The Press Box - ‘The Lost City of Z’ Director James Gray (Ep. 295)

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey sits down with acclaimed director James Gray to discuss the high stakes of filming his new movie, ‘The Lost City of Z,’ in the jungle, the near-impossible task of making a classic film, and why he isn’t interested in making a television series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello and welcome to a channel 33 podcast. My name is Sean Fennacy. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and I'm joined today by James Gray, a writer and director of films like The Yards. We Own The Night, Two Lovers and the Immigrant. His new movie, The Sweeping and Beautiful, The Lost City of Z, tells the true story of the Edwardian explorer Percy Fawcett,

who went on a quest to find the titular Amazonian civilization. James, thanks for being here. It's nice to be here. This is a beautiful movie that is, very similar to some of your movies, but also very different. It is an adventure story. It is a story about obsession.

You've never made an adventure story before, but you have made some movies about obsession. Why did you make this movie? You know, Stanley Kubrick once said, he said, somebody asked him why you make the movie you make and why you choose a story. And he said, well, it's a little bit like,

you know, asking why you married your wife. You know, she has a nice figure gear in a lovely face, but there are a lot of women who have nice figures and lovely faces. He said, you know, the point is you don't really know exactly why. But I can tell you in my case, I had been sent the book in 2008 before it was published. And I have no idea why, by the way, Brad Pitt and Dedy Gard and Jeremy Kleiner, who are the producers of the movie, why they send it to me, because nothing in my work would show that I could go to the Amazon jungle and the United Kingdom and so forth.

but they did send it to me and I was attracted not by the Amazon stuff which I knew would be more or less a logistical catastrophe I was I was attracted by one very small passage in the book where it talks about his father and it's you know this great explorer who had all these guts and it says his father was an alcoholic who destroyed not one but two family fortunes I'm not even sure how that's possible with drink and game And I thought, well, that's interesting. This guy who was willing to do anything essentially risk his life on a repeated basis for a 20-year period essentially had to make up for a lack.

And I found that very powerful and related to it personally. So I began to get interested in the story really through that and not through any of the other sort of surface elements. Now, of course, once you start writing and working and researching and I went down to the jungle and all that, you begin to get your own form of obsession. But my friend of mine saw the film last night, and he pointed out something very funny. He said that he thought that the film was an explorer, that the character was, in a way, a metaphor for movie directing. So I said, well, what do you mean?

He said, well, you go into an unknown place. You get incredibly obsessed. You neglect your wife and children. And sometimes it leads to success, but sometimes it leads to disaster. I said, no, I haven't thought about that. All right. Well, I hope this leads to success, but I'm not sure. So you started pursuing the movie back when you were sent the book by Plan B.

But then there's this interregnum. There's eight, nine years before you're pursuing it. What's that experience like when you throw yourself into something? Did you go to the Amazon eight years ago and start exploring there? Yeah. It's a very painful experience, to be frank. Because with movies, you know, it's not like painting. If you're an artist, a painter, or even a sculptor, although that's a different machine in a way.

But if you're a painter, you go to the art store and you spend 50 bucks on paint and $100 on canvas or something, and then you go and you can do whatever you want and people might like it or hate it. You can sell it, not sell it. But you can do it and express yourself. And with a movie, you essentially need millions of dollars and hundreds of people for two years at a stretch. And I've often joked that years from now, 100 years, 200 years from now, people are going to look at us having made films as a civilization and look at it, it's like making the pyramids. You know, like, even today, I still, I have that sensation.

Like, I, I saw Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor, which is the most expensive movie ever made, adjusted for inflation. And he, you know, Joseph Mancoitz, the director, has a scene where there's 10,000 extras. Now, you cannot do that anymore. You cannot get 10,000 people to appear on screen. You don't need to. You can CGI 10,000. You have CG 10,000 people.

So even today, people go, how did they do that? How did they do that? Look at the, you're going to tell you? So imagine 100, 200 years from now, you're going to take out a tablet. If they're even our tablets, you're going to talk to some computer system and you're going to say AI, and you're going to say, oh, I'm thinking of a movie, handsome guy or beautiful woman, and they do X, Y, and Z, and then the computer does the whole thing for you. So to your question, which, of course, I'm now, I'm now, I've now strayed from, but I did go to the Amazon and

I went to where Fawcett actually was, which is a region called a Pontanale in Brazil. My first instinct was I said, you know, I have to go where Fawcett actually was. That's it. I have to make the movie there. And then I got there, and it's a true sadness, but so much of the jungle has been clear-cut for soybean farming. And you realize, okay, where was Fawcett? And the Brazilian guide said, Mr. James, he was here. and you look around and you think this is Nebraska

and I realized at that moment I have to I have to invent some kind of reality that adheres to what the story was because this ain't here anymore. So I did do a lot of traveling around Brazil and I went to Argentina as well and we wound up shooting ultimately in Colombia and Peru and the period that it takes to make a film

it can either help you or it can hurt you. You know, you change as a person much more than you think you do. I mean, I know people say, oh, so-and-so is really set in his ways. But we change a lot. And from 2008, just to give you some kind of idea, I had two very young children,

to today I have three children who talk back to me. And that alone is a major step in human beings' development, not just theirs, but my own. So you try to fill that part of the story with a meaning that it didn't have in 2000. But maybe something in 2008 that you were, that was part of you, is no longer there. You know, I'm now in my mid-40s and, you know, when you're in your mid-30s, you have greater stamina. I was horrible to say that, but it is true.

Yeah, well, on the other hand, you might have ended up with a Fitzgeraldo situation or something like that. Well, I certainly hope not. I mean, the thing about Fitzgeraldo, which sits, you know, sort of in the firmament, along with Aguirre, the wrath of God and Apocalypse Now and a handful of other films made, basically lengthy, painful, agonizing jungle. The jungle terrors, yeah. Right. The thing about Fitzgeraldo is a documentary about it.

I don't know if you've seen it. Burden of Dreams, great movie. Sure. Which is both really funny because Herzog is very funny and extremely engaging and also absolutely mortifying because, you know, people got killed making that movie. And no movie is worth somebody getting killed. So you definitely, I mean, I definitely had terror.

I was, you know, in Canada. I was horrified by the notion that, you know, I'm genetically designed to be an accountant in Minsk, not to be hanging out in Amazonia. And I was very concerned that the production would just spiral out of control. Did you ever have any truly scary moments while you're making it? Every day. Really? Oh, yeah.

How does that manifest? Well, I mean, in different ways, it depends on the terror of that specific day. I mean, one day we were shooting on the river. I'm going to tell you this story. We were shooting on the Don Diego River, and Charlie Hunnam and Robert Pattinson are in the water, and up to their knees in a part of the river that was very shallow. And they were pushing the raft against the upriver, and it was just, it was murder. I mean, it was 100 degrees, 100% humidity.

Everyone's passing out. It's terrible. In any event, I look over and I see what I think is a, looks like a crocodile or alligator or something, run up the banks of the river, which we were all standing in with the cameras and with the actors. And I called over the producer, the Colombian producer, who was terrific guy. I said to him, I said, are there crocodiles in this water? Mr. James, no crocodile in this water? None, none. I said, okay.

So I believe him, and then I'm shooting. And in another take, I see, you know, the eye and the snout of the thing right near the edge of the banks of the river. And I slipped out. I called him over and I said, what is that? He said, Mr. James, it's not a crocodile. He said, black Cayman. Now, God knows why, but on the day, I kind of went, oh, all right. And that somehow comforted me.

I walked off. We finished our day. And I came back to L.A. I told my editor this story when we were cutting. And he said, Black Cayman. He said, I don't know. I think that's maybe worse. So we looked it up on Wikipedia, and of course, it's a kind of crocodile, but significantly

more dangerous. Now, how we were not attacked by Black Kamens because they were everywhere. I saw them after that. I have no idea. But that was one day. Another day, we were shooting this scene, and it was Charlie and Robb on the banks of the river. And it was the middle of the night, we were shooting it.

And midway through about take six, I had gotten what I felt was good. I was working on something that I thought might be interesting for seven, take seven, take eight, something like that. and I start hearing in the middle of the take. Me being obnoxious, my first instinct was, who's making noise during my take of my movie? Here I am in the middle of nowhere and the middle of the night on the river and the jungle

and people are yelling. And what it was was our marine team. They were up the river, and they told me that the river was rising. So I said, so what? The river's going to rise? How long it's going to take?

We're almost done here. We did six takes. I'll do a few more than I do medium shots and a few hours will be gone. When I tell you that within 30 seconds, the biggest rush of water I have ever seen came and overtook not just the set but all of us. And when I, I mean, it was a rush like I had never seen before. The banks of the river totally swallowed up by the river. Everyone pulled the cameras out, started running, and the river was basically rising like this

as the guy was running with the camera. and you can't see what I'm doing here if you're listening to this podcast, but it was rising in an unbelievable rate up to the caraman's chin as he runs to the banks of the river holding the camera over his head. And this was a daily occurrence.

So you're always an inch away from catastrophe. Now, having said that somehow, we got very lucky and always managed to just about escape. Now, that scene, I never went back and got any more coverage, but I had enough in the editing room to put it together.

So, you know, with someone like Francis Coppola, he didn't escape that. I mean, there was monsoons, and Martin Sheen had a heart attack. How many days did you shoot? I mean, Apocalypse Now shot for a long time. Apocalypse Now was there for, I mean, I know that he was there for a year, which is madness. I mean, there were he hadases, and he would go back to the United States in between there.

It wasn't a solid year, but I know that he was, I think he shot for 270 days or something like that. We were there for four months. Okay. Which is much easier, but it's still not, I mean, after about two weeks, a certain kind of, there's a, I don't want to say it's punishing, but because again, you're doing something that you want to be doing.

At the same time, there's a level of physical punishment, which is quite powerful. And when you don't have telephones or television or your computer isn't working because it's so humid, and you find yourself in this space with this bed, with this mosquito net at night, listening to the sounds of the jungle, which are alive.

I mean, the jungle is, you realize that we're invaders in a world dominated by insects and animals. And there's a kind of a terror and a cabin fever that does set in. After about two weeks, the first two weeks I was there, I was like, this is incredible. It was 100 degrees with 100% humidity, but I was tolerating it, and I looked like a beekeeper, and I was filled with sweat at the end of every day. But, you know, after two weeks, you want the massage, the air conditioning, the, you know, the dumplings sent to you from dintay fung with the soy sauce. I just was, I was...

They do say the jungle madness is real, though, you know, that is something that infects you. So, you know, as I mentioned earlier, all of your other films are essentially based in New York, take place entirely in New York, you are from New York. Was this a purposeful choice to say I want to get out of the milieu that I've been working in for the last 25 years almost? I'm not sure it was a conscious thing at first, but it certainly became the case. It's a very tricky thing when you're a film director and you want to make personal films or films that you care about as opposed to, you know, someone who just takes a job or

whatever, you're trying to express yourself and you're trying to say the same thing really over and over, but with a different frosting, you know, you're making the same cake with the different exterior. And I just felt, I couldn't keep making movies in New York. At some point, you fall into a rut, and it's a dangerous thing. You know, there's a very familiar thing that a lot of creative people repeat to themselves and each other, which is that you have to give the audience not what it wants, but what it needs. A lot of times the audience doesn't know what it needs. And a lot of times the audience has to catch up to something.

So if you look at, for example, Vertigo, which is now considered the greatest film ever made according to most polls, it was a big failure for Hitchcock and a major disappointment, and he himself regarded it as a fact. failure. And she said, Jimmy Stewart is too old for the part. And he, I don't know if he loved Kim Novak. And you look at the movie now, and Kim Novak's incredible. Jimmy Stewart's brilliant. The whole thing is a masterpiece beyond comprehension. But it was not accepted. Hitch blew it this time, said the reviews. So you realize that there's always a risk and you have to keep trying to push

and see if you can make something interesting. Most of the times, let's be honest, most of the times you have met with failure. That is something you have to accept. Most of the times, you know, I have been met with terrible failure. And yet not. I'm still here. So at some point, you have to kind of be willing to break out and to try to do new things. And I just felt that the jungle was the best way to do that.

Well, you mentioned terrible failure, which is like maybe a complicated way of defining some of the things that you've gone through in your career. It's a notable parallel, something like Vertigo. Some of your films were received rapturously at first. Others were received with a complicated, sometimes booze at film festival, sometimes negative reviews depending on the country that you're in. I'm curious specifically what it's like to be told that what you've worked hard on is bad. And for someone like you, I get the impression that with this film,

there's going to be a lot of conversation about James Gray being one of our great American filmmakers, which, you know, maybe is something you wouldn't have necessarily been able to say after, I don't know, the yards or even some of the complications you had with the immigrant. So as you look at the scope of your career and the way it's received, how do you stay even? And what is it like to process all that information? Well, that's an incredible question. It's weird. I've never actually been asked that before. You know, it's very hard.

I'm reluctant to say it's hard because so many people live lives. I'm luckier than 99.99% of all humans that have ever existed. But in a sense that that is a meaningless fact because all of life is relative. So speaking about myself, it's very hard to hear people say that you're not good because you don't try to create a work of art, if I may be so bold as to say that, which nobody likes or nobody responds to.

On the other hand, you do have to keep in your mind this idea that it is a marathon and not a sprint. And all of the heroes of mine who have had lengthy and beautiful careers in the cinema, whether it's Mr. Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese or Francis Fort Coppola or so many great people making films in the English language only, I've just mentioned. But even someone like Federico Fellini. Now, if you said some, Federico Felini is he a great director, if they've heard of them, they would say, of course. But, you know, Felini was, you know, his movies were treated terribly in Italy. Even La Strata was considered a, you know, bad movie.

And it took America to sort of discover him. So you see that the field is littered with people who sort of left their guts on the table and got slaughtered for it. And at a certain point, you say, well, if it happens to someone as great, great as Felini or Stanley Kubrick, I have to kind of readjust my expectations. You wind up kind of trying to have tunnel vision and saying, how can I do the best that I can and let the chips fall where they may? That's all we can do. Now, there are some few rare examples, rare, where the person is expressing him or herself and somehow it manages to hit. But if you look at someone like Francis Ford Coppola, when he made the Godfather and the Godfather Part 2,

something happened where it aligned perfectly, the timing was right, everything worked somehow, and his masterpieces, and they are beyond genius, somehow clicked commercially, even though you're making three-hour-long movies about someone's moral bankruptcy. So it does happen, but you know just because it does happen, you also have to realize it's very rare, and you have to be zen about it. Now, to be honest with you, I have had very difficult times, but at other times I realize how lucky I am. Do you specifically strive for that seemingly unattainable iteration of success? Like, do you say, I want my movie to, this movie will be a massive hit and will be understood by the, the thoughtful filmgoers of the world.

You try to do that. Why wouldn't you? I don't, because it seems very far away as a concept. It's impossible. I mean, I shouldn't say this, although I will, because it sounds almost like I am berating or underrating the Beatles. But if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated in November of 63, would their appearance, and Ed Sullivan in February of 64,

been greeted with such rapturousness? or was the country ready for something so disarmingly different, having been through this catastrophe, this collective sense of mourning? So knowing that you are totally beholden to the ebb and flow of history and fashion, this idea, I'm going to make a film that's a personal expression, but it's also going to make a trillion dollars and everybody's going to love it, is so ridiculous. It's so impossible.

The only way to make a film you know that will be a success, would be to basically test the movie like crazy and jerry rig it so that it fits every desire or craving that most people want, and it would have to be based on a branded product that has already existed. And even then, there's no guarantee. Even then.

Absolutely right. Even then there is no guarantee. So if you look at it that way, my dream really now, knowing that this is not necessarily in the cards, Maybe it is, but maybe it's not. What I've tried to do, and I'm very close friends with Wes Anderson,

and what I've admired about Wes from afar, as much as I can admire him from afar, is that he has created a kind of brand for himself. Now, he would never put it as crassly as that, but it is remarkable and wonderful that people go to his movies on the basis of his name or the Coen brothers or people like that. They've created this kind of brand,

and that is itself sort of a real testament to their talent. Yeah, it's like a redefinition of the phrase intellectual property, right? They have sort of created something that no matter what it has their imprimatur on it, and then you can know what you're getting going in. That's right. That's right. It is the most elegant form of sort of big macization, which is not to say that, you know, West or Martin's, obviously they're artists,

but they have been able to marshal somehow in a great way that ability. that ability and that's how and that's something I suppose I can aspire to Kobe beef Big Mac yeah maybe yeah the Kobe Beef Big Mac Hey guys we're just gonna take a quick break

and have a word from our sponsors Have you ever been on a website and thought This seems good but what if it were a TV show instead You're in luck Since 1993 the AV club has produced some of the best pop culture writing on the web And now after 20 years of talking about TV Things are coming full circle for the folks

at the AV club We're getting their own TV show Posted by a long time AV Club editor John Teddy. The AV Club show is a weekly deep dive that invites everyone fanatics and casual observers alike to look closer and laugh more at every corner of pop culture, from TV to movies, to music,

to games, and beyond. So get your snack of choice and turn on Fusion TV to catch the AV Club, hosted by John Teddy, Thursdays at 9 Eastern. Be sure to visit fusion.net slash where to watch for details. Okay, now back to my conversation with filmmaker James Gray. So let's ground this a little

bit more about the movie. It's based on the David Grand book, we should say, tremendous journalist who writes for The New Yorker. It's a very deeply reported and consider a book about something that happened 100 years ago. How do you get the level of detail of a story like that onto the screen? And how do you make a decision about what doesn't go on the screen? Well, the first answer is that you don't get all that detail on the screen. A lot of it, you know, immediately has to come out. most great films that are based on books or something like that of pre-existing properties, if we may use a vulgar term, are based on short stories, actually. Short stories are excellent for movies because they seem to fit the running time. Now, I've mentioned the Godfather,

which of course is based on Mario Puzzo's novel, but even there, Francis took out huge sections of the book and made very interesting decisions. In fact, there's a a wonderful book called The Godfather Notebook that has just been published about Francis's original notes on the pages of the book itself. It's remarkable to see the choices he made where an artist is making every single correct decision. I mean, it's crazy. The approach that I took was to say, okay, I know that I can't do the whole book because that would be a 27-hour-long miniseries. Maybe interesting only to me. So what is? not part of this major thread that I'm trying to pursue. Well, first half the book is David

Grant himself going around trying to find Percy's footsteps, Fawcett's footsteps. And I felt, you know, that was like me going down to the jungle and that's not interesting. And even so, I had seen a kind of postmodern retelling of, you know, adaptation, for example, with Nicholas Cage, which is a beautiful film, but it is very much that kind of strange postmodern adaptation. So I thought, well, it's been done wonderfully well. Why would I want to do that again? What is new? Well, what is new sometimes is old, and what is new is a movie in the style almost of like David Lean or Francis Ford Coppull or something like that, a kind of epic American, in Leans case, English, of course, but English language, epic kind of historical tale.

So I said, okay, well, let's lose the grand stuff, and that was half the book. Made the situation a little bit easier. Then he went on eight trips in real life. I reduced it to three, one for each act of the film. And you have to rid yourself of the belief that you have to include every fact, because movies are not, features are not documentaries. You know, we're not beholden to the absolute details of the truth. We're beholden maybe to a spirit of the truth.

but I'm not even sure then. One uses history in a very, very free and maybe reinventive way, which has been shown throughout history, right? You don't go to Shakespeare's Richard III and say, it's not very accurate, Richard III, now is it? And then throw fruit at the actors or something. You have to free yourself. And as I said earlier, this idea that I had gravitated towards,

this person striving for acceptance. and that was the cause and the beginnings of that obsession that lack in him. What is it that conforms to that thematic idea, and what is it that gets in the way of that? And that begins to all of a sudden narrow your focus even further. And pretty soon you've got something that starts to take shape. And the first draft of the script, I believe, was 175 pages, which is very long. It's about a minute a page it corresponds to, and nobody wants to sit through three hours anymore. and then you find yourself focusing and focusing and focusing in that way actually the amount of time that I had to work on the film stood me in good stead.

So you're obviously extraordinarily film literate, thoughtful, you referenced to Cleopatra of Vertigo and just in this conversation. I'm curious that you've partnered with Amazon to release the movie. What is that like to know that the film industry is changing in that way? obviously the film will go into theaters. Yeah. But there is something happening right now where there's a discussion about where something should be seen first,

the notion of movie going. How does that make you feel as somebody who obviously really cares about the art? Also a great question. You know, 10 years ago, I would give interviews and people would say, you know, talk about the future of cinema.

I felt very much like a Cassandra, you know, I thought that movie sort of reflected a kind of a temporary moment. And people assume that art forms last forever. But let's face it, if you were a composer of opera, you would be in deep trouble. Opera was a popular medium in 1860 or 1870. I mean, when Verdi died, 400,000 people lined the streets of Rome for his funeral. And today, you can go to the opera, but you dress up, and it's $300 for a great seat, which is crazy, and who can pay that, you know? And it's become a rarefied thing.

And I started to see that movies, the tradition where you go and you sit in the theater and you watch the film and you pay your money, eat your popcorn, and then enjoy that as a communal experience, that that was under grave threat. This was 10 years ago. And I don't think that anything I said then has been disproven by anything happening now. I think where we are headed toward is a world, which is Amazon and Netflix, where essentially you mostly watch these things at home on your 60 or 70 inch television. Now I'm against that because I feel that the communal experience is important.

And I'm sad that we might lose that. Does it hurt me and does it hurt my feelings when somebody says, I've watched your movie on my TV? Not so much anymore because I know they have a great system usually. It does bother me when people say I've watched your movie on my phone. or on my computer on the airplane. That does bother me. Now, I know that I should have respect

for whatever way people want to watch the movie, but it wasn't made for that. It's like saying I've looked at so-and-so's paintings as a series of postcards. It's not the venue which it was meant to be seen. So I mourn a kind of a change in the... And also, you know, when I got into movies, was 1987 when I started in college at USC film school.

And when I graduated in 1991, the scene was still very much the same as it had been in 1933, which was that you made your film. And it was actually better than it was in 1935. Why? Because you would make your film and then it would come out on videotape. And then a few years later on DVD. So it had a life which didn't have when it was only in theaters. People don't know that the Wizard of Oz and it's a wonderful life were both

catastrophes financially. And TV allowed audiences to rediscover it. So in that sense, it's better. We can discover these films for years to come, and it can find new audiences. So that's a plus. But the major negative, I keep saying this, is that intimacy, that womb-like intimacy

that we have with the screen. And it's very powerful. No longer speaks to us, really. I talk to a lot of filmmakers on this show. The end of these conversations always leads to them saying what their next project is going to be seven out of ten times I'm developing a television show. And it's going to be distributed by X entertainment company. You have resisted the urge to make a TV project.

Obviously, you are a classical filmmaker. Is there any part of you that as you get older thinks that that might be something you could do, given the state of things? I'm sure that I could. and maybe I should. You know, there's a beautiful aspect to, I mean, I loved the Sopranos and I loved Breaking Bad. In fact, there was an episode of the Sopranos, which was Joe Pantaliano beating to death

a stripper, which is, it's about an hour long, I would guess, maybe 50 minutes, something like that. I remember watching it and shaking, like physically shaking afterwards. I found it one of the darkest and most interesting things I had seen in a year. And that was a TV show. And I loved Breaking Bad too. So there are ways to do things that are just extraordinary. And people have done it.

But it is not the same thing. It's not the same talent, really. You have to develop a different muscle because it's like it's like saying to someone, okay, you're writing songs. Now go ahead and write an opera. It's not the same medium. You have this, you know, all of my training, if I may use, that vulgar word, was about how to structure a two-hour to three-hour long film.

You know, page 10, angle of attack, page 15, inciting incident, page 30, end of Act 1. All these rules that they teach you, and over and over, you try to master it and try to master it. And finally after, you know, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, 10,000 hours, maybe you've got something in your pocket that you can consider expertise. And then all of a sudden somebody turns around and says, oh, that thing you worked on, the thing you craft you worked on to master it, you've got to reinvent yourself now.

Now, this is the story, by the way, across the globalized economy. People who used to be doing X or auto workers or whatever now have to retrain themselves to work on microchips or something. It happens everywhere. I used to write for magazines. Exactly. The world changes. We have to change with it.

Adult education. So in a form that's as different as television, I would have to re-educate myself. Having said that, is there a way to turn the 16, 17, 20, 50-hour thing into a weapon, something that's actually better than movies? It's possible.

It's maybe even probable. I'm not there yet, so I would be 7 out of the 11, I would say, because I'm about to go make another film. I want to keep making films as long as I possibly can. I find that there's something very beautiful and immediate about that. medium because all of movies, two to three hour long format, is a sense, a form of pop psychology.

It's all a form, if I use a dirty word, metaphor. It's all a way of making a film is sort of like, it's like a bullet. You know, you watch, we've talked about the Godfather, you watch that movie even at three hours as a narrative juggernaut. It has like one basic concept, the transfer of power from father to son, and the thing is like a locomotive that plunges its way through the center of your chest. And TV operates very differently. It has to, by the length of time. Movies evolved to the length that they are for a reason. Around 1930, movies were about 70 minutes long, and then they evolved by the middle of the 30s with the talkies. It really evolved to about the 90 to 120-minute range, and we haven't strayed from that since.

There's a reason. There's an evolutionary process at work. And I feel that I don't want to lose that. You haven't not lost it yet. James, congratulations on the Lawsity of Z. Thank you for chatting with me today. It's been wonderful. Thank you. Hey, thanks again to Fusion TV's The AV Club

for sponsoring the episode today. Pop culture's everywhere. According to non-existent studies, it's 83% of the things you consume, even more than oxygen. at the acclaimed pop culture website, The AV Club, it's all they ever want to talk about. And now they're coming to TV.

The AVe Club, hosted by John Teddy, is a weekly deep dive that illuminates all the fun, strange corners of pop culture.