nobody would be saying oh i wonder what wilt did wilt would say oh here's what i did here's here's who i was with you guys could be like well can we put a camera in your house just to see and just in the doorway that's it he's like sure yes just monitoring you are welcome so when wilt moved here he bought this house in bel air on like the top of some mountain in the one of the bel air canyons and like had this famous architect build this amazing house the only reason i know this is the house was for sale a couple months ago i just i saw that and the person the whoever many people owned it they didn't really fuck with the house right so it's still like kind of wilt's house and it's just

a 70s brady bunch bachelor pad that was like oh my god and uh it's incredible it's online if you want to go look it up but just just will bringing ladies up i mean it's literally like that old uh larry david episode it's literally the house that Cumb built. Right. Oh, my gosh. Put a blacklight in it and you just go crazy, man, even now. You know who really benefits from the NBA? This is a complete LA thing.

You know who really benefits from the NBA season starting? Guys at LA clubs. Why is that if you were if you are at if you are at an la club right so if you're going out to poppy nightingale one oak all of these places yeah the moment the season ends uh-huh all the nba players come to la.A. They vacation, right? They vacation for a little bit. They go wherever they go, ride banana boat together, whatever, and then they come to L.A.

And when they come to L.A., they take the clubs over. Game over. Take them over. Yeah. You think that you're doing your thing. You think that you're on TMZ and it's all swagged out until Kevin Durant walks into the club, buys all the bottles and stuff like that. But now, for a little while, the regular L.A. weird actor commercial type dude is going to get the clubs back. He gets his minute.

He's going to get them back. This is interesting. Like the fifth cast member of Modern Family. Exactly. You're going gonna be able to go in there and flex with your cw show you're gonna be able to go in there and say listen i'm on arrow next week i'm on black you know i'm saying you're gonna be able to go in there what about i'm on the rigor podcast network all of that you're gonna be able to do all of that. You know what I'm saying? For a while, till the spring and the summer comes again.

And here they come again. John Wall, Russell Westbrook, bang, bang, bang. They're going to be there. John Wall's second time.

I mean, he was there all night. They're all summer. So if Will was here now, first of all, it'd be amazing. It'd be great. Oh my God. It's Will Chamberlain i really

feel like he would have enjoyed this era a lot more than the 60s in the 60s there was a lot of judging of wilt you think so i mean i wasn't like was there you know he wrote uh you know when i did my basketball book i tried to read every book that ever came out about basketball either an autobiography or whatever. And one of the best, and I wrote about it in my book. One of the best ones was, Will, Not Just Your Average Seven Foot Millionaire, I think it was called.

And it was this really candid book about like his sex life. And it had stuff that, I remember I read it when I was, I think, 14 the first time. And it was like, I was on a plane and this stewardess was giving me the eye and she ended up we ended up reenacting the scene from deep throat and with stuff like that i'm serious it's in there reenacting the scene from the vintage porn situation shout out to linda lovelace it was like it was like a performance worthy of the classic deep but it was like this was like 1974 right nobody was talking

like this so like you put him in now i don't even know what he would be capable he's going for it i mean now the dude the more sort of out there you are with that type of stuff the more famous you are this is why i'm saying that he was ahead of his time not only this this the swagger that went with the sort of he knew exactly what his status was but he also i think he could play in this nba and be unbelievable yeah he would have been good well he's such a great athlete exactly that's what i'm that's what i'm saying i made uh i did i had a footnote in my book about wondering if what if what was secretly gay really because it was just lifelong bachelor and had cats that was just Lifelong Bachelor and it had cats. That was the only evidence I had.

But do you think maybe like the braggadocious nature of like the 20,000 women was kind of like, he doth protest too much? Yeah, it was a little bit. Like if you're inflating numbers, it was a good footnote. It made for a good conversation starter. But there's too much evidence that he wasn't. Yeah, for some reason.

You know what I mean? There's so much evidence to the contrary. For some reason, it was weird because when I started to get a little older, I looked through my grandmother's scrapbooks and she had pictures and stuff like that. I would see my grandmother in pictures with all of these guys. Never with Will Chamberlain. But once I learned about Will Chamberlain, I asked her about it. I'm like, yo, man, you are out there in L.A. doing it.

Because there's a lot of black actors, Calvin Lockhart, all of these guys, Harry Belafonte, she was like around him and stuff. And she was like, no, but everybody knew about him. So everybody knew about him. The legend. Imagine, he comes in, he's 7'3". I was talking about the summer, DeAndre Ayton walked into the club, walked into Poppy maybe like a month ago or something like that.

And people didn't really even know who he was, but he's so tall. So if Chamberlain, the most famous guy in LA, walks into a club at 7'3", he's coming out of there with everything, man. Even, so it's horrible for basketball players, especially if you're 6'6 and over. You're standing out in every possible way. But even like that one time when we went out with Brady, or you weren't there for that time.

The Super Bowl. Uh-uh. With Will and those guys. This was before Brady stopped going out. He's 6'5". Are we talking about Tom Brady? Tom Brady. We moved to Tom Brady. Well, no, just quickly. I moved to the GOAT. Well, first of all, that's how you know you're around famous motherfuckers

the time we went out with Brady nah I don't know I'm thinking about who Brady I was talking about Brady Quinn Brady Quinn yeah like that's

that's the guy that I would be hanging out with Brady Quinn he's a realtor now or something like that Brady's 6'5 big guy you can't

when you're you're 6'4 I would say that's about the limit you can go that's the my dad says you can bend in the limit you can go my dad says you can bend a little you can crouch my dad says that is the limit because i'm the shortest of all

my brothers my dad says that's the limit of normal tall so his move was to go he'd find a corner because that way corner people can't come with you a bunch of different ways they can only come at you and if you have your friends in front of you through the buffer. But then you would also kind of lean against the wall so he wasn't 6'5". And that way he blended in. Brady didn't want to be noticed? No. Not at all. You love him, huh? Well, I mean, he's the GOAT. I think he's getting a little strange

in his 40s, but that's alright. We all get a little strange in our 40s. He's getting a little weird. Time versus time is a little strange. A little strange, man. And it's getting stranger. A little strange man and it's getting stranger it's getting to almost getting kooky I would say that Tom Brady is getting kooky

he's a little kooky a little bit were you in the club scene like how often do you go to the club scene and run into these guys um I don't go to the club like a ton but like the guys I play basketball with they're party promoters and so when I go it's to the club like a ton, but like the guys I play basketball with, they're party promoters.

Yeah. And so when I go, it's to the best clubs in LA. It's to these different, and they're out there all the time. So July is like the Super Bowl of LA club scene. July is the Super Bowl of LA club scene. The season is over. Dude, the women must know. They must know when. What?

No, when that July is the month. Of course. What are you talking about? That's what I mean. It's simple for them. They're better scouts than some of these guys getting paid for. Like, of course they know. By the way, I've heard things said, Bill, that are so crazy.

I've heard people say stuff like, oh, no, he's still on a rookie contract. I've heard that said. So they have spot track on their phone? They're looking at salaries? I've heard that said, they have spot track on their phone I've heard that said he's still on the rookie contract I'm like okay not me I'm not fishing for that I'm already caught

I'm not out there on the club to meet women that's not what I'm on I'm already done with that I've heard you meet girls and they say yeah yeah yeah they know how much you're making. I never believed any of this stuff until I spent three straight years with

Jalen Rose. And we just constantly... And then after about four months, I was like, oh, so this really is like this. Yeah. It most certainly is. This is as ruthless as whatever we thought it might be.

It's actually happening. Yeah. Like, the toughest situation is for a G League guy. Because a G League guy looks like a basketball player. He walks like a basketball player. He even has some of the gear. Yeah, he can say. I play for a team.

He can say that. But the problem is when you get to those clubs and you're in there with girls that know Brandon Jennings, even Brandon Jennings, big deal in the club.

Got a lot of money. They know he's coming. They know he signed a contract. Know he signed a contract? G. Lee, dude, you ain't got it. Go back to Sioux Falls or wherever

to play for the breakers. Boy, the club's expensive for a guy from, you know, playing for Sioux Falls. A table play for the breakers. Boy, and the club's expensive for a guy from playing for Sioux Falls. A table at one of these places is going to cost you $10,000 to $15,000. I mean, that's a quarter of your season salary, isn't it? And you're going to run it up with the drinks and your homies got to come. And then not only that, but remember, it's not just the basketball player because Puff is in there.

You know what I'm saying? Like all of these other people in there. It's just, for me, being the TMZ guy, everybody knows who I am, but I'm not a celebrity. It's funny watching them watch me, and it's funny just watching them. Do they think you're like the

hall monitor? Sometimes. Especially pre Kanye West thing, because now... The Kanye thing changed. That removed your hall monitor status Took it away. Now because I think people saw in that moment that like yo

you can trust them. There was a connection made and stuff like that so no one would expect me to kind of be that guy but before sure I remember we actually I'm not gonna tell the name of the guys. Me and a friend of mine he's an actor. We had gone to Sam's Hofbrau downtown which is my disneyland and um we we we went there and we met up with some other actor friends of his and everybody was supposed to go to a different club after sam's that would be open

even later and i'm getting ready i'm like i'm like forget about it i'm gonna go ahead and go because we have to be up so early at tmz that a lot of times I'll go to sleep, right? And I was like, nah, man, I'm just going to come and just thug it out. And he goes, oh, you're coming? Okay, well, I'll see you guys tomorrow. And I was like, I looked at my homie and I was like, did he just say that in front of my face? And he goes, hey, that dude has four commercials. He can't risk it. I'm like, all right, cool. I mean, I'm not going to snitch on him. I've never done that before in my life, and that's not how I look to break stories, but it was a thing

for sure. I can understand that. Of course. I'm not leaving him a crime. I'm like, all right, cool. More for me. Go tip somebody. Put a girl through nursing school. I... You know what I'm saying? I wasn't tripping.

I understood it. How soon I missed out on this whole club scene. When we were in our twenties, it was just, you went to a bar and you had bottles of beer and it was dark and everybody had heavy clothes on bill. We did this whole 15,000 for it's like, it might as well be happening in Westworld for me. Can you guys do me a favor?

Go to the club someday? Please. I've done it. I've been there before. I'm stupefied every time I've been to one. Nah, but see, the problem is,

is that like- Go with you. Right. Oh, I mean, I would like to do that. Yeah, I would like to do that too. Also, Nephikai was in.

Nephikai, yeah, producer Kyle's in I'm telling you it's dope and especially it's dope because Bill everybody would know you

well you know to a certain demo I'm the white guy who was on Countdown oh that's very true see two years and remember now

like the ladies that are scouting these athletes they don't just know the athletes they know the media members they know the announcers. Oh, that's great.

Like, I heard one girl complain about Joey Crawford one time. She knew the referees. Oh, wow. Remember, she's flying around. But he wasn't in the club? No, he wasn't in the club. That was funny.

But she's flying around to different cities with athletes, so they complain about the refs. And so she hears it. And she, like, sponges it. Absolutely, man. That's great. I wonder if they know how much you make.

What a world we're missing out on, House. Yeah, we missed it. Our world was just, let's go, can I get everyone a round of beers? I mean, it's like- Just this whole bottle. I can't even imagine how much money everybody- I've never bought one in my life. Beers and shots and beers and shots and beers and shots.

This is why Kyle goes to the dark room on Melrose. Oh, that place is very small. Yes. Oh, there you go. Finally. That place is popping. Is it whack? Is that like the dark room is supposed to be whack?

That's his place. Yeah. There's a stink on it in this company. I don't know what it is. Bill knows. Bill knows. Not a stink. I've been there with you multiple times.

I like it over there. You like the parlor? I like that whole Melrose bar scene. I like being able to watch all the weirdos walk up and down. Melrose has a good energy. Now we ride bird scooters from bar to bar. So those things are going to go away soon because somebody is going to have some sort of crosswalk, fly through a windshield, and those things are going to be gone.

Do they have those in D.C.? Yeah, I won't miss it when they go away. Let's take a quick break. Hey, book and business travel is ridiculously outdated, time-consuming, and costly. Thankfully, TripActions takes the pain out of corporate travel management with a complete solution that helps businesses save and keeps employees happy. TripActions, of corporate travel management with a complete solution that helps businesses save and keeps employees happy.

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trust TripActions with their business travel. Learn how TripActions can reshape business travel at your company today. You'll be rewarded for checking them out. Go to tripactions.com slash BS to attend a 30-minute demo and you'll get a $100 Amazon gift card. But hurry, offer valid during this month only. You mentioned the Kanye thing before. And now that he's officially lost his mind, I think we can all agree.

But you were kind of Christopher Columbus in the early stages of the maybe maybe maybe not columbus maybe not columbus i don't think i murdered any indigenous people who landed who landed on territory early oh i'm trying to think i don't know lewis and clark new armstrong new armstrong i could be you're the new armstrong i was ryan was Ryan Gosling. You were Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong. Right, yeah. People hadn't really seen this Kanye thing. I mean, obviously, we knew he had a ton of problems. But then that was kind of the moment. And if you look at this whole arc of everything that's happened with Kanye, that was kind of the first point.

And then it just kept getting worse. Yeah. Did you feel that that day? A little bit. I think that for me, watching him in the office, because it was kind of bizarre while he was in there. Yeah. Because he turned it on a little bit.

You didn't know if it was shtick or real. Well, after a point, it became obvious that it was real. But when he first jumped off and started doing what he was doing, I think we were just all like, you know, a little bit taken aback. But then after a while, he just keeps going and going and going. And I'm sitting in my cubicle. I'm like, what is this guy talking about? Right. And if you watch the clip, it really wasn't until he addressed the room and that I answered him back.

Because he turned around and he goes, yo, does it sound like I'm like i'm speaking freely and i'm like no it doesn't sound like you're speaking anything it sounds like there's nothing going on right now and you know and even even in that moment it wasn't even about because kanye west was uh a cultural idol to me and in many ways still is you know what i mean he like uh for for who i was, like, I always listened to hip hop, right? But a lot of the themes, like, I couldn't, I could relate to the themes, but the actual lyrics and stuff like that, I couldn't. Like, I was never, you know, serving anybody. There was, as much as I love Hov, there's so many lessons in Hov's music and Jay-Z's

music that, you know, you could extrapolate them out. But some parts of it didn't relate directly to me. You know what I'm saying? But yay, everything that he did, did. Like not being able to figure out. How old are you? I'm 38. Right.

So you're almost the same age. Right. Yeah. So not being able to relate to what you're going to do after college, sort of. Well, the way he released the albums, it's almost like checkpoint. If you're near that age range, it's like checkpoints for your own life right and then remember when kanye west says uh you know george bush doesn't care about black people i was going through hurricane katrina i was down in the south yeah yeah so um so all of those things i had an intense connection to him

and so when i was talking to him i wasn't't trying to sort of sun him in any way. I was just really speaking my heart to him. Because your feelings were hurt. My feelings were hurt. Yeah. And if you listen to the past Kanye West music, and I have been, I haven't really listened to the new stuff. But if you listen to past Kanye West music, there was always so much social commentary about how people in underserved and Black communities were misunderstood, were profiled, were targeted. There was always so much about that. And I'm like, what changed? You know what

I'm saying? Like what, like what, it's not even, you don't have to stay the same. Obviously people change, their mindsets change, their perspective change as they get older, as their world gets bigger. But I want to know what exactly changed. Like, what was the point to where you deviated off of that? And you seemed so far gone from that when I was talking to him. And now we know that it doesn't really seem like he has even a hold on who he is or a grasp of who he is right now. I mean, has there been a diagnosis yet?

Has there been a medical? I mean, has there been a diagnosis yet? Has there been a medical, I mean, has there been reports of him? We know about him seeking the medical help, the medical attention that he's needed for the episodes that he's had, but this is pretty apparent. Like, you know, he hits a lot of the markers in the diagnostic manual for bipolar behavior. He said that he is.

Okay. Yeah. All right. I think it even is more simple than that. How many celebrities have we seen just getting driven crazy by being famous? It happens, bro. I mean, this has happened over and over and over again. Some shake back, some don't.

Like Britney Spears shaving her head that day at the, what was that? The L'Amortage pool. Right. She was. Just barring somebody's bathing suit. And like Michael Jackson. Like how many times do we have to see this? Yeah. It's a tough one for me because Kanye was one of my favorites, but is somebody like

in my family was really big. Like it was somebody we always listened to driving to soccer games and it was my daughter's fire up music and on all our playlists. And it's just like to have your kids go, is he ever coming back? Is he just gone? Is he just a crazy person now? It's like, I don't know. I don't have an answer. Usually as a parent, you have an answer.

I don't have an answer for this one. I emailed him and he emailed me back. Yeah? Yeah. I emailed him because he apologized, right? He apologized for the – here's the thing. Kanye West is a good person. He is.

He's a good guy at heart. Even when I was talking to him, he was listening. You know what I mean? Like, when he came out, he went on the radio station in Chicago, and he was talking about how he made people feel. And he seemed to have genuine remorse at hurting some people. So I sent him an email. He emailed me back and he explained every single question. Because what I asked him is that I said, yo, you seem to be a good person. And the question then becomes,

I went through my entire history with his music and his cultural influence like I just did, and I says, how do you address good people who you disagree with as strongly as I disagree with you? And I said, I don't really even know that I agree with the substance of your apology,

but how do I address this with you like a hero of mine? He answered all the questions and then put me on some other emails and we were going back and forth and then he just went left again he just went left again like it just he the you know whatever he believes politically is one thing but this stuff is bizarre man and i'm not gonna pretend like this shit isn't it's abram i want to be that's the thing this is a person with a with a diagnosed mental illness and so he needs help he needs like you know professional help and a network that can help him and not to indulge you know some of the the um avenues that are self-defeating for him like going to the white house that's self-defeating like you know well i don't know what the uh status of his uh what medicine that he's on and everything like that but it's

not helpful for him his own like existence in the world to be going through these self-defeating episodes i don't think what do i mean that was legitimately that moment legitimately to me was anakin skywalker submitting to emperor palpatine that moment that moment legitimately to me was Anakin Skywalker submitting to Emperor Palpatine that moment was legitimately the whole black community was Mace Windu the whole black community was Mace Windu and we were trying

to stop the Emperor we thought we had him and Anakin cut our arm off kicked us out the window and then submitted. But it's an illness. He has an illness. But I also, I don't even think he has the standing like that anymore, does he?

It depends. Like, if he had done that six months ago, it would have been different. No, you're probably right about that. Because I think he squandered that connection even before this in a lot of different ways. But the frustrating part is, if you listen to a lot of the things that he was talking about while he was talking to President Trump, those things would all be helpful for the community. Like if you're talking about infrastructure, bringing

factories back to places like Chicago, Compton, South Baton Rouge, Gary, Indiana, where you can bring jobs back to people where they can sustain these lifestyles and provide for their family and all that. That's all great stuff. And then at the end on it, you just fucking shit on it. You shit on it by surrendering and kowtowing and saying to Trump,

like, you're like my dad and stuff like that. And it's like, and it's, once again, I'm sure there are a lot of people listening to this that love Donald Trump. I don't want to get into a political thing. But Kanye West is like, for me, it's just insanely disappointing. It's one of the, culturally, it's just insanely disappointing. Culturally, it's one of the major disappointments of my life. Yeah.

Well, you know, going back to, like, the celebrity part of it and fame kind of breaking somebody's brain almost a little bit, you think about, like, how tough his life was and a lot of what he sang about in his music. And he always would mention the car accident and um but also even how he got his first album and how hard those extra two years like he's going around and um it was just such a great story for sure right up until a couple years ago but you go all the way to like 2000 i don't know 14. It's really one of the great 12 year stories of any artist. Like this guy who repeatedly did the music that he wanted to do.

Right. That actually put real thought into how he put it out. Each album had a theme. Right. The way he dealt with fame was he was candid about it and he would get angry about it, but it was never like off the rails. And then something shifted. And, you know, I don't know whether it was getting involved with the Kardashians.

I'm not talking about like the curse of the Kardashians, but just like going into that family and how that fame becomes a machine, which was never what he was really about. It was. I don't know if that like messed with his brain. Like all of a sudden now he's this pawn in this reality show game. And he's, you know, he's, I don't know. It just seemed like he lost his way and I think he knew it.

And I think that was part of it. So Kanye West, you guys heard the song, All of the Lights. Yeah. So you heard that song. That song by itself, I think he said, took seven or eight months to make. So one song, maybe the finest achievement maybe in hip hop, like a fantastic song. That one song took seven or eight months to make. I say that to say that the story of Kanye West prior to this last two or three years that you're talking about was of someone supremely dedicated

to artistry yeah kanye's life was about the art whatever it was if it took six and six or eight months to get a song right that's how long it took you know i mean if it took this amount of time to get your shoes right that's what it took but i think that was my single favorite thing about it loved it if if you listen to it, if you, after the album, he wants a different sound, bring in John Bryan to do the work on him with him. Like, bring in all of these people. Collaboration,

artistry, purity, and it seems like a 180 from that now. It seems like schticks. It seems like publicity stunts. It seems like we're talking about everything other than the music. Well, it started, I remember when he started talking about how fashion was the most important thing. That was the beginning of it, yeah. It was like two years ago.

Yeah. And he was like, eh, I care more about this now. And it's like, what are you talking about? You're one of the most talented people who's done music in the last 25 years. Like, how can this be more important than that? He was bringing up all of these names in fashion that we didn't know. It was like he was telling me about like, he was telling Sway about how he couldn't

get Renzo Rosso and the rest of the guys from Margiela and Diesel. I'm like, yo, who the fuck are these? I don't give a fuck about these dudes. Who the fuck are these guys, man? I mean, Hassan and I, our generation, Cobain was the most talented guy in that whole generation.

He lasted, what, five years, our generation, Cobain was the most talented guy in that whole generation. And he lasted, what, five years? Who? Kurt Cobain. Oh, I thought you said Kobe as in Kobe Bryant. No, Kurt Cobain. By the way, that wasn't, I listened to Nirvana. But it was it. He just had demons and that was it.

He was gone. Came home, Kurt Loder was on the TV, said, I came home and I was turning on the TV because I wanted to watch MTV's The Grind. So I was watching, remember that? Yeah.

Eric Neese. Oh, yeah. Took his shirt off all the time. I wanted to get that shirt off. But there were chicks in the, you know, whatever. I was watching

and Kurt Loder was on the TV. Kurt Cobain's dead. I'm like, what? Not a shock, though. Well, I mean, it was. That was the thing. It was like, not the most shocking news Cobain's dead. I'm like, what? Not a shock, though. Well, I mean, it was. That was the thing. It was like not the most shocking news of 1993 or 1994.

13, 14. I was. Yeah, for sure. It was just like it was headed the wrong way and you could see it. He was battling addiction from well in advance. Oh, my God. Of any sort of success, the commercial success. And a really destructive relationship.

Did you guys know that, though? Did you guys know? Yeah, we knew. See, I didn't know, like, because you guys, I guess, are around my big brother's age. Like, I guess I didn't know nothing about heroin. And as far as his relationship with Courtney Love, I just see him at the MTV Awards.

There was a crazy interview with him and Courtney Love that was the red flag interview. I can't remember what it was. Yeah, you're right. I don't remember it either. Just a ton of crazy quotes. that was the red flag interview. I can't remember what it was. I don't remember it either. Just like all, just a ton of crazy quotes. And,

but the lyrics of the songs, like, you know, when somebody's putting on a song called rape me, like obviously they're not a hundred, they're not bad in a thousand. Yeah. At that point.

But, but yeah, it was, it's tough, man. I think, I think some of the things that makes great art is pain and loss and suffering and having to strive for shit. Like once people become successful, it becomes a lot harder to, it's like the Eddie Murphy syndrome.

You're in bubble hell, you're making $30 million a movie. It's tough to get a feel for the people. Yep. Very true. Kanye is like going in the Kardashians. Like, now are you going to write songs? What are you going to write songs about? You're super rich.

You're crazy successful. And you're married to somebody who's richer than you are. Yeah. So what's your art? What's your struggle? Yeah, it's tough. It's just, and it- Jay-Z's had the same problem the last five, like the last Jay-Z album.

It's like, what are- You didn't like 444? No, just like some of that, some of the songs, like some of the stuff he was writing about. It's like, well. Well, for me. Are you, are you in the mix anymore, Jay-Z? I think the thing with me, what Jay-Z was able to get back to was actually the fact that he had had so much trouble in his personal life with Beyonce and his family. I think that that stuff was able to kind of center him.

And also, Jay-Z, if you're having a conversation about who the greatest rapper of all time, there are a lot of guys you can bring up, but if you're having a conversation about who the most successful rapper of all time is, there's only one dude, right? And so for him- Although Drake's inching toward it.

Drake is inching toward it in terms of- Drake's had a really nice 10 years. Of raw popularity. I would argue that Jay-Z, in terms of cultural significance, dwarfs Drake. I would agree. You know what I mean? But Drake is going to- Drake's-

When the numbers are all tallied up. I feel like it's become the music version of MJ LeBron. LeBron, I was just about to say. Where he's like, no, fuck that. Nobody will ever be MJ. Fuck you. I don't want to hear it. And then LeBron just kind of wore us down.

And you start to go. And then after 14 years, like, well, body of work. I don't know. Like Drake's kind of quietly slapping years together. He is. And it's going to be after 15 years, we're going to look at each other and go. I mean, I'm with you. I just think Jay-Z.

So to me, the fundamental question about Jay-Z and LeBron is does, like, because to me, when you look at Michael Jordan, he has such control over everything on the basketball court when he was at his peak, right? When he was at his peak, you just had zero doubt that michael jordan and the bulls were going to find a way to do it right you don't have that with lebron james you don't and you like you like you you you you how's sire leading the mj i'll take it to my grave yeah like you you know i mean i love lebron james right you don't have that with LeBron James. And by the way, the same questions kind of exist with Drake. Drake is a fantastic talent, but the reality is that Drake does not have one seminal body of work in terms of a hip-hop album.

So he doesn't have one. Everybody else that we're talking about in hip hop, right? The guys are on the Mount Rushmore and then the next four and so forth. They all have one piece of rap that the generation cannot live without. They have one album that you have to have heard, right? Wu-Tang has that album. Outkast has that album. Hov has it.

Most guys have it a couple of times. You know what I'm saying? Drake doesn't have that. And as many fantastic moments as't have that and as many fantastic moments as he has and as many numbers as he has what's the drake album that where you have to be like yo did you ever hear this this changed everything i was talking to a friend of mine about because i saw drake is the first time i saw him with nephew kyle actually my son on friday i was so impressed by what a charismatic performer he was because

it's basically like it's this giant stage and it's just him and i was thinking like how many people how many people like just in history could in the staple center make a stage that's basically the size of the basketball court but there's no band. And rock that whole thing on your own. And have the charisma to carry it. So I was like, that was the one thing I was surprised by. I was surprised Drake was that great. And my friend said, yeah, but Kanye did the same thing, and his songs actually meant something.

And he could carry the stage the same way, but when he sang shit, there was meaning behind it. Drake's more like, it's a party but it's like there's no kind of meat drake is fantastically he's fantastic but he was right there was no meat to the song so it's like he's getting the let me get the left side now i'm gonna get the right side it's like a party and he's the host but yay has songs that have made me question my spirituality. He's had songs that made me look into all different types of aspects of myself. It's music that represents a specific moment in time.

And that's kind of what Drake is doing. But by the way, here's the deal, though. It doesn't matter. It don't matter. The game is different now. A lot of people, he even said it when he was talking to LeBron. A lot of people are holding on to what he thinks is an antiquated version of what matters in hip-hop. He's just racking up numbers.

At the end of the day, when LeBron James, like, retires and he owns all the records, there are going to be generations of people that look at him and go, how could this guy have not been the greatest basketball player in the world? Well, and it's also a generational thing because I noticed it with the ringer staff if it's like under like 30 LeBron's their guy period and not only that

they didn't want to hear about MJ it's like fuck you with your old man stories about MJ LeBron's my guy and for our generation it's like fuck you with LeBron stuff MJ's the guy. But it's really funny how there's a generational divide. Can you feel that in, like, you're in Washington, D.C.,

so you're like no man's land for LeBron has no real, no, but LeBron has no real relationship with the Wiz. MJ passed through for two years, but it's not like people, whatever. But can you feel that with the under 30, over 30? Well, it manifests itself differently because the city's changed so much in just like the last one generation. The city's changed, gone through a pretty radical reset in terms of the demographics of the city. There's a lot more youth, just really coincident with the arrival of Obama. So you have an entirely different kind of perspective. There is a D.C. and the D.C. region has a long-storied basketball tradition,

still generating many of the very best high school basketball players that go on and play all over. We can name, go through the whole list, KD, Oladipo, everybody, right? Jeff Greensback. Rudy Gay. Rudy Gay, of course. all over we can name go through the whole list kd oladipo everybody right jeff green's back rudy gay of course like i mean a long long list of of um dc based basketball talent and i think all that all the old heads that old generation would there's no debate there's no question nobody's talking about everybody respects the hell out of LeBron, but,

but MJ has six titles, six titles. And was like the sheriff. Yeah. Never lost. He's just like, once he got there, once he figured it out,

he never lost. Different time, but at the same time, you know, and I love LeBron and LeBron is everything that I want a contemporary athlete to be. But you know, it's different, man.

It's just different. I am a LeBron Kool-Aid drinker now. You are? I just think he's such a great role model. He's the guy. And he just works his ass off. And the worst thing he ever did was the decision, which is, like, stupid. Who cares?

Yeah. Like, for all that's been put on him since 02, you know, I think he's, when we're talking about Kanye now and how fame can change you and LeBron, it's been the opposite. It's like, it's made him stronger. It's given him strength. Strengthen his neck beard.

Yeah, he definitely has a neck beard. He leaned into, it's so hard for a guy like that to lean into expectations. When he leaned into the expectations of him, and he even raised them off the court, LeBron has set a standard off the court that

everybody in sports is trying to get. Everyone in sports is trying to be as relevant off the court as he is right now. And really, to be honest with you, that is going to be the legacy of his life even more than basketball. Like, basketball is going to pale in comparison to the career off the court that LeBron James is going to have with Maverick Carter and all of those guys.

Well, and the other thing is, I did a panel with Maverick, and we were talking about when those guys came up in, like, 05, 06. And it was like, thing is, I did a panel with Maverick and we were talking about when those guys came up in like 05, 06, and it was like, LeBron's starting a company with his friends and everybody's reaction was like, uh-oh. Oh, boy. Yeah, he's starting some of his buddies.

This will be a disaster. You know, they had to fight this... Prejudice is the wrong word. What's the word when people are just looking down on them? I mean, dismissiveness. Dismissiveness. Condescension. Condescension. Prejudice is the wrong word. What's the word when people are just looking down on them? I mean, dismissiveness. Dismissiveness. Condescension.

Condescension. Like you guys are, you're bringing your buddy Maverick into a meeting? You're bringing your posse around? Yeah, posse. That's a Phil Jackson. The famous Phil Jackson. He's posse. Look, they're not throwing a no-hitter, but I think they've made some strides and now we're in this world where every famous player is going to have their own content company, which I think

is going to be hilarious. I think it will be too. There's going to be some good, bad content companies coming our way. They don't drink Merlot in the barbershop. Just want to make sure y'all know that. If y'all go to a black barbershop, you're not going to find no Merlot.

I love the show, but Tommy Tommy I know you can hear me I love the show but chill out is this the only barbershop where the barbers don't actually talk no no in most barbershops you go to in most barbershops it's only the barbers right

then people aren't saying anything my barber we talk my barber comes to my house to cut my hair now because he's been kicked out of several different barbershops around LA

true story and so he comes to my house to cut my hair now because he's been kicked out of several different barbershops around LA. True story. And so he comes to my house to cut my hair. When he cuts my hair, I don't talk. I stay completely silent for the entire time that my hair is getting cut. Do you know why? Because if I start talking to this motherfucker, it'll be an hour and a half, two hours before I got shit to do. I got to go to sleep. I got to be up early.

So I stay completely silent. Meanwhile, in the shop, the barbers never say nothing. got shit to do i gotta go to sleep i gotta be up early yeah so i stay completely silent meanwhile in the shop the barbers never say nothing i think i was talking to a very realistic i was talking to uh y'all you know charlemagne yeah my brother so i was talking to my brother charlemagne about it and he said a dope concept would have been if lebron and mav just popped up at real barber shops and just and they put hidden cameras and Mav just popped up at real barbershops and just- And they put hidden cameras? Or just real cameras to get everybody to sign a release and talk to the people and stuff like that.

Not saying that the shop isn't dope, because it is dope. It's a dope-ass show. I liked it, especially the last one was fucking fire. But ain't nobody drinking Merlot in a barbershop. I'm still surprised that you like Jay-Z's last album that much. 444, everybody liked it. Everybody liked it. I just can't.

You're talking about his last solo joint, not this joint that just dropped with Beyonce. Which one are you talking about? I was talking about the last one. Which one? The one with Beyonce. Okay. I like that one too, though. I don't care about Jay-Z and Beyonce's romantic problems.

Okay. Is it okay if I don't care about that? I don't even care aboutZ and Beyonce's romantic problems. Okay. Is it okay if I don't care about that? I don't even care about my own friend's romantic problems. They're not for you. I know, but we're invested. You're invested in the relationship. Yeah. That's the royal couple in some ways.

I don't want to live in a world where Jay-Z and Beyonce are divorced. What's that about? I was watching Flickin' Channels the other day, and Austin Powers was on, and she was in Goldmember, which I totally forgot. She ruined Goldmember. She wasn't good. She ruined Goldmember. I got to say, though, she looked good. Right.

She looked fantastic. I remember I got into her. She was bad in that, though. Not a lot of sexual tension with her and Mike Myers. Nah, didn't really reverberate through the TV. Foxy Cleopatra. I'm a whole lot of woman. But she, you know, Beyonce jay-z are an institution by the way that gives

couples every because one thing that i don't like is some of the speculation that like people don't have problems in their relationship people judge jay-z and beyonce and stuff like that i know people in my hood and like where i'm from that have gone through way worse stuff than that um but it's good to see them still together and so i am am invested in it. I like that. I'd have more, but let's save some for the next time you come on. Gotcha. There's so many topics. Yes. Plus we gotta get to Damien Chazelle. House, any last thoughts? You're hungry.

Where are we going to dinner? Is that your last thought? That is my last thought. Nephew Kyle, someday you can $15,000 clubs. How much is it for a wine bottle service? So if you get, it depends on what club, what table, and what night. So if you're at, let's say you're at, let's say you're at. It sounds like $15,000 is cheap.

Let's say you're at, and shout out to Dev and Mark and all of them, because I'm going to know I'm going to get this wrong. But let's say you're at like Poppy or One Oak. Poppy is hot now. Let's say you're at Poppy Poppy or One Oak. Well, Poppy is hot now. Let's say you're at Poppy. You want the main table. It's like a Friday. It's a big deal.

You're probably going to spend like 10 grand for the table, sometimes more. All-star game, you might have to, all-star weekend, you might have to spend $60,000. So just the table is 10 grand? Well, you get the bottle service. Oh, you get one. But what if I want like 10 bottles? So that bet jacks it. You got to keep buying them.

And the bottles are going to be. God, I'm so want like 10 bottles you gotta keep buying them and the bottles gonna be so old I've never done this before anytime you've seen me sipping on you're the beneficiary I'm at somebody else's and by the way that's how you know I'm not in these clubs trying to get women because women don't like guys like this

you try to grab the drink. I'm like, no, girl, it's my turn. I'm about to, I'm like, don't touch that. It's my turn. I'm about to have a, I'm about to make my own screwdriver. Then after me, you can go. Thank you very much.

Put your breasts away. And then I make my drink. We almost had orange juice. We almost had orange juice. Yeah, you might want to tap the girl and tell her to go get some more. Remember when we went to Miami the Super Bowl

weekend 2010 yes I do recall that that we were in that whole club scene it hadn't really gone out

you hear that 2010 2010 here we go at this decade I'm out of the loop once my daughter became old enough

to judge me I had to tone it down Bane Latham this was fun I loved it man promote oh yes the red pill podcast bold enough to judge me, I had to tone it down. Van Lathan, this was fun. I loved it, man. Promote the Red Pill podcast. The Red Pill podcast, man. We just interviewed Jay Prince. That's up right now.

Nick Cannon is coming in tomorrow. And so I'll do Nick Cannon. That'll be up Tuesday. So the Red Pill podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, Van Lathan's the Red Pill. And speaking of promotion, I went on House of Carbs. Is that going up this week? I think.

Be at the midnight. Tonight. Oh, Joe House and I, we tried to figure out why the pasta bar isn't a bigger thing. I don't even know what that is. So you go to a wedding or a charity event or something, and for dinner they have a pasta bar. Oh, like a pasta buffet type of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a buffet for pasta. I like that. That's why. I'll fuck with that. Well, we like it too, but we had some ideas to make it better. So we did that on House of Carbs. If you like pasta. Don't listen if you're a vegan though, because I might have done some flybys on the vegans. Just for fun. I just think

they're a little sensitive sometimes. So check that out. Coming up, Damien Chazelle first. Let's take a break. Before we get to Damien, let's face it. Guys are terrible at taking care of their health. Studies show 70% of guys who experience erectile dysfunction don't get treated for it. That's bad. The thing most people don't realize is that ED is like a check engine light for a man's body. It could be an indicator there's something more serious going on, like a heart issue or diabetes. Thankfully, our sponsor Roman has created an easy, discreet way to get checked out by a doctor, get treated for ED online. It's a one-stop shop.

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guys don't tackle, but it's really important. And now with Roman, it's really easy to take care of it for a free online visit. Just go to get roman.com slash bill. All right. Damien Chazelle is here. Sean fantasy is here. Editor in chief of the ringer do a little three man podcast. First man came out this, this weekend. It's been out for three days. This is your, i guess it's your third major movie that's come out what's that experience like the first weekend uh sleep are you just checking constantly from people involved in the movie how it's tracking are you one of those people or you just kind of send it out uh i think i always intend to just send it out and and kind of close the blinds and go on to the next thing but i'm

never really able to i just sort of wind up uh i wind up immersed in the nitty-gritty um uh you know which maybe it's a side of myself i should embrace and not try to fight it but for whatever reason yeah i i stay neurotic and ocd and involved the whole way through kind of uh in it from the beginning until the end. What were you most worried about when you released this? Like that, the length of the movie or would people come out to see it? When you're thinking your neuroses, what's like popping out on like Thursday night right before the movie comes out?

It's usually a whole host of things. I mean, you know, I think with this movie, we were definitely conscious of the fact that it's, you know, it doesn't sort of engage in a lot of the, you know, maybe more sort of expected historical epic tropes. Yeah. And, you know, so on the one hand, I think the real relief for me

was just getting the movie made at all, was kind of, you know, being able to... We worked with Universal on the movie, and they were incredibly, and I would say surprisingly supportive of kind of what we wanted to do with it. And the intimacy we wanted to bring to it, the documentary-ness we wanted to bring to it, shooting a lot of it on 16. You know, not trying to make Neil Armstrong something that he wasn't, trying to kind of respect how soft-spoken and taciturn and introverted he is.

But that makes him very much not your conventional movie hero. So all the things that kind of interested me, they were on board with. So I think I went in first into the movie with a lot of trepidation of just being able to make the movie I wanted to make. And so definitely once we got to the finish line, I was relieved that the movie up on the screen was the movie that I'd kind of dreamed of and envisioned. You know, it's not always the case. And, but then, yeah, very quickly, I mean, we finished right before, like three days before we premiered at Venice. So it was kind of right away, you switch your mind from the stress of making it to then the stress of putting it out into the world. And I'm just the type of person

that gets stressed at every single screening, every festival. So in a way, the theatrical release is kind of just one of many stressful milestones for this movie or any given movie. Are you in the theater? Are you one of those people that walks around the town as it's being screened? No, no, I'm not. I was going to say I'm not that crazy, but then again, that's not. I wouldn't call that crazy. It's just different levels of OCD-ness.

What would be your move if you released a movie, Sean? What would be my movie? Would you stay in the theater or would you be one of those, like you just leave and go outside and just wait for people to come out? I think I would probably lock myself in my house, just constantly updating Twitter. I think that's what I would do too. I'd be going crazy.

I don't think that would be good for me. Because when the people come out of the screening, you must just be trying to read their faces and over-interpret every reaction. Yeah, I know that I would do that, so I try to not be anywhere physically close to where the people would come out of the screen. So I like...

It's why Q&As actually are never my favorite thing because there's always some version of having to confront the people who've just seen the movie. And it's no longer this invisible mass that you can kind of project onto. You know, you sort of, you see what it is that the movie does. I, you know, sometimes I'll force myself in certain screenings to, you know, sit in the audience while the movie plays,

you know, like a festival premiere or something like that. Well, you wanted sit in the audience while the movie plays you know like a festival premiere or something like that and well you wanted to see this one on the imax i'm sure right because that's yeah i made sure i saw it on the ipad i'm gonna see it in the imax but i don't think the ipad was how you intended ipad imax you know they almost sound the same but they they look a little different uh i did get to see it on uh well i mean certainly when we were finishing it you know uh we were finishing it on imax but um but then yeah that was one of the few screenings i kind of forced myself to sit through was uh when we first screened on imax at toronto um and uh

but yeah no i never handle screenings particularly well i'm just usually kind of a sweaty a sweaty mess with my hands sort of dripping during most of it. Sean saw it on the iMacs. I did. That seems like the right way to see it. Yes. That's my guess. Yeah.

I mean, you know, not that there's a wrong way. I don't want people to think. Don't sleep on the iPad, man. It's the best possible way. But yeah, maybe the iPad right now is as close to a wrong way as you could get. iPhones may be probably number one worse. iPads too. Yeah, at least you're one removed from that.

It's good. On the list of eyes, you're, yeah, number two from the bottom. Could you feel it when, like, you know, especially that first scene, you're trying to capture, this is crazy that we're sending these dudes into space and basically tin cans. Could you feel that in the big ass theater? Yeah, it rumbles like crazy.

The sound is unbelievable. I mean, how did you go about making that feel as close to the real thing as possible? Well, that was the goal. I mean, it was one thing that I found that actually, ironically, it's sometimes by limiting your choices, you actually can make people feel that they're getting an even more immersive experience, you know. So for that first scene or for some of the launch sequences, just limiting ourselves in the capsule, not sort of giving the audience the safety of views that the astronauts or pilots wouldn't be

seeing. I think that it's a simple choice, but I do think it just helps connect on a visceral level the audience to the person in the cockpit. So suddenly you see everything they see, you hear everything they hear, you interpret everything as though you are in that cockpit. And so then from there, it's about using the sound to kind of complete the three-dimensional picture. Because the camera is limited in what it's seeing or not seeing, the sound then can almost be even more heightened. It can be even more intense, more, you know, sort of oscillating between exactly what the pilot would actually hear, just, you know, pure authentic machine sounds relative to that craft and, you know, heightened, you know, sounds that could augment the emotional feeling of it. Like we used animal sounds. We used sounds from warfare, guns, explosions,

lions roaring, elephants stampeding, the whole nine yards. But you sort of bake them into the sort of the diegetic sounds and you create a kind of, I'd say an emotional reality for the audience. The last three movies you made, sound was like one of the biggest characters in the movie. Definitely, yeah.

Is that an obsession of yours or is that a coincidence? Well, I think I'm really interested in just the kind of plastic elements of filmmaking, the form, especially when you strip it down to its elementals, you know, sound and image, and just seeing how those two things work together. It's probably why I have an affinity for sort of long stretches of dialogue-free filmmaking. I think that's another probably through line

through those movies. Just that sort of idea of pure cinema, where you can set up a situation where an audience doesn't need dialogue and they can just sort of be immersed in the primal ingredients of movies, the ingredients that have been sort of enthralling audiences since the birth of cinema. That's why Rocky IV is such a classic. Ten-minute sequences with no dialogue. That's exactly it. He was sly new when he was giving the audience.

I guess we talk on this show all the time about how they don't make a lot of movies like this anymore and the idea of doing something especially that is like this subjective and not showing the traditional vision

of the space that we see or the moon landing that we see must have been somewhat difficult to convince people to do and to give you all this money to do. I mean, do you have that sense that it's harder to get movies like this made?

And did you have a hard time getting this movie made? So I, you know, I guess in a way there were certain kind of lucky circumstances with this movie because, you know, the producers and Universal had the rights to this book, Jim Hansen's biography of Neil called First Man. And so, you know, basically I kind of, you know, I started working with a screenwriter, Josh Singer, to adapt the book. And we were lucky that the, you know, we were pretty, I sort of made a point of being pretty open and honest and transparent about what I wanted the movie to be right off the bat. And I have to say I half expected either Universal or the producers to kind of react initially like, no, no thanks. That's not what we're looking for. And pretty much I was open about the things you're talking about, that these space sequences or flying sequences were going to be super subjective that the, you know, camera wasn't going to leave the cockpit that even for the rest of the movie, everything was

going to be sort of up close and personal as though a documentary crew was sort of stalking the characters and getting close to their faces. And that's just, that was going to be the style of the movie, um, that it was not going to be a sort of, uh, uh, you know, uh, um, it wasn't going to be your typical giant sort of myth-making space movie. It was going to kind of go against that or try to. So, you know, I basically laid all that out on the table. Again, half expecting them to say, you know, thanks, but no thanks. And they said, great.

They said, that sounds great. You know, go ahead and do it. Why do you think they trusted you to do that? Which I was surprised by. Well, I think in retrospect, actually, they were, and I think this is one of the reasons why the rights to this book had kind of been, there was a period of time where they had the rights to this book, and it was sort of languishing.

It wasn't really going anywhere. I think it was partly just because they, they, they didn't want to do the, the traditional biopic, you know? So, so I think there was actually this appetite to, you know, okay,

if we're going to do this, we have to find some way to do it differently. And there's also the shadow of Apollo 13, right? And all, and the right stuff and all. Yeah. It's like,

if you're going to make the same type of movie we've seen when people go into space and there's the wide shot of everybody in the control center celebrating. And I've already seen that movie. Exactly. So, so I think, but,

but you know, a lot of times studios want to just see the movie they've already seen. And so I, I had a lucky situation with the, with the folks at Universal that they were actually very much on board with doing something different. And, you know, that said, you know, it's still a process of, you know, where you have to just then, you know, once you're all on the same page intellectually, then you got to

figure out logistically how you do it, you know. And this one was tough, you know, because because of the way we wanted to do it, this wasn't going to be a, you know, giant, giant budgeted movie for what it was. And we weren't going to have a ton of days to shoot it, you know. So we had to shoot it in less than 60 days and we had to find a way to to kind of marry the sort of quotidian life, the home life of the movie with with the space sequences, find a way to do the space sequences practically. I wanted to do those in camera, which is its own kind of, can be its own sort of, you know, knee-breaking kind of ordeal. But again, I think you get a lot out of it as a result. So, you know, we wanted to shoot a lot of the movie on 16, but you've got to be careful,

especially we knew we were doing an IMAX blow up. Going from 16 millimeter to IMAX is not generally done because 16mm is a very tiny gauge and tiny format, and IMAX is very huge. But we liked that idea of setting up kind of a Wizard of Oz moment on the moon where you could go from the smallest film format there is to the biggest. Well, I guess we could have done Super 8 if we were really ballsy. We would have done Super 8 to IMAX, but instead we did Super 16 to IMAX.

But anyway, you're trying to kind of wet ourselves to certain things like that that we knew would be either difficult to execute or difficult to sell. But at least with the sort of overall support of everyone, the studio, the crew, myself, everyone being in agreement that okay you know even if we fall on our face at least we got to try to do something different here because as you say otherwise there's no point what would you say was the hardest part was there a moment when you were like oh shit why did i do it this way like i can't i can't pull this off the the the first day we tried to do kind of our space sequences i mean the first scene of the movie, this X-15 flight, was our first day of kind of set pieces. Like we had done all the on the ground,

you know, quote unquote normal stuff. We broke for a hiatus during the winter break. Came back, started working on sound stages. And that first day, and we had kind of spent a lot of time in prep figuring out how we were going to do this. And, you know, we had a full-scale replica of the airplane built on a sound stage, and it was on a gimbal,

so it could move back and forth. And in front of it was a big LED screen, which was projecting all the stuff that basically Neil and the audience sees out the window. So it was all set up. We had looked at what the LED imagery was going to be. We had looked at the craft. We'd figured out our angles. It had all been storyboarded. And I show up and after, you know, we had just done a month or so of shooting where we were

banning out multiple scenes a day. It was really quick. And suddenly we show up and a whole day passed without pulling off a single shot. And that had never happened to me before. We were supposed to shoot a third of the scene that day, and we never rolled camera because we could never even get into a place where we could roll camera because everything would break down. As soon as the craft would start to work, then suddenly the screen wouldn't work the way we needed it to,

or the angle would be off and you'd see off the set, or the gimbal would start malfunctioning, or these spacesuits. I had always taken for granted how difficult spacesuits are. I realize now why movies tend to, these days, just digitally create the visor. It's because once you put a visor on, once you fully enclose someone in a helmet, then you got to figure out, well, they have to breathe. So you got to get oxygen tubes in there. They have to not overheat. You've got to get cooling tubes in there.

But then when the oxygen is hissing, how are you going to hear their audio? So you have to have the oxygen and the audio in this really tricky balance that changes every time they move. It takes them half an hour to even get in and out of the craft. So Ryan just wound up sitting in that craft a lot between takes because it was too much of a hassle to get in and out um the whole thing was just like hair pulling and and eventually we you know the next day we finally popped a few shots off and that felt like a victory and you know and we hit our groove uh but we were starting off at such a deficit in a way i mean it was it was uh that was the hardest that was the moment where definitely it felt like, oh, maybe we should have done this with the digital visor and green screen and just half the buck,

and we just fix it in post because it's not going to work. And Gosling's stink eyeing you through his little visor. Like, why'd you do this to me? You know, I will always be thankful to him because he had many instances where he could have done that. And he was gung-ho the entire time. In fact, I think he was even more adamant about not using green screen than I was

because I think he, in his mindset, it was like, you know what, if I have to wait around, fine. But at least when I'm doing the scene, I'll have stuff physically in my view to act off of, at least I'll actually be able to. And we were able to do kind of full takes. Once we finally started shooting, you know, which was a thing, we were able to kind of, that scene, for instance, carry him through, you know, being under the B-52, dropping, breaking through the atmosphere, bouncing. We were able to kind of run it almost like a little stage play in the cockpit. And then

we would run it from different angles over and over. But, you know, he was We were able to kind of run it almost like a little stage play in the cockpit. And then we would run it from different angles over and over. But, you know, he was kind of able to, it was sort of the hope, act it the way you would act a normal scene, even though you're, you know. We tried to set it up so that for him, at least, he could kind of forget he was on a soundstage in Atlanta and just imagine, you know, for the most part, because he wasn't seeing camera equipment or a green screen or whatnot, he could imagine for the most part that maybe he was hanging from a B-52 40,000 feet above the air and shooting into space. I mean, it's kind of an amazing testament to space travel. The fact that it was so hard just to recreate space travel for the film, like it's just unbelievable. That was my biggest takeaway from the movie. Like, I guess I had never really thought about how ridiculous it was that we even tried to do this in the 60s yeah yeah and i hadn't either before i started just like how random it

was like easily every one of these could have just gone terribly absolutely it's a miracle that they didn't i mean it's truly the it's the it's the strange kind of event or part of our history where the more i found the more i learned about it the more details i got about it the more I found, the more I learned about it, the more details I got about it, the more incredulous I became. The more astounding the feat became. I guess it makes sense because you see TVs from the 1960s compared to now. And then you think, oh man, we tried to send people to outer space

with the knowledge that we had in 1965. They were doing their calculations with pencil and paper. Half the time they were doing their calculations with pencil and paper, you know, half the time. They were using slide rules and like, I'll always remember the first time I saw some of these crafts, you know, in real life, whether, you know, it was probably the first one I saw was in the museum, but, you know, especially getting to come up close to them and they are so unreassuring.

Yeah, they're rickety, right? If you're in a place where you're going to fly them. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so small. I mean, I think that was one of the big things that Nathan Crowley was the production designer. And one of the big things we talked a lot about was, because it can be hard to communicate scale in a film. It's hard to communicate how big something is. And it's hard to sometimes communicate how small something is. And so trying, because I felt like I had never,

in all the space films I'd seen, I never never actually I still found myself surprised when I saw the craft or some of the crafts in person they still were smaller than I had expected even having seen some of the footage and it's just because you know the the frame the angles it's hard for you to sense the three-dimensionality of uh of a surrounding you always kind of imagine it a little bit bigger things always come out a little bit bigger on screen so we so we tried to find, to, you know, create those crafts to scale and, and, and fully enclose the camera in them as much as possible. So shoot a lot of POV, you know, kind of straight POV angle. Sometimes our, sometimes the DP himself would just kind of crawl in, in a spacesuit into the craft and just shoot, you know, a tiny little 60 millimeter

camera out the window and panning a tiny little 60-millimeter camera out the window and panning around. And it just helped give you a sense of just how close your face is to the console, to the window, to the other guy, to the door that comes down over your head. We just tried to emphasize all the things that would make it feel as claustrophobic

as I think it really was. Everything was rickety back then. Because I was watching Love Story a couple months ago with Ryan O'Neill. And he takes her to his parents' estate. That was a bigety back then. Because I was watching Love Story a couple months ago with Ryan O'Neill. And he takes her to his parents' estate. That was a big comp for us. He's in that awesome Porsche. Yep.

From like, you know, just like the classic. You would see this online. But he's driving and the thing's like. And then he's shaking. And that's just what we had back then. It's crazy, too, how risky it was. Because you point out in the movie, which I think we forget, there were a lot of people who were not excited about this and thought it was a really bad idea and a huge waste of money.

Yeah. And I, I think we kind of forget that. And we, and honestly, we only, I mean, it was really important to me to get into that in the movie, but we could have spent even more time on that because it's, you know, there's this misconception, I think, of like, of that era having been all about space travel and everyone being gung-ho about the sort of idealistic, you know, notion of it. And, you know, with the exception of the very beginning of the 60s, when we were still sort of in that fresh Cold War with Russia mentality. And then I'd say with the other exception of literally just the moon landing itself, not even lead up to launch, but literally just the landing, that like those few days in the summer of 69, approval for the program in general hovered around 50%, if not below. Is that why you put that song in the movie?

The way? Yeah. So that song is, that's a real song for the movie the way yeah i mean yeah so that song is that's a real song for you know by gil scott heron from the period and that's just one example of i remember at first we had at first you know instead we had a um a speech that was kind of modeled after some some of the more famous op-eds uh that that we'd been reading from the time uh uh from national newspapers and publications and and things kind of voicing similar concerns. And then we actually, Ryan found this Gil Scott-Aaron track that seemed to kind of articulate all of it so much better in such a kind of compelling way. But then, you know, this also, it was very easy to find, for example, footage of, you know, archival footage of whether it was protesters or, you know, famous people like Kurt Vonnegut going on TV saying this is a waste, you know, there was a real debate that I think has been forgotten in

the glow of the moon landing, you know. There were so many other things people were angry about back then. That late 60s was rough in general. This was in there, but I mean, man, there was like so much going on. Which makes it even more ironic, I think, in a way that like, and poignant maybe that, you know, that that event, that sort of fleeting moment of hope and unity that we think of as the moon you think of the Vietnam War, you think of riots in the cities. 69, it's Altamont Manson, the same week that they walk on the moon. Oh my God, even worse. Another tragedy. I was about to say Chappaquiddick, but you trumped me with your birth. Two iconic moments in New England history. I like to think the moon landing and me being born

were the only two things that saved 1969. Were you born in that month? I was September, yeah. September, 69? Yeah. Wow. I think I was right after. What was the exact date?

It was July, July 20th. So you would have been, yeah, you would have been born right when they were probably doing kind of their world tour. My mom said we watched it in her stomach. I mean, it seemed like every single American was involved somehow at that telecast. I would say that's probably the most watched television event we've had. There's hundreds of millions that were viewing it.

You said 400 million? Yeah, the estimate's about 400 million people worldwide. I'm trying to think of one thing that could give us 400 million people watching at the same time right now. Is there 50 year old Tom Brady winning the Superbowl? I really hope not. No. Um, maybe, maybe, maybe this interview. I'm hopeful it's going so well. Look, let's not sell ourselves short. Yeah, it could happen. I'm curious about, so there's a lot of controversy, obviously around the movie. You were, you also had controversy with the La La Land Oscars moment. I'm wondering, I don't care about the controversy, honestly,

but I am interested in what it's like to be thrust into a controversy like this. You seem like a very nice person trying to make good movies. When you find yourself in a weird moment like that, what is that like? Well, yeah, it's always a little strange. I mean, I guess the, the, um, with this movie, I think it was, uh, especially strange since, you know, well, you know, cause the, the, the controversy as I understood it was revolving around, um show the flag on the lunar surface several times and then I sort of you know understood that it was a little more about you know actually seeing the flag being the pole of the flag being physically planted which Neil and Buzz did together you know it took a long time for them to plant it in and I guess you know to me it was what was important at that part of the movie because it's not a movie just about Apollo 11.

It's a movie about the eight years that lead up to it. It's a movie about how we got there, not what we did once there. That once we were there, the emotional climax of the movie to me had to be, and this is purely an aesthetic consideration, not at all a political one, had to be Neil's private moments on the moon. And so that's also why we don't, you know, we don't get into the experiments they conducted together or Buzz's famous words about magnificent desolation or anything like that. We just sort of stick with Neil. And I was fascinated by this very unknown part of the moonwalk, which is otherwise the most famous event maybe ever, which was Neil going off to this nearby crater by himself for about 10 minutes. And no one really knows what happened during then, what he did, because he never told anyone

about it. He wasn't on comms. And the idea of someone going all the way to the moon, you know, which is itself such a lonely journey, you know, and, but then taking the time to be truly alone on that surface. I don't know, there was just something both poignant and poetic and even tragic about it for me, you know, and especially then learning what he was going through at that time, those eight years of his life. I mean, the unfathomable amount of loss and grief that as a human being, he must have been going through in that short period of time. It just begged a lot of questions for me of, you know, what is going through your mind if you're coming off of that sort of time in your life and you're the first person standing on another celestial body, you know, looking back at Earth. It almost felt like Orpheus traveling from our world to Hades,

going beyond where mere mortals are allowed to go, going to the undiscovered country, going to the underworld and turning back and looking back the other way. There was something so, it's real life and yet so mythological and fairytale and fantastical that it felt like that's where the emotional climax of the movie had to lay. It seems like you can't make a movie these days without some sort of controversy.

That's kind of just what the internet is for at this point. You'd be like, how can we turn this into something? Well, in some way, the good thing is that to take the silver lining approach is that it was actually encouraging to me to sort of find, for example, how much people still have deeply emotional connections or associations with the moon landing. Because I think that was something that we sort of struggled with as well while making this movie in terms of things we were worried about. You know, how do you make this is, you

know, 50 years ago, almost, how do you make it feel relevant? How do you make it feel relevant how do you make it feel timely um and and and so to find that there still is this sort of visceral emotional connection um and some conspiracy people too oh and yeah i mean they're still out there too yeah we i've i've encountered some of that too the uh since the movie came out has anybody shown you new evidence of the conspiracy um so you missed the part in the movie where kubrick comes over and tells them to adjust their... That was my favorite part, yeah. Yeah, you liked that, right? No, the...

Yeah, I actually found while we were shooting it, I think we all had a moment where we were having such a hard time specifically doing the moonwalk sequence and the moon landing. And then, you know, thinking, OK, we're having this hard a time recreating literally like four minutes of this event. But in 69, they're supposed to have recreated, you know, the better part of several days worth or on the moon, at least two and a half hours of live stream, basically, you know, live broadcast to everyone in the world, recreation of this with the technology they had in 69. I'm actually of the viewpoint, and this has been communicated by someone more

eloquently than me back in the past, responding to a lot of these conspiracy theorists. Technology wise, it actually was easier back then for them to send people to the moon than to pull off the hoax that they're accused of pulling off. Yeah, I've been between 90% and 100% believe in the moon landing for the last 40 years. Usually 100, but lately I was at 90 because I think I was on the Reddit conspiracy thread. I'm back at 100. Oh, you're back at 100. I'm back at 100. You've talked me back into it. I was a little worried there for a second, that 10%. Because there was always a 10% of me like, we could barely do anything in the 60s.

How did we pull this off? How did we send a spaceship to the moon, and yet we didn't have color TV? So it was just a little shred of, hmm. Well, the irony actually, what's fascinating about, I think, the moon landing, again, is that the type of, and it's why, again, to my point, that in a weird way, it was easier to do it than to fake it, is that it doesn't really mean it was easier.

What it means is that it's different kinds of technology required for each. The technology required to go to the moon was by, and this is what's shocking about it looking from today's standards, was really analog. It was really actually old-fashioned, what we would definitely call now, but that you could even call in the 60s old-fashioned rocket technology. I mean, there was the most cutting-edge and brilliant rocket scientists behind it, but essentially what they were harnessing, the basic ideas of power that they were harnessing,

was really old-fashioned, was really sort of rooted in simple mechanics. And by contrast, the technology required to broadcast a signal that's faked to everyone around the world from a signal that is mistakenly tracked as from the moon, et cetera, et cetera, that that kind of technology, which maybe could be doable today, that was actually not really around at that time. The reality is there's probably like a 62% chance this should have worked, right?

If you do this five times, maybe two of the times something bad happens. Oh, for sure. I mean, Neil himself gave himself a 50-50 of landing. That's not to say 50-50 of them coming back home alive, but certainly they were very prepared for the idea that they were going to go to the moon, try to land, it wasn't going to work, and they'd have to turn around and go back. Whether Neil would have actually aborted or just taken it all the way, no one can know for sure. Sure, but they were very, yeah, I mean, they went into it very hopeful, but I'd say also very kind of realistic about what the odds were. You can't abort at that point. You're too close.

You're right over the moon. You got to keep going at that point. But you point out how unknown everything is. There's that moment when he's describing just the surface of the moon, you know, the texture of what it is because we just don't know. We don't know anything. S it going to sink in it? Yeah. How far down is he going to go?

What does it feel like? I never thought about that. I didn't know, like, his foot, like, what if it's just, his leg just gets sucked down. Oh, yeah. No, they were really worried about, you know, that the LEM itself

wouldn't even land properly, that it would just sink in. Yeah. You know, they were trying to get as much information about the moon, especially that part of the moon, you know, through satellite imagery and the earlier missions and whatnot and probes before they

landed. But there was still, there's only so much, especially again, with the technology that they had at that time, you know, again, at that time, it was a time where they were probably better at flying than they were at recording, you know, data, recording information, filming things, you know, streaming things. So there was so much unknown about, you know, filming things, streaming things. So there was so much unknown about, even down to quarantine. I mean, quarantine was because the Andromeda strain, Michael Crichton's book came out the year before and became a national sensation and prompted lots

of people to start going, oh my God, we're sending people to the moon. They're going to bring back a disease that'll kill all of us. And so Congress tried to calm them down and came up with this plan that honestly wouldn't really have worked anyway if they did bring back a deadly disease, which was, you know, we'll put them in quarantine for 21 days. We saw that with the Johnny Depp movie. What was that one?

The Astronaut's Wife. That's right. He comes back. He's not the same. Something's wrong. Were you prepping with The Astronaut's Wife? This is what happens in space, man. You don't know what's going to happen.

You might get invaded by an evil being you're only 33 right and you've made three memorable movies already this is really annoying I think when I was 33

I was making like 400 I don't know 40,000 dollars a year trying to break into how did you do all this fast so fast

because usually directors in their 30s is when it starts to happen but you've already made stuff happen like were you always one of those people that was ahead of the curve or was it luck what was it i mean a lot of it i know that's a tough question by the way but i just like you tell us how you're a genius a lot a lot but you're crazy young. This doesn't really have a lot of parallels in the history of Hollywood. It's a lot of luck. I think, and this again goes back to luck,

I think I had the benefit of having a very one-track mind growing up. So I can't remember ever wanting to do anything different. I've always wanted to do movies as long as I can remember. I think before I knew what a movie director was, I sort of wanted to make the movies I was seeing. Initially, they were mostly animated movies. So I thought I'd be an animator and I was drawing a lot and trying to figure out how animation worked. And then, you know, it became live action movies. I wanted to do that.

But basically, I always wanted to do this and nothing else. And, and, uh, so it meant I was sort of, when it came to being a normal, well-rounded kid, I maybe was lacking in, in certain other areas, uh, uh, and maybe still am, but, uh, but at least, yeah, the benefit it gave me was never having that moment of doubt or uncertainty as to what track I want to like I was going to make movies work no matter what and I didn't know if they would work or when they would work but you know

it was all I wanted to do it was all I knew how to do wasn't that what Paul Thomas Anderson told us didn't he give us basically the same answer very similar story yeah it's like from age 16

he was just like this is what I want to do I don't want to do anything else oh yeah yeah well you know I mean he started really young

yeah he started young too. So maybe that's it. Lessons for the kids out there. If you're not doing this when you're 16. Be singularly focused. Yeah. 16. Don't have a life.

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What about being in charge of dozens of people at the same time and the human interactions you have to have with actors? Actors are difficult. How do you learn that when you're in your 20s? You're working with people like J.K. Simmons, who's been in there for 30 years. That's actually the trickiest thing of all, at least for me. For a natural introvert like me, I think is that aspect of it.

I can only say I learned that by doing it. And so I think, you know, even my student film days of, you know, of kind of trying to rally the troops in those small circumstances, that helped prepare me for, you know, doing the whiplash short was the first time. I remember being terrified my first day on that set. That felt like my first real day, even though it wasn't the feature. It was literally just the short. But the short had been, like enough money had been put together for the short, like $10,000 or something to have for three days, have a real crew. And that was my first time not just working with my friends

or fellow students with the camera on my own shoulder or something. It was my first time working with a crew. And so winding up on set, J.K. Simmons was in the short, which was really nice of him to agree to. He basically did it as a favor. So giving him direction or trying to, you know, trying to sort of organize the crew, working with the assistant director. All that stuff was so new to me. And, yeah, I think the first day I had like a mini panic attack, nervous breakdown inside.

And I tried to hold it together and kind of made it through the first day. Second day was a lot easier than the first day. Third day was easier than the second day. And, you know, and then in a way kind of had had been broken in a little bit like the feature ironically as hard as it was was a little easier than the short just because i had gotten the feel of it a little bit um and there's a moment on a movie on a movie set you show up you're the guy yeah which which i really it's one thing when you show up with your two buddies and they're the only ones you're making the movie with and then it's an actor that you're also friends with

and you're the guy that's so different than showing up to a bunch of strangers or people who are there for not because they're doing a friend a favor but are there for a paycheck or are there for you know it's just a different atmosphere and it took me

but that's why I guess my big know, my big advice to people, you know, has been or would be to try to kind of work your way up if you can. You know, that there's, you know, I think I benefited from learning from mistakes on situations that were controlled enough or small enough that those mistakes weren't disasters. So the short prepared me for the feature. Whiplash as a feature was low budget enough. It prepared me for La La Land, which was a little bigger budget, still not huge budget, but you know, and it kind of,

you work your way up from there. So at least that's how I kind of learned how to do it. It's the only way I think I've gotten any sort of skill at that side of it. So now you're finally ready to make Terminator 6. Yeah, that's the next, I think that's the next natural Black Panther 8 extension. But so obviously La La Land and First Man have some things in common, but mostly they're very different. But they both seem like pretty significant challenges. They're two kinds

of movies that are maybe not as big as they once were 20 or 50 or 70 years ago. When you're going into a project, are you looking for something that you say, I don't totally know how to do this and I want to try it. It has to be a challenge. Yeah. I think, and I think even maybe the more movies I do, the more I feel that way because it's, you know,

it's hard enough to kind of to to make a movie you know you you you you invest so much of your sort of uh you know energy and time uh and so many other people do too it's such a collaborative thing so you're asking a ton of people around you to invest that same amount of time and energy to invest all of that into something where everyone feels like they've seen it before or it's just going to be one more notch on the belt or a paycheck or whatnot, I wouldn't know how to do that. So you're not going to make a rom-com when a guy and a girl have been friends for a long time, but now one of them is developing feelings for the other?

That's not in the works? Well, look, you could probably redefine that genre in a way that would be really exciting. Let's put it in space. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's do it with aliens. Do it with aliens and musical numbers.

Two serial killers. Yeah. And some serial killers, and then I'm all in. But I think it's just like you never know, or at least I never know if a movie is going to work out, you know, if it's going to fall on its face or if it's going to have a life. But, but it's all the more reason, I guess, to just make, make the act of doing it itself count. You know what I mean? So, so you just, you want to give yourself a reason to get up in the morning and work as hard as you can and try to inspire people around you to work as hard as they can. So you at least want to have the ambition, the hope of doing something that's different or that's a little off the beaten path or a little out of the norm.

It doesn't mean you'll succeed, but at least it helps with the willpower, I guess. So that's kind of, I think, to answer the question of whether I like those challenges, I think that's why I like them. Because if you fail, at least you know you tried. And whether you succeed or fail, you learn from it that way, too. I guess I want to... It's such a privilege to be able to make a movie, period. So I would hope to kind of just personally learn as much from each movie as possible and pull as much from it as possible just for my own growth as a filmmaker.

I think that's really good advice. That's something I've tried to live by the last 10 years or so. Like you're not, you're never going to know unless you try. Unless you take a risk and you have to be okay with the risk not working sometimes. Yeah. And when it doesn't work,

it's like, all right, it didn't work. What do I learn from having that not work? Yeah. You take things from that and you put it to the next thing. Absolutely. But I think most people are just afraid to kind of try.

What was interesting about when you did La La Land, that became a much bigger, I'm glad you're here because I've always wanted to ask you. It never seemed like that movie was meant to be as big as it became. No. From your standpoint, right? That was like your second film. Yeah.

It was this intensely personal film. It was super different. And I don't, all of a sudden it became this this kind of monster yeah and it was like did did did he mean for that to happen no yeah i think um i think lalaland was sort of the epitome of of because i was talking this a little bit on first man but i'd say lal and more than any project i've done was the epitome of making the movie was the victory for us. Yeah, just getting it done. I remember the day before shooting began,

the day before principal began, we all went out for celebration drinks because that was like, we didn't wait till wrap to celebrate because who cares? The fact that we were actually had made it to the day before principal photography where you can reasonably assure yourself that no one's going to pull the plug you know you've made it to 24 hours before so you know maybe a week before the

plug can be pulled but once you're at that day before principal you're probably okay and we all just thought it was amazing that you know after six years we had finally kind of gotten to the starting line and uh now you you know, yeah, we wanted to execute well, we wanted to, you know, make a good movie and have a good time and have it work out. But just getting the chance, the lucky chance to make it was such a win for all of us that I think everything after was, you know, yeah, I'd say either a surprise or kind of almost unnecessary icing on the cake. I mean, it was great. We certainly enjoyed the ride, but it certainly wasn't why we did it.

Were there any downsides to that success? Having a couple years removed from it, does it set some sort of unreasonable bar? Because that movie was really an extraordinary success given what it was and how you made it. And also had a re-watchability to it that I don't know if you anticipated or not, but like my wife watched the movie like five times. Oh, really? Yeah, but I think a lot of people did.

I think it became like a go-to movie. I was, yeah, again, I mean, all that stuff surprised me a lot. I mean, I remember we, we test screened that movie and it did not test well, you know, we tested twice and it tested badly both times. So like, you know, so even once we were in post-production, you know, there was this big question of, is anyone going to see this? Is anyone going to like it? We knew that we liked it, you know, we, or, or, well, actually, I mean, actually you never really know if you like it because you always only see the problems. We knew at least that that it it was a reflection of our tastes, you know.

And but in terms of going after from it, I mean, the good thing was that I was already working on First Man. If I had not had anything kind of in the pipeline, so to speak. And like, you know, so kind of the La La Land release ends and then I'm left sort of standing with kind of an empty slate and trying to figure out what to do next. Then, yeah, I do kind of shudder at that at the prospect of what that would have been like. I'm not sure how I would have acted. I think the best thing I did for myself was to make sure I had something already going already in the pipeline before La La Land even came out. So as soon as La La Land was done, even while we were kind of doing the promotion and stuff, I was spending the other half of my time working on First Man and working with the writer on the script

and working with Ryan on research and all that stuff. So that kind of helped funnel me and maybe not have so many of the negative consequences, as you say, can happen of what La La Land became. Well, then you ended up in the craziest moment in the history of the Oscars, but you're deep in First Man at that point? You were just able to transfer it? Thankfully, I was.

We hadn't started hard prep yet, but we had started crewing up and the script was being fine-tuned. We'd started traveling to meet members of the family and whatnot so yeah so that was all kind of that train had sort of left the station a little bit um no one last minute tried to convince you to make another musical uh no it's happening right now but uh yeah he's getting he's getting emails we did uh you know we did joke that we would put musical numbers into First Man. You kind of do.

There are some musical moments. There is a dance. Yeah. Yeah, we did think of that as, yeah, that was going to be the closest we got, the closest that we doffed our hat to that genre. But no. Iron ironically, Neil Armstrong himself was really into musicals. I mean, there's like a, you'll remember

there's a scene in the movie where they're kind of asking Neil about what he did in college and learning that he did the musical review in college and all that. And I always wonder if certain people watching it think that that's just something that I sort of invented in order to be like an Easter egg to myself or something. I kind of like, I'm kind of,

I kind of cringe at the idea of that. Whereas the reality is no, you know, Neil himself. That's all, that's all true to Neil. Neil was, you know, I promise that wasn't my intervention. Neil was very much a musicals fan, a Gilbert and Sullivan fan, as it turns out. And yeah, who knows? Maybe if certain things had gone differently,

he might have been the new- Gene Kelly. New Sondheim, new Gene Kelly. Yeah, who knows? Do you feel like after what's it been, how long has it been since the Oscars? Like a year and a half that people don't even remember what happened anymore they just remember something crazy happened that

they don't remember if you ended up winning or losing or uh also like did you want for best director one so it's it must have been doubly strange yeah i mean it's a very i mean because that was my second time at the oscars and both times they've been very, and maybe it's because I grew up kind of, you know, watching the Oscars on TV. So I sort of experienced the Oscars so many years as the thing that was seen on the TV box. So then actually being there, it was a weird kind of, you know, felt like that, it felt like, you know, like Pleasantville or Purple Rose of Cairo or one of those movies where you sort of step through the proscenium and you're just kind of looking around. And it was weirdly surreal meets anticlimactic

meets overwhelming meets underwhelming. It's all these things at once. I felt that both times I was there. So it's kind of in a way when weird stuff happens, as did happen that night, it's almost weirdly in keeping with the surrealness like i think it was maybe less of an utter kind of uh uh you know needle scratch shock for me um than than it was just sort of uh yeah an outgrowth of i mean the oscars themselves are very weird and it helps to

kind of be reminded of that sometimes that's what kimmel said when I did the pod with him like three days later. Oh, yeah? Because we've been friends for a long time. And he didn't even really fully know how, I was like, this isn't going to be in the first paragraph of when you retire. And they'll be like, and he hosted the famous Oscars. And he's like, really?

It's going to still, people will still care? And I'm like, yeah, this is going to be like the number one weirdest thing that happened at the Oscars. I am surprised that people still ask. But maybe it just needs to be one-upped. Maybe we just need to figure out some even weirder thing. Let's do it this year. Yeah. Yeah. I know it can be done. You need to wear a space suit to the Oscars.

If they can land a man on the moon, they can, they can find a weirder way to end the Oscar. How much thought do you put into the big picture part of your career? Because I've always found some directors, they're just on to the next project, almost like Bill Belichick. And then other people really study the great directors of all time and the choices they made, and then they did this, and then they zig this way. Do you think about that stuff?

Which one are you? I do. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I think, again, part of my movie-obsessed childhood and adolescence and whatnot was reading biographies of directors and watching all their entire filmographies and trying to learn where things went right, I don't know. But then at the same time, when it comes to actually deciding what am I personally going to do next, it does, at the end of the day, for me at least, boil down to just a gut level of what I'm feeling at that particular moment. It's part of why, actually, I've had a hard time. I've been asked a lot with this movie, you know, what made you want to do this? Especially, you know, you're the musicals guy or, you know, movies about music guy. And why take this left turn?

Why do a space race movie? And, you know, I've said various answers, but none of them probably really get at the real answer. The real answer is I don't really know. You know, I just, for whatever reason, at that moment in my life, it grabbed me. Something in Jim Hansen's book, something in the idea just grabbed me. And it was a new kind of affection I had for this material, because I didn't grow up being obsessed with the space race or anything like that. I didn't really grow up wanting to be an astronaut. But it grabbed me and I sort of went with it. And so as much as I try to think about the bigger picture, sometimes you can't, it only gets you so far, I guess.

You just go to what grabs you. Yeah, I mean. But do you have a checklist that's like, I need to make my war film, I need to make my biblical epic, you know? Yeah, you gotta make your war film. My war film. No, I'm not really. I will say that, again, but I think this comes back down to gut level, that I usually tend to want to do something that feels at least tonally like the opposite of what I just did. And that's not at all kind of an intellectual reasoning. That's purely just emotional where, you know, so, so with Whiplash, I, I, I, I, it felt right after Whiplash to do something kind of a much more hopeful and romantic

and sort of in love with, with love and with movies like La La Land. And then again, you know, conversely after La La Land, I think in some ways the, the confection aspect of La La Land helped inspire the opposite in First Man, going back to the sort of documentary route and trying to go gritty and grungy. So I think, you know, it's as simple as you get a little tired of one kind of tone or one sort of mood and you want to switch it up. So Fast and Furious you have your eye on, maybe. Fast 11? Yeah, but that would maybe have to be one movie removed from First. Because First Man has its kind of action sequences. I can't do that again.

Maybe like five years from now. Yeah, but check back in five years. Sean, do you think Whiplash was a sports movie? Yeah, we discussed this. We had a big argument about this like two, three years ago. I can't remember what we decided. It has all the elements of a sports movie. It's just just instead of sports it's drumming yeah but it's the same beats and totally no i mean i i and it has the same feeling of like ultimately it's about self

competition it's not about the competition surrounding you yes it's it's about whether you can do it yourself there's something amazing about that i love that movie how do you feel about that movie now have so many years removed from it um can you see it and say this is good or do you only see the flaws um i haven't i haven't uh i haven't looked at it in a while i mean uh he's like denzel he doesn't go backwards that's what denzel said he doesn't I did a podcast he doesn't go backwards I wish I had more than that in common with Denzel so he never looks at old work

not interested Ethan Hawke was the opposite he was so ready to go back and re-litigate every choice he's ever made

and Denzel's like I don't go backwards yeah I guess I could see both sides I mean I I have at times gone back

I try but I kind of don't like to do it too much. You know, I think Whiplash was, yeah, I don't know. It was fun making it. You know, I'd say it was still, you know, the most kind of nakedly autobiographical thing i've done um not that it's strictly autobiographical but just sort of in terms of where it came from and and what i was thinking as i was writing it you know so so i and i think there was something kind of liberating about that and and one thing i actually haven't done in a while is write

i'm sort of excited right now to sort of sit down and write again. That's kind of something I've been wanting to do in a while because I wrote Whiplash after I'd written La La Land and First Man, Josh Singer wrote. And so it's actually been since basically the making of Whiplash that I've kind of written something. So I might wind up revisiting it just for that reason. Go like Starbucks in West Hollywood and just bring the laptop and you're just off for six hours. Where do you write? What do you do? Well, my process begins with a huge amount of procrastination, which I try to kind of, I try to group under the umbrella heading, like, you know, research or inspiration, you know, read a lot, watch a lot,

listen to a lot of music, try to kind of figure out a playlist of both movies and songs to sort of get myself in the mindset. But then, yeah, eventually I'll just sort of, I mean, sometimes I write by hand, but usually, yeah, it's just on my laptop. By hand? Whether at home or at a coffee shop. Like in a journal? Yeah, sometimes. Interesting. I didn't know your generation still did that. Notice how I'm making it seem like you're super young. Well, sometimes- Under 35ers.

They don't really use the pen and pencils. The thing with the pen and pencil is that, I guess what I'm always trying to do with writing is avoid the terror of the big blank page staring at you. The blank Word doc or the blank final draft. Yeah, exactly. Something about the blank final draft or blank Word doc is sometimes more intimidating than just the blank loose scrap of paper you happen to have or a notebook. It's also why sometimes, this is actually a trick that I would recommend to some people,

sometimes I'll write chunks of a script as an email draft to myself because it's a very kind of small little window browser if you don't because it's a very kind of small little you know window browser if you don't open it up big and you're just sort of so you can after a few lines think you've written a lot because you're kind of filling your your i like that and then you sort of keep going and it's all about getting started once you're in it you know once you have 50 pages of a script the next 50 are much easier but getting past the the blank page is a is a i'm probably like all writers in this regard, is terrifying. Do you base the character on pieces of different people you know, or is it just somebody you create from thin air?

No, yeah, it depends. I mean, certainly Whiplash, people were based oftentimes word for word on people I knew. Other times it's kind of, you know, composites, you know, some people I know, some movie or book characters, some, you know, just kind of all meshed in. A lot of times, obviously, there's a lot of me. Yeah. Whether I like it or not. And in certain characters I write, certainly the Miles Teller character in Whiplash, you know, was in some ways a somewhat easy character to write because I related. And, you know, so, yeah, it's a mix, I guess.

But it always helps, I think, to have something to be – even sometimes it can be as simple as writing for an actor, I find. Whether you wind up casting that actor or not, by the way, but just having a face in mind. Sometimes I find it helpful very early in the script writing process to just like put a little lookbook together that's just like faces. And it's either faces of, you know, whether it's known actors or, you know, people out of fiction or historical figures or whatnot. You know, you just kind of just to visualize a little bit of a gallery of faces. So you kind of are writing to you're not just writing to a to a to a character name, you know, on a final draft doc, you're writing to an actual flesh and blood human

being. And then that can change completely. When I first wrote J.K. Simmons' character in Whiplash, I was picturing a sort of basically someone I'd say James Gandolfini would have played, like a New Jersey, Italian-American, sort of kind of blue-collar turned intellectual sort of, you know, kind of blue collar turned intellectual sort of guy, because that was very similar to a music conductor I'd had growing up. And that's who I was writing. That's who he was. So J.K. initially, first, you know, working with him, meeting him was the polar opposite of physically what I had in mind, his kind of, you know, the thin, tall, muscular, bald, you know, black shirt, like that whole kind of look that J.K. brings to the movie was so different from what I wrote in my mind. But he's saying the same words, you know, and of course, now I look, I think back to, I can't

think of anyone else in the role than J.K. He made it completely his own. But it's just a good example in a way that it doesn't really matter where you wind up. It just helps me to get started out of the starting gate to have something physical something visual to write to well that's why fast and furious 11 is going to be great for you though i already had the character yeah yeah exactly start writing can you give us can you give us like a sneak you're totally right the uh a fast and furious 11 yes please so it's on space begins yeah interior room night yeah if you could

the door opens yeah can you give us a sneak peek of the um maybe the playlist of movies or music that you're diving into right now

for whatever you're gonna do oh yeah um yeah I'm I'm I've been re-watching a lot of uh

right now I'm on a big early Truffaut kick um it's been a while since I've watched like-watching a lot of, right now I'm on a big early Truffaut kick. It's been a while since I've watched like Jules and Jim and Shoot the Piano Player. Those movies are so great, by the way. I mean, they're so, they are so much more just radical and revolutionary than I had remembered. And I grew up, you know, I loved Truffaut. One of the earliest books I read, you know, once I could understand it as a kind of budding film geek was the Truffaut-Hitchcock book of sort of transcription of their interviews together. Most formative film book I've probably ever read. Reread it like 10 times.

But anyway, Truffaut is amazing. I've been rewatching a lot of his stuff. Rewatching Fellini, rewatching – recently rewatched Mean Streets, which is another kind of, again, movie I always thought was awesome, but, man, it's even more awesome than I remembered. So you're going to be making a gangster movie about a filmmaker who has many women in his life.

Yeah. I'm in. How'd you know? Sounds exciting. And they race cars by night and it's Fast and Furious 11. It all ties together. I'm going to do the true faux Fellini version of Fast and Furious. I can't wait.

That sounds amazing. Just wait for it. I'm in opening night. Goodfellas is, I'm still a cable guy. I still like scrolling through the channels. Goodfellas is on all the time cable guy like I still like scrolling through the channels Goodfellas is on all the time and I've just been

watching it constantly it's the most rewatchable movie ever made thank you very much I just can't we have to do the we do a rewatchables podcast where we just

break down movies we've seen a million times oh cool I'm officially ready for Goodfellas okay this is big news just so you know

we've been trying to convince people right now I'm halfway through a rewatch of Casino have you seen that recently yeah that holds up really good sharon stone oh amazing she's incredible part of the appeal of sharon stone in that movie was we didn't know that she had that performance in her but now we know because we've seen casino for 22 years but yeah no but in the moment i was like wow really yeah you do have to rewind a little bit to sort of the the the shock of her performance in that.

But also she's just, she is in a way, because you'd seen, you know, because so much of the rest of the sort of leads cast, you know, are people you've seen in Goodfellas and earlier Scorsese movies. She is this kind of, she's the new element in that movie. And just, it's amazing to watch her wreak havoc with those characters,

but also kind of with the movie itself. Like she steals the show in every sense of the term. It's such an amazing performance to watch her wreak havoc with those characters, but also kind of with the movie itself. She steals the show in every sense of the term. It's such an amazing performance to watch. What movie have you seen the most times? I don't know. Maybe the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I mean, that's probably still my biggest go-to. Certainly La La Land wouldn't have been possible without it.

I have to kind of re-watch that relatively regularly just to get my my regular dose of it um um we expected that answer sean i remember you talking about it before la la land and obviously there's there's huge aspects of it in la la land yeah um and you didn And you didn't spend too much time focusing on the space movies before First Man? No, actually, you know, what's funny about the space movies is that it's, you know, I felt like, and this was different than when I was doing La La Land, because with La La Land, yeah, I spent most of my time before La La Land watching musicals. With this movie, I tried to actively not watch space movies. And I think it was, I think, again, maybe because I was less interested in homage with

this movie and more about trying to kind of make a space movie as though almost trying to deny that the earlier space movies had existed, which can be hard because a lot of them are really damn good. But trying to sort of almost blindly go down my own path, and I wanted that path to be more dictated by documentaries. So definitely I was watching a ton of archival space footage, like movies like For All Mankind, if you've ever seen, amazing documentary entirely comprised of archival footage from the era, from the Apollo missions. That I watched and screened for the cast and crew. I watched that several times leading up to shooting.

But then also I'd say just a lot of documentaries of the period that had nothing to do with space. I'd watch stuff like Gimme Shelter by the Maisels or Salesman by the Maisels or Frederick Weissman documentaries or D.A. Pennebaker documentaries, just kind of verite, direct cinema documentaries from that period, you know, that just in many ways were as far from the space program as you could get, but gave me at least a sense of how we could shoot this and how we could capture the flavor of the time.

So yeah, that was our screening series. Incredible, yeah. Which one? Gimme Shelter's way up there for me. Oh, so great. The scene of Jagger re-watching the clip with that like

blank look on his face and to remember that that you know that's again that's the same year same season as the moon landing

oh yeah that's summer is it summer 69 Altamont I mean I know it's 69 oh that was 69 yeah it's just incredible

you know when you think of that movie as a snapshot of its time what do Gosling's next 10 years look like? You're pretty close to him now. What do you see him doing? I really have no idea.

Because it seems like he just loves to do something we don't expect him to do with the next project. That's all I can promise in a way, because I haven't gotten a chance to really talk to him in any more depth than that about it. But I can assure you whatever he does next will not be what you or I am expecting him to do next. I think it's part of what I love about him as an actor and as a filmmaker. I think he did do a lot of movies back to back before First Man and then sort of immersed himself in First Man and wanted to kind of see that through to the finish.

You know, he wasn't just sort of a presence on set in First Man. He was very, obviously during prep, there was a ton of research and involvement he was doing. But then even, you know, I'd have him come by the cutting room when we were editing and just sort of trying to, I just love pinging ideas back and forth off him. He's always, he's just a great collaborator from beginning to end in that sense. And so I think he was just totally in that world until we finished the movie, which again was relatively recently. So I think he himself is probably trying to figure out right now what is next. What's your best Ryan Gosling story? My best Ryan Gosling story? My best Ryan Gosling story. Well,

well, he claims that, uh, so we first met, um, to talk about this movie before, before, before La La Land. Um,

I wanted to meet him and pitch him basically Neil Armstrong, see if he'd be interested in playing Neil Armstrong. and so this would have been back in 2015, maybe. Um, and so we met up at, restaurant, and I got there and didn't see him at first. And then he, I guess, came from behind and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around. Now, he claims that I turned around in such a way that it made it seem on my face like I wanted to kill him.

Like I was turning around to go, who the just tapped me on the shoulder. Now, I argue with this claim a little bit because I think I'm a very, you know, mild-mannered, sweet-tempered person. But he, I guess, saw like, you know, the rage of a bull seen red in my face. And then I saw it was him, and again, according to Ryan, that dissolved and everything. But I think when people ask him,

like, so, yeah, and what made you want to kind of take a chance on Damien and everything, and sort of kind of band up together, whether it was La La Land or First Man, at least I've heard him sometimes refer to that moment of, oh, well, we're either going to, as he describes it,

we're either going to fight right now physically or we're going to make some movies together. It's going to be one or the other. I think he liked the fighting spirit. He saw some edginess in you that he was attracted to. He was like, this is a guy I want to go to war with. Yeah, and I never wanted to break it to him that it was a completely faux impression,

that this was a fleeting and false veneer. But hey, I'll take it. So you don't know what's next? I don't, but I'm sort of, you know, just getting out of the first man world. Looking at that blank final draft, Doc. I'm trying to avoid that. This is why he tries.

He's been, I haven't written a lot this year and he's always like, when are you going to write something? And it's like, I don't want to stare at that blank doc anymore. So you got to take the Damien method of bringing a journal to a coffee shop. Maybe like a playlist journal. Maybe I got to bring the pen and paper back.

Or do it as an email. The blank doc is just after so many years of it. Yeah. I just, I get psyched out by it. Yeah. No, I'm with you. I thought that writing would get easier, you know, as I did it more and more. It got harder.

You know you can fill it up. It's just the process of going through having to fill it up. Oh, yeah. Becomes less fun like each time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you sense it when you're filling it with crap,

you know, it's like the delete button is still, or the worst though is actually sensing that you're filling it with genius and then reading it back the next day and realizing it's crap. It's like, what was that? That's even worse. Those are very evocative feelings.

Yeah. I feel like this is, I see you. And you're actually good. You know, and you're, uh, yeah,

we, we all, we all feel that pain. First man. good luck with it I thought it was excellent I can't wait to see it in the theater instead of my iPad

thank you appreciate it thanks for having me alright thanks so much to Damien Chazelle thanks to Van Lathan thanks to the one

and only Joe House thanks to ZipRecruiter don't forget to go to ziprecruiter.com slash BS thanks to FanDuel you get the excitement of researching and building your team each week, regardless of the outcome at FanDuel.

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Until then. We'll see you next time.