The Press Box - 'The Big Picture' — Jay Baruchel’s Directorial Debut and Making an Authentic Hockey Movie (Ep. 347)

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with Katie Baker about the best hockey films ever made (0:30) before he sits down with actor and now director Jay Baruchel about making his first film, 'Goon: Last of the Enforcers'; hockey fandom; and filming the perfect hockey fight (6:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is brought to you by the new Paramount Pictures film Mother. In this movie, a couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. From one of my favorite filmmakers Aaron Aronovsky, who directed Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream. Mother stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a riveting psychological thriller about love, devotion, and sacrifice. I suspect everyone is going to be talking about this movie in September. So go see Mother on September 15th. Douse's advice was get the most expensive pair of sunglasses you can find and walk in like you own the plane.

My name is Sean Fennesse. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Ringer, and here's the big picture. Great show today. F-O-R friend of the ringer, Jay Barrichelle is here. He's heard to talk about his new movie, Goon, Cullen, Last of the Enforcers. It's a hockey movie. He was the writer and producer of the first Goon, which is one of my favorite sports movies of the century, I would say. And to join me to talk about Goon and Goon 2. and also great hockey movies, resident Ice Queen of the Ringer, I would say. Katie Baker. Katie Baker, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me.

So Bakes, you know why you're here. We're talking about Goun. Explain the listeners kind of what happened with this first film, why it was good and where we're going in the next one. Goon is a movie about a bar bouncer played by the man formerly known as Stifler. That's right. A real turn from the Stifler character. It's a much more dramatic role.

And Doug, who's played by Sean William Scott, ends up playing hockey as an enforcer. He can barely skate. Like, he can beat people up. And that ends up elevating him to one league below the pros. So it's kind of about his journey. He meets a woman. Yeah, it's a really kind of weirdly beautiful movie, the first goon. And great performances.

It's funny. I feel like this movie also. And the second movie as well, really make an effort to just be like, this is just the guy who has a pregnant wife and he's trying to figure out what's the best choice for his family, right? Yeah, my theory is like I feel like hockey players, moms have to drive them to the rink at five in the morning. And it's hard to be a diva when that's your mentality. So obviously you are emotionally connected to hockey. I feel like hockey is an underrated platform, an underrated palette for movies.

So tell us about some of the best. versions of the hockey movie. The one, two, I think it's pretty well accepted that Slapshot is kind of always going to be most people's number one. I think Goon, to me, there's just something about the way Goon portrays, like, the entire universe, like, including fans and including the personalities that I really like. But I did go back and watch Slapshot, and it actually was a lot better than I remember. It truly is great.

If anyone has never seen Slapshot that is listening to this right now, just go just get it on iTunes. So what else is on your list? What else is on my list? We've got Miracle, kind of the feel-good, rah-rah American. And that's a portrayal of the 1980 Miracle on Ice Team, right? Correct. And he, you know, he's got a good locker room speech that rivals like Al Pacino in any given Sunday for... Off debated in this office, which is number one.

Yeah. And this isn't on my... top list. But if you haven't seen the movie's sudden death, you're missing out on a Jean-Claude Van Dam film set at a Pittsburgh Penguins game that includes a fight with the Penguins mascot in the, you know, the kitchen. I never knew there are so many like ways to try to kill someone in a commercial kitchen, but now I do. And honestly, that is like an all-time great film that has hockey in it. It even includes a Jean-Claude Van Damme, you know, stealing a goalie uniform and then having to make a pivotal save. So that's kind of an underrated hockey adjacent film.

Incredible. That's 5B or something. Yeah, exactly. Youngblood I just recently watched. It's a very entertaining snapshot of a certain time in film, which brings us to the Mighty Ducks. Let's do it. Let's break it down. Do you love the Mighty Ducks? I love it. Do you love it? I do love it. This came up last night in conversation when we were out with the staff, and we mentioned it to Bill Simmons, and he kind of just blanked us a little bit, you know? He's a young blood era.

Yeah. So what is it that makes this, like, uniquely 90s and special to people like me and you? I think there was kind of a whole run of good kids sports movies in that time, like little giants and... Yeah, the sandlot, things like that, yeah. It's your classic story of a rag-tag group of kids. led by a coach who, you know, in spite of himself, comes to love them. Strong performance from Emilio Estevez. Extremely strong.

It's kind of funny that for a Disney film, it begins with a DUI. Like, I don't know that that necessarily would be the detail these days. It's a great point, right? Gordon Bombay washes out of, I think, professional hockey, right, because of this? He's a lawyer at some... Oh, he's a lawyer, okay. But he's a former... With a hockey background.

He has hockey aspirations for sure. Who's your number one duck? This is an important way to go out. I love what I was the same, Averman, Braverman. Yeah. Kind of the nerdy, but Goldberg the goalie, a favorite. And then, you know, the tension between Goldberg the Golly and Julie the Cat Gaffney and Mighty Ducks, too, is an important one. Julie the Cat really, you know, I mentioned little giants like Becky the Icebox.

That's right. You know, I'm kind of proud of these 90s movies for being so progressive with their portrayal of women. They were. Disney was so woke and we didn't even know it. We didn't. And, you know, Mighty Ducks gets props for, I don't know if there's, like, really any other sports movies that launched a professional franchise. That's exactly right. That's it.

That's why it's, I would say it's not the best movie, but arguably the most important hockey movie because its effect is long lasting. Yeah. Katie, thank you very much for joining me and breaking down your list. Thank you for having me. And now here's my conversation with Goon Last of the Enforcers director, Jay Barichel. Jay Barichel, thank you so much for coming in today, man. What's up? Thank you for having me.

to be here. Jay, you're a director now. Yeah, technically, yeah. How did that go? Goon lastly, The Enforcers. Yeah. It's a sequel to Goon. It is indeed, yeah. It's, uh, um, it was amazing. It's the best gig, best gig in the world to direct a movie. Um, it's all I've ever wanted to do since I was a little kid. Really? Yeah. When I started acting at 12, I had, that was like three years into me had saying that I

wanted to be a director. At nine is when I started. And my mom said to me, you know, you want to go to film school while being on set is the best film school in the world. And I've been very, very fortunate and grateful for the career I've had, but I was always enacting to be a part of movies, not the other way around. And so I've been waiting for this, like I said, since I was nine years old. And it's a hell of a first movie to get to start with is something like this that's like already has an audience that people dig, you know, who quite liked the first film. So it was like not lost on me what a big deal it was. So you co-wrote the first film.

I did, yeah. You're a Canadian man. I am. You're a massive hockey fan. I am. Tell me a little bit about how the original Goon came about and sort of like why you felt like you needed to pick it up and tell more of the story. Sure, yeah.

So how it kind of came, how I and Goon found each other was like super, super simple as my friend Evan Goldberg, who's Seth Rogan's writing partner, was approached to adapt this book. Goon. And he said, yeah, it sounds great. I just don't know anything about hockey. And he's like, but my friend Jade does. And he also knew that I had been writing a fair bit and trying to get that going. And so he stuck his neck out and spoke on my behalf. And then he and I very quickly, I think, in like half an hour, 45 minutes, kind of figured out most of the big ideas for that movie. what we were going to sort of take from the book as inspiration.

Because Goon is technically inspired by a true story. There's a guy called Doug Smith, whose story and life is a bit more Hollywood than we wanted. He actually wins championship and gets the girl and all this different stuff. And so we were like we want to take some of that and filter it through our own experiences. And for me, everything I know about hockey, or at least the beginning of it, was all through my father. And I come by my Montreal Canadiens fandom, quite honestly, through my dad. Also, I'm half Irish, a mom's side, Jewish on dad's side, and the sort of, and dad was an immigrant as well. And the kind of first generation immigrant Jewish thing was part of hockey for him.

him because he played hockey in an all-Jewish hockey team called the Bethel Wings, and sometimes parents of the other team would throw pennies at them as they came on the ice. And so dad would just note to self, I'm going to line up one of these kids pretty good. And I remember – Was he a goon? He was. Wow. My dad had the fight in him in a big way.

Whether it was on the ice or just out at the store, he just liked it. Some guys liked doing it, and dad was one of them. And so, like, I remember meeting someone when I was like 22 who had played on the hockey team with my dad when they were in high school. And I was like, because the great shame in my life was that I'm always been a piss poor athlete and had no interest in ever getting any better. I just wanted to watch movies, read comics, play with G.I. Joe's. And so I know that it was like a lump in my dad's throat that I was never the hockey player. And, you know, I would play pitch and catch with them in the backyard. and like purposely limp, make my catching arm as limp as I could,

then I would like fall to the ground with the, and I could, okay, fine, you can go inside just to get it. So I sat next to this guy, Willie, and I was like, tell me, tell me, you played hockey with my father. To grow up in my house, you know, I, the implication was that, you know, he elected not to go to the NHL. He decided to take his talents to our house. So I was like, tell me how good was my father at hockey?

And he said, how do I put this? And I'm like, okay, great. And he says, you like to, your father liked to finish his checks. And that dovetailed perfectly with everything I knew of my father who would zero, zero to fist into somebody's face very, very quickly. So the hockey fighter aspect, which is already, hockey is a black sheep sport in the states. And then hockey fighters are black sheep in that sport. And that seemed very, it was hard.

for me to separate that from my dad's experiences and all the kind of cultural stuff in it. And so that's why we made Doug Jewish. And because everything I know about hockey fighting was through my dad. And the two were, he couldn't pull the two things apart. And also growing up, watching the habs and watching hockey, all of the players that were lionized in my house, with the exception of Patrick Wa, every single one of them was a fighter. Chris Nyland was my dad's favorite player. So I grew up very much in the cult of hockey fighting. And you stuck with hockey through into adulthood as a serious fan.

Yeah. Well, what's weird is I, so when I was fighting to define myself, 10, 11, 12, and I realized I'm not sports guy. Dad is sports guy. I'm movies and comics guy. I distanced myself from it. And then I had this light bulb moment towards the end of my teenage years where I was like, oh, wait a second. I can enjoy and follow a sport and a team in said sport without ever playing it. I was like the two aren't mutually exclusive.

I don't have to be athletic to like sports. And once I was able to make that conclusion of my head, head, I fell back in love. And I also suspect my dad passing in 2004 kind of helped part made some of that as well, you know, and not to make it super hokey, but in my mind, one of the things the Goon movies are is like my way to say to dad up there. So I never put on the sweater and the skates for you, but I could do my version of it. And so I couldn't play hockey, but I like movies, so I was able to make movies about hockey. That was my way to meet halfway, kind of.

He obviously would have loved Goon. I think so. I think so. But so... Thank you. In the parlance of movies and comic books, there's just a Goon expanded universe now. Yes, there is.

I want to know about how that came about and why you did that. And, you know, why was there more in Doug's story to tell? A bunch of reasons. And most of them, from the most pure place possible, we had only started a conversation in the first one. The first one is very much a love story, a puppy love story. So boy meets girl and it's boy meets hockey, boy meets hockey fighting. And it's the start.

And at the start of any relationship, everything is quite sweetness and light. Year two of a relationship or a job or something, the honeymoon is done. And it's much more of a gray area. and your answers aren't as easy and readily available. And so we saw there was something of a moral imperative as well to continue this conversation about what it is to do this for a living. The sort of negative physical and mental and emotional repercussions of this particular line of work wouldn't have had a place in the first film because the first film, like I said,

is about fallen in love. This one's about being married. So Doug's married to Eva and he's married to his job. And it's a job that asks a lot of you and takes a toll of you. And it's a very finite thing. It's something you can't do forever. And we thought, what an amazing question for a hero to ask of themselves. If I found what I was meant to do and what if what I'm meant to do is hurting me and I can't do it forever, then what?

Right. And I think that that applies to music and sports and a lot of jobs. jobs that are short shelf life jobs, people define themselves entirely by that. Well, what happens when that ends? Skills that erode. Yeah. And can you evolve into the next phase of your life, who this next person are going to be? Or will you be extinct and stay back there trying to hold on to what you used to have, right? And so we thought that these were very, this is very fertile ground for storytelling. And on top of it, we also just thought, that we killed it. We love, we, everyone involved with the first film really loves it. And,

and we had such an amazing time making it. And the only sad thing was by the time it was done, we felt like we had just gotten our sea legs. We had just understood our rhythm. We had just figured everything out how to read one another. And so we, we had so much story left to tell, so much more character stuff we'd come up with. And, and we'd created a world that was fairly rich and deep and felt like something that we can see more of. Right. So you'd wanted to be a director for 25 years. You hadn't had a chance, but you

wrote and you produced the first one as well. I did, yeah. And so how does this happen? Do you have to convince someone to take a shot and let you do it? Were there other movies you were going to direct before this? Yeah, there was a horror movie that hopefully will, you know, I should know actually this week if we're getting to make it this fall. It called Random Acts of Violence. That was an adaptation of a graphic novel

that my writing partner, Jesse and I did. And so we had been building that for years. And it's so funny in movies, especially in small movies. I suspect that doesn't apply much out here in studios. But in small cinema, movies aren't movies for years. And then they are. And all of a sudden out of nowhere, someone gets a production office and a fax machine,

and then stuff just starts happening. And that's kind of what happened with Goon, too. But I never volunteered because I firmly believe in Chain of Command. And Michael Douse, my buddy, directed the first film. He's my general. And so Jesse and I built number two for him to take over and run it again. And in addition to being my general and one of my mentors and a dear friend, he's a dear friend of mine. And so we made the movie for him to direct.

when the circumstances dictated that he couldn't come back, then it was a big question mark. And I know that my preference was for me to take over because whoever else we would get would be just some guy. It's your baby, yeah. Yeah, somebody from the farm team, the Youth Academy that was there the first time, we can import someone sexy, but they're just not going to have the skin in the game. Right. Of course, I can't say that. But I didn't have to because our lead, Sean William Scott, said you should direct it. And then our other lead, Mark Andre Grandin, said, I think you should direct it.

And then the producers and I started having a conversation. And then it was like, yeah, let's take a gamble on him because at least we know him. And I give a shit about this world and this character. So floored that they said yes. In fact, the entire, every day on set when I'd see the slate, I would say, you know, it says director, Jay Barrasht. I was like, you should put quotes around director. Okay, so you're going to make the film. Before you're making the film, are you scared, or are you nervous or purely excited?

Mostly excited. Okay. Mostly excited, inevitably nervous because it's a big undertaking to direct a feature film at all at any scale. even the feature film of what you and I are doing. The 90-minute version of you and I across the table would be a daunting task. My dinner with Jay. Exactly. Let alone a sequel that also has – there was a time in pre-production when my first AD came to me.

It was like, okay, we need to cut some characters because you have – I calculate it. You have 65 speaking roles in this movie. We have 12 hockey teams to create and populate from scratch and big arenas. And my whole pitch the whole time was this has got to be Ben Hur meets the trailer park boys. I want it to feel epic in scope, but super blue collar on the ground. But anyway, so there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of action. And I don't think most people's first movie requires that much shit. And I'm not complaining.

I put myself out there. I left at the chance. But yeah, definitely nervous mainly, mainly two things, mainly because I wanted to make sure the movie was worth making. I wanted to give people that liked the first one a worthy sequel and that respected them and respected our characters. Also, for me personally, I've never said this, is I have wanted to direct since I was a child and now I finally have the chance. So it's shit or get off the pot. I better fucking kill it, man, or else everything I've been saying. has been just conjecture and nonsense.

This is my time to prove that the movies I've been making in my head since I was a child, I can actually find a way to do it. And I was very, very lucky. I had 99% of the same cash returned and then some. We got a bunch of new people coming into play. But I had no work to do with any of them. And I made sure that whoever we hired would just kill it. I wanted everyone to feel free to create, but I also know that the best directors can lean on and hire the best people.

And so that's why, like, my cinematographer for my first film is Paul Serasi, who shot every single Adam Magoyan movie, the Borges, like, you know, far classier than what, you know. And, but that was deliberate. That was deliberate. That was like, I want, if because chips are down, we're going to run out of time, we're going to get behind schedule, blah, blah, blah. I want the motherfucker knows just how to light instinctively. And so, and I took that approach to everything. And, yeah, I spoiled for riches. Spoiled for riches with the cast and crew.

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And our gift code BS to save $20 on your first shirt. Do it today. And now back to my conversation with Jay Baruchel. What didn't you seek, I mean, you've been acting in films and television for, like I said, 25 years. But what did you not know? The first day on set or what was the hard thing that you couldn't foresee? Yeah, it's weird. For whatever reason, it didn't.

So I'm very ill at ease in front of groups of people and like I don't do much like theater or anything. Set is different because it's just the place I know best on earth. But at the start of every scene, you do a blocking, you do a big rehearsal or the entire crew queue up. And so do the actors, wait for the director to kind of tell them what to do and how we're going to tackle this. And it's exactly what should happen. Well, of course, then I'm like, oh, God, right. That means that multiple times a day I'm going to have a hundred people staring at me in silence waiting for me to tell them what we should be doing. Well, that's uncomfortable.

You're the general now. A hundred percent. And I didn't want to betray that. And that was the advice I'd gotten from Michael Dow's, from Jacob Tierney, from all these directors that I are friends of mine that I respect was like, no matter what you'll always have. have an idea. You've been on set since 1995. You will never be at a loss completely. And Douse's advice was get the most expensive pair of sunglasses you can find and walk in like you own the plane. And I... That's like beating the guy up in prison, right? Yeah. For me, it was, I mean, so this is going to sound so incredibly nerdy and insane.

But so I'm a big history nerd. And one of the sort of things I took in with. me was I was like, I want to be Napoleon, which, and what I mean by that is, what I mean by that is, yeah, Napoleon was, his true genius was two, twofold, was that all of his men believed that he had the end in sight and would follow him to the gates of hell, but they also liked him and enjoyed his company. He ate with them and all this stuff. and that sounds incredibly wanky because we talk about nowadays all the stuff.

But what I meant was I wanted everyone on our set to believe and know in their heart of hearts that I have a vision and I have a place I'm taking us. But I also wanted them to enjoy being there. And to that end, it was kind of, we had something uncommon on our set that I've not seen on many other sets where pretty much everyone,

and I made this abundantly clear, everyone had the freedom to come up to me and pitch stuff. So that would be, my grip would come up and be like, I think you might need a, you might want to get close on that guy there because it might help you in the, I was like, oh, that's a very good point. And I had, like, there's this weird shot in number two. And last thing enforcers, we have this concussion vision. And we use this lens baby. That's what's called a lens baby. This attachment you put on, well, my focus puller just on his own made this weird little stencil of a Halifax Highlanders logo, fit that on the lens baby and messed around.

and what we ended up getting in the concussion shots. If you watch real carefully, the light turns into a logo and a slight little corner for a bit. These little things. What I'm saying is he didn't ask me. He just did this. It was like, what do you think? I was like, dope.

And that was the same with all the actors. And I wanted everyone to be able to come up to me and be like, yeah, I don't think this works. You know what I thought would be really cool? And because the movie's better for it. And I get 100 people clock. it the way I'm clocking it and giving as much of a shit as I am. And also, it should be a fun place to show up every day.

You know, like, there's quicker, easier ways to get paid. So we're there because it's a good gig. And making movies is the best. And so I wanted everyone to have as much fun as possible and feel open and feel that it was their movie too. Did you have a Waterloo moment? Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Good. Yeah. Plenty. Yeah, inevitably. Yeah, every day I fought Wellington. Every single day. The real Waterloo stuff was the fact that we just didn't have, we're small movies, so we just didn't have enough days to do everything we wanted to do. Like, I'll put it to you this way. So on an average TV show, which they shoot six to eight pages of dialogue of scenes a day, they're, if they're, if they, they get up to 35 different camera setups, that's a huge day for them. On a feature film that shoots two and a half pages of the day, if you get to five setups a day, that's a huge day. On our movie, our mean average, I swear to God, is one of the only things I'll brag about. Our fucking mean average for the entire movie was 45 setups a day. My record was I got us up to 84.

I shouldn't say I. We got up to 84 one day. Wow. And in spite of that, we were still behind. We still didn't get everything on the call sheet. Is that just because of the complexity of like shooting on ice and the big crowds and things like that? And shit takes time. And a 12-hour day is really a 10-hour day.

And when you think of all the things that have to happen and getting the machine going and all these different things. And we just take overloaded and we're always far too ambitious and what they want you to do with every day. And so that was a bit waterlooish once in every once. in a while. And, you know, there's a lot of managing personalities. And so sometimes you'll inevitably come to log her heads with somebody about something. And the key is to hear them. But if they're, if, if you, if you disagree and know that you're seeing the movie in a bigger way than they are to find a way to honor what they're saying and respect it while not just throwing everything away for them, you know, kind of thing. It's a lot of managing person.

personalities and expectations. I have an important question, which is how to, how do you stage a great hockey fight? Oh, good. There are so many good fights in this movie. Thank you. How do you do that? Oh, wicked. I'm so glad you asked.

I could talk about, I could talk about stunt choreography for hours. It's my favorite stuff. So when it came time to sit down to start cutting the movie, my editor, my editor, my editors, Jason and Andrew had been cutting scenes as we were shooting. But when I was done on set and it was time for me to go into the movie. the edit suite in earnest, Jason was like, well, what do you want to start with? We can literally start with any scene. And I was like, do we have to start chronologically? He's like, no, we just start with whatever scene you want. I was like, okay, let's do the final fight. So first

thing I ever cut with Jason was the final fight that closes our movie. We're all big fight nerds. And so how we started it was we, I sit down with our stunt choreographer and coordinator and choreographer, Jean Franette. And we kind of go through each one of these and try to tell them what this has to be and what it can't be. And ideally what we want. Because the other thing is you can't treat each fight in isolation. You have to remember that this is fight three of five, that each thing has to have its own rhythm, its own vibe. It's got to the audience should get a different it scratched in every fight.

Are you going to like HockeyFights.com and studying fights to, To steal moves? Completely. And always. But I'd be watching that shit anyway. I grew up watching this stuff. And I love it. And so, but by the way, there's a ceiling on how many moves you're ever going to use in a hockey fight anyway.

There's no, you know, I would, I'd love to see the man try to body slam somebody. Like, that's just never, and there's no reason to punch anybody in the gut either, really. Right. And so there's only X amount of moves you can do. So the real fun is to find variety with. this limited amount of moves. It's also got to feel real because there's no audience, especially where I'm from, there's no audience in the world who is better acquainted with how hockey and hockey

fighting are photographed than Canadians. And so it's like, so they've, it's got to pass their bullshit test. It's also got to be its own thing in a way. And so we would kind of, and of course it's a movie. So every once in a while you, you throw in something that wouldn't be like in our, there's way more headbutts in our movies than there are in. I did notice that. There were a couple of vicious headbutts.

Yes, there are. And so, stunt team would start running it and practicing it and would send me tapes. I'd give notes. Then when would come time to shoot the thing, doubles run it in front of everyone. We get the entire cast and crew, and we did this with all over hockey as well. It was always the most fun at the time's on set. All of the crew and cast queue up at the bench, usually. and we just give stunts the floor and we watch them

and the point is to track the arc of the fight to see where it has to start where we want to go and also and this is the real cool thing to me is picking your act breaks within the fight so so for example in the final fight in Goonlast the Enforcers it pays homage to the final fight of the first film where it is a big movie version of a hockey fight

but it's still a hockey fight Each guy's got a chunk of the other guy's collar, and they're just laying into each other. Well, there comes a time in that fight when Anders pivots, and he comes back and he hammer fist, dug in the face, and it's fucking brutal. That was act break number one for us. From that point on, the fight has a different energy and is amped up. And so that tells us, production-wise, working up to there, from that point on, that's when we start putting blood in the mouth. And that's when this is that. And this is when we start to see the first.

bit of cracks on the like so so you and then you pick act break two in the fight and that's when the next tier of makeup and blood comes in and the company the entire crew and set all understand okay so we're we're in this part we're in part three room part one right now okay that's right so let's run that a bit let's do a few clean ones let's try to get some blood in there okay anything else are we missing and then it's about making sure that each heavy hit lands to the best of our abilities you know like i can't stand action movies where I'm bored watching guys fight. And there's a myriad of those.

Wyatt Russell is so good in this movie. So it's such a credible, monstrous asshole. Just wanted to note that. Let's wrap with what happens now. You've made your directorial debut. You're a really seasoned and successful actor. What direction are you going to go in? What are you going to do?

Thank you. Well, I just want to keep making movies and cool TV shows as long as people let me. And so that movie Random Acts of Violence that Jesse and I wrote that we were trying to get going before this one, there's a version of things where I'm getting to direct that this fall even. And also this year I made an investment about 20% of a comic book company called Chapter House Comics in Toronto. And I'm also the chief creative officer there. So that means that when I'm not like trying to make movies, I'm like signing off on capes and logo.

and helping coming up with bad guys and world building. And it's just like I, it's the closest to feeling like I was 10 years old, my friend's tree house again, you know. And so now I understand and love acting and I've gotten to make a lot of do some cool stuff and make a lot of people happy and I'm doing the next How to Train Your Dragon movie. And if something awesome finds me, then that would be lovely. but my ambitions are to keep making action movies and horror movies and to do some wicked comics if I can too. Jay, major dreams come true for yourself.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming on, men. Thanks for having me. Congrats on the movie. Thank you. Today's podcast is brought to you by the new Paramount Pictures film Mother. In the movie, a couple's relationship is tested to an uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. From filmmaker, Darren Aronovsky, who made Black Swan in Requiem for a Dream, Mother stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle.

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