The Press Box - War Machine’ Director David Michôd on Making a Big-Budget Film with Brad Pitt for Netflix

Episode Date: May 26, 2017

Ringer Editor-in-Chief Sean Fennessey chats with The Hollywood Reporter’s Matthew Belloni about the Netflix controversy at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and how streaming services are reshaping the movie industry (1:00). Then Sean is joined by filmmaker David Michôd to discuss his new film ‘War Machine’ and making a big-budget war movie with Brad Pitt for a streaming service (14:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Best of all, our listeners can get 25% off all-access badges by using code ring. All one word and lowercase at checkout. Visit terminus event.com for more information. Hello and welcome to The Big Picture. At Channel 33 Movies podcast, I'm Sean Fennacy, editor-in-chief of the Ringer. This show has a podcast name finally, and I'm going to continue doing it. Apologies to failed nominee titles above the title. Nobody knows anything.

And my personal favorite, you'll never podcast in this town again. So we do have a name. We are going to be doing this in the future. I'm very excited about that. And today, on The Big Picture, I'll be talking with... the Australian filmmaker David Mischot, who's made movies like Animal Kingdom, The Rover, and Netflix's latest original film War Machine, which stars Brad Pitt. But first, I'm joined by Matthew Bellany, editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter.

Matt, thank you so much for being here with me today. No problem. So, Matt, help us understand what's happening at Cannes right now related to Netflix. There was a little bit of controversy before last weekend, and what exactly is happening right now? All right, so Netflix is in the middle of this giant industry issue of windowing. And windowing is super boring. It sounds really awful. But it's actually the most important issue in Hollywood because it determines when people can see movies and TV shows and for how much.

So when you click on a movie on Netflix that you want to watch, you say, oh, click. But what you don't realize is that there's been three years of negotiation that leads to the fact that you can click and watch on that. And Netflix submitted a couple films to the Cannes Film Festival and got accepted. There's this film, Okja, which is by a South Korean filmmaker. and then they had another film that they've been promoting as well, the Noah Bombach film. But they got in and then there was an outcry in France because Netflix films do not go to theaters before they go to Netflix. That's a big difference between what Amazon does, which Amazon partners with theatrical

distributors to put movies in theaters like Manchester by the Sea, which you could see in theaters for a couple months. Then it goes to Amazon Prime. Netflix wants everything to be on Netflix the day that it could be available in theaters. And they offer them to theaters, but most theater chains won't show it because it's on Netflix. So they found themselves in this big controversy in the Cannes Film Festival essentially reversed itself and said, oh, we'll let you in this year. But from now on, no Netflix films in competition in Cannes because you don't honor that theatrical window. And that's a big deal.

Yeah. So Pedro Ladovar, who is heading up the jury at Cannes this year, went on the first. record and said that he would not be giving the palm door to Bong Joon Ho's film Okja, which is controversial. And then Will Smith, who has a Netflix film of his own coming later this year, went in the other direction and said that Netflix is sort of like the future of viewing for people that his kids watch all of their content on Netflix. Tell me what it's like in Hollywood and what the reaction is to something like this.

You know, later I'm talking to David Michelle on this show. He has a film War Machine with Brad Pitt. Is there anxiety amongst people, you know, at the studios versus some of the choices that Netflix has been making in the last few years? I think Netflix is the single biggest topic of discussion in Hollywood right now because of the reason you just said, everybody has an opinion. The fact that this Memorial Day weekend, you can go to a theater and pay $15 and see Johnny Depp, or you can stay home and watch Brad Pitt, arguably a bigger star in a movie on Netflix. That scares the crap out of Hollywood because the movie, you know, they first did it to the TV industry with House of

cards and Orange is the New Black and 13 reasons why. And all of these shows that were professional high quality A-list Emmy-winning shows that are not on TV, they're on the internet. And that was fine. It's a big buyer and people like to watch TV at home. But now Netflix is doing that to movies. And they're doing it with big stars, Will Smith, Brad Pitt. They're spending the kind of money that a studio, a major studio would spend. The Brad Pitt movie, War Machine, probably costs 80, 90 million dollars. That's the budget of a big Hollywood movie and it's on Netflix and it's competing with these movies that are in theaters. And it'll be very interesting to see the Memorial Day weekend box office when you have this kind of A-list star on Netflix. That is something that scares

the crap out of Hollywood. So this is an interesting thing. I'm curious to see if Netflix sticks with this plan and continues to make big budget films or if they're still in this period where they are trying to essentially keep an eye on stock price, grow the amount of people that subscribe to their service. And so they're throwing big money at, you know, we've seen Adam Sandler now and we've seen Will Smith, we've seen Brad Pitt. These are huge, massive movie stars. Do you think five years from now, Netflix will still be making films with big top stars, or will they be doing things sort of in their own way and trying to create stars of their own? I think that's a great question, because what you've seen is Netflix trying to spend their way into becoming a player. They are

solely focused on those subscriber numbers, and they want to get those subscribers up over 100 million and keep growing and growing and growing. And to do that, they say they're going to spend $6 billion on content in a year, just this year. That is an insane number. That's, I mean, to put it in perspective, it's, it's two to three times what HBO spends. It's, you know, it's just gigantic on what they're spending. Is that sustainable? Who knows? The stock price is doing pretty well. But in three years, will investors still be into this whole idea of spend, spend, spend? What they've also done is they have changed the equation of the economics of Hollywood. Now, the price to get a hot TV show has gone up because Netflix is willing to overpay because they're trying to build

subscribers. And you hear it all the time around the other networks. Oh, we got to compete with Netflix. Netflix is spending X, Y, Z. Amazon is also doing the same. They have a slightly different model with movies where they put movies in theaters as well as on Amazon Prime. And that has been popular with filmmakers. They've been able to get movies like Manchester by the Sea, which got them two Oscars, which is a big deal. I mean, in the arms race between Amazon and Netflix, Amazon got to the Oscars first. They won two major category, Oscars Best Actor and Screenplay for Manchester by the Sea. Netflix is yet to get there. But in the overall ecosystem, I think Netflix has been a more impactful player just because of the traction that their projects get, everybody talks about shows on

Netflix. When this Brad Pitt movie comes out, I have a feeling everybody's going to be talking about it. And it's just them trying to spend their way into relevance. And so far it's working. One thing I'm interested in, I have a lot of filmmakers in here. A lot of them talk about the creative freedom that a place like Netflix provides. There's not, you don't, the notes that you get, say, if you make a show for a network or if that you're working, you know, for a big studio like Universal or like Fox, David Michelle got to make exactly the movie he wanted to make, regardless of the quality of that movie. And that obviously draws talent. But one thing that has been on my mind is when will we know when Netflix has made a truly great film, a masterpiece?

You know, there's word of mouth, and then there's sort of the industry understanding. So you, as somebody who works at The Hollywood Reporter, helps dictate some of the tone of the industry. Will it be clear to you when the next classic American film that appears on Netflix arrives, or is there going to be this unpacking period? I think there's a gauge of that, at least in the industry, and that gauge is awards. And that's why Netflix and Amazon have so aggressively chased awards. The arrival moment for Netflix in Hollywood wasn't when House of Cards premiered. It was when House of Cards was nominated for Emmys. And what that signaled to the industry was, we're serious and we can play in this game just like HBO, just like all the other network.

similar to 15 years ago when the Sopranos started getting Emmy nominations and everyone said, wow, okay, HBO can produce the quality shows. And we need to have original content on HBO. And if I'm ex-movie star or TV star, I want to be on HBO. And HBO's entire model for the past 15 years has been about that announcement they make every year that they are the most nominated network for the Emmys. So when Netflix cracks through and wins best picture, that will be the moment that the industry says, okay, this is where you go to make a quality film. Because what filmmakers like more than anything, more than money even, if you could argue, they want to see that film on a big screen and they want to experience it.

And you don't get that with Netflix for the most part. They do offer, you know, in small theaters for awards consideration and other things like that. But most, you know, nearly everyone who has. experiences these films for Netflix, experiences them on their screen. And some filmmakers don't like that. You know, Christopher Nolan has come out and said he doesn't, he's not, he's not a fan of that. He wants people to take in his movies as an experience. But, but I think that that's going to change because like you said, Will Smith's kids don't care about theaters. And, you know, anyone under 20, 25, 30 who grows up watching content on their phones or wherever, they're used to that. And they

don't have that same affinity for the movie theater experience. For most movies, some, you know, if you want to see Wonder Woman or you want to see whatever, you know, big blockbuster, you probably want to see it in a big theater. But Netflix is going to have a niche and they're going to make an impact there. Cast us forward again, five years from now, do you think it's plausible that half of the best picture nominees are Netflix and Amazon properties? That's totally plausible. So what will that mean for studios then? Will that mean they will lean more deeply into the Wonder Woman's, the blockbusters of the world, or will they try to experiment and create streaming services of their own? How do you see that playing out? First of all, you're already seeing the studios leaning

into the Wonder Woman's. The most successful studio in Hollywood right now is Disney, and they're successful because they have Star Wars. They have Pixar and Disney animation movies. They're remaking all their old animated movies as big movies like Beauty and the Beast and Jungle Book. That's their model because they know what Marvel Marvel as well and Pirates of the Caribbean what they're doing is they're they're they know that the studio um release business model is moving towards these franchises and frankly a lot of these Netflix and Amazon movies that are getting picked up are movies that the studios would be hesitant to make on their own Brad Pitt's war machine that floated around that was that was available to studios and there was a lot of hesitation to do a very um you know kind

of biting satire at a price of $80 million, even if it stars Brad Pitt. That's still a risk for a big studio. They're looking to make big tent pole blockbuster movies, and then they want to take a few chances on the kind of movies that are smaller budgeted that can win awards. That's the model. So in comes Netflix, incomes Amazon, and they're willing to take a chance on these things because they're trying to establish themselves as a place for movie stars. can go and directors can feel comfortable. And Brad Pitt can make that $80 million satire he wants to make. So we've heard in the past about TV showrunners and also their agents being slightly concerned about not getting data about viewership on shows on Netflix. Do you think that there will be a similar

frustration or concern from filmmakers, say two or three years down the line when we don't quite know how many people saw War Machine or Bright? I think so. I mean, money can assuage a lot of those concerns. You know, Adam Sandler has been, has had a Netflix relationship for a few years now. Those movies kind of come and go and they're on Netflix and then, you know, but it's interesting, you know, he's being paid very well for that. And it's also interesting that Netflix recently announced that the Adam Sandler movies were their most popular things on Netflix. I have a feeling that's because Adam Sandler wanted people to know that because he misses those box office numbers coming in. It'll be interesting to see what they say about War Machine and Bright, the

Will Smith movie and a couple of other things that they go on there. Netflix kind of dribs and drabs that information where it sees it's beneficial. And I have a feeling that Adam Sandler wanted people to know that he was still loved. This was very insightful. Matt, thank you for chatting with you about it today. No problem. All right. Thanks to Matt Bellany from the Hollywood reporter. Coming up, we'll talk with director David Mischo about Netflix and his movie War Machine, but first a few words from our sponsors. Clothes are important. Mark my words. And finding a shirt that fits is very hard. I'm wearing one right now. It fits okay but not great. Here's what you need to do. Whether the collar is too tight or the sleeves are too long, there's something

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who has a new film War Machine coming on on Netflix, May 26th. It's very exciting. David, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. David, this is a very interesting movie. We were just talking before we started taping about what it's like to talk about what's going on in the real world related to the movie that you made. Yeah. What do you mean by that?

What is going on in the real world and how does that relate to your movie? I mean what I was saying to you before was that in a way there's something gratifying for me about talking this is my third movie now and so I'm doing like a press another press tour and I always like talking about the movies because it always feels like a beautiful last stage in the process for me. It always like actually like talking about the movie because the movie comes alive for me in a different way when I'm talking to other people about it. This one feels slightly different though and it feels like. like I'm getting to also talk about stuff that's just important, you know,

which is about the fact that that we, uh, we seem to be at perpetual war now with, with, with no clear end in sight. There, there can so often be, you know,

I can so often feel like there's something, you know, I feel like just a, like a kitty in a sandpit, you know, with Plato and, and blah, blah,

blah when you're making movies, you know, it's just like, uh, I mean, there's, there's, so so important to me and yet I kind of know that it's like I'm lucky because I just get to play

for a living. It's nice when it has that extra dimension. Yeah. So your first two films, Animal Kingdom and the Rover are fairly self-contained stories and this obviously is about something that is happening in the wider world. Yeah. How does that happen? D.D. Garner and Brad Pitt come to you with Michael Hastings book, The Operators, right? Yeah. Why did they come to you? What did they say to you? I don't know I can't answer for them why they came to me. One of the things I love about those guys is that they've been talking to me for years. You know, they were, they're like the only people in Hollywood who've been talking to me since before I even made Animal Kingdom. How did they become aware of you?

They saw a couple of short films that I'd made and they sought me out. And we were having conversations even back then about trying to put, you know, a movie together or, finding ways of working with each other and it didn't happen. But we stayed in contact and they would regularly send me books or materials of various kinds and this was the one that landed because it happened to coincide with me looking for a way into a movie that might be set in one of these contemporary theaters of war and Michael's book gave me that way in. before you got that book, were there other kinds of war stories that you were working on writing or that you were trying to engage with?

I hadn't started writing anything, but I'd been reading a lot. And I had assumed, given the nature of my first two movies, that my version of a war movie would probably be something about, something sad and poetic and brutal, you know, about the horrors of the battlefield. For some reason or other, I was resisting the stories that, resisting the the kernels of the stories that were presenting themselves. You know, I think it was in part because I didn't know that I wanted to subject myself to the horrors of actually making those movies, but also because I felt like that's what all modern war movies are these days.

You know, they are strangely cloistered little movies about, you know, the honor or the trauma. They're often very grim. And almost always, you know, with maybe one or two exceptions, coming from a place of quite of noble intention, you know, of seeing the men and women that fight for us as victims of war. What Michael's book presented me with was a larger story to tell. And one that would be about that. It was always important to me that the movie,

in some way or other, ultimately become about the horror and sadness of war. But it needed to be about something else, too. And it needed to be a movie that asked questions of the larger machine that scrutinized the architects of that horror and sadness. You know, we don't ask questions of these people. The military has become this institution that we all treat with just great deference now across the board. When, you know, the military is a gigantic organization,

It has all different kinds of personalities in it. And there are certain parts of that organization that I think need to be held to account. It won't come to, as a surprise to listeners at this point, to hear that you're from Australia. I'm curious what it's like as an Australian to observe conflict in the Middle East. You know, from talking to U.S. citizens or, you know, British citizens, does it seem like the observation is the same? Or do you have a different kind of perspective because of where you're from? I feel like I'm in an incredibly privileged position here and that, yes, I feel like an outsider.

I actually don't believe that this movie couldn't have been made by an American because I think one of the defining features of our contemporary relationship, social relationship with our military is a kind of detachment. Unlike, say, back in the days of World War II, when the military and the social fabric were all part of one thing,

I think we're all, you know, for the most part, most of us, I should say, are looking at the military from the outside. You know, and maybe being an Australian, I've got another whole ocean's worth of distance away. Having said all of this, all of this stuff feels completely, completely relevant to me as an Australian because we're there. We have been. I think we're, I think we're actually the only, the only Western nation that has fought side by side with the United States in every major conflict since World War I. We were there in Korea. We were there in Vietnam. We were there in all of these Middle Eastern engagements. We're still there. And I think, you know, there's there is talk now of another troop surge into Afghanistan. And I think our

government has been asked to contribute to that surge. This movie feels as much about my country's military as it is about, about yours. So there's something interesting. some choices that you make in the movie to sort of create a fictionalized version of a very true reported book. I'm curious how you landed on inventing a character and inventing a world that reflects what happened but doesn't strictly recreate it. There are certain parallels that can be drawn between this movie in a way and my experience on my first movie, Animal Kingdom, and that that movie was also, it was kind of very loosely based on or inspired by a real event in Melbourne's criminal history and are kind of very loosely

inspired by a particular criminal family. You know, the first point of departure always is just I want, I want wiggle room, you know, I want to feel like I can engineer my own characters from the ground up. You know, I had no interest in, with this movie and doing a kind of, I had no interest in making a Stan McChrystal biopic. I had no interest in doing a hatchet job on Stan McChrystal. For me, this movie isn't about an individual, a real-life individual or a real-life group of guys. It's about an entire system. I wanted to make a movie about all the various, the different layers of the military, the ways that they interact with one another. Brad and I knew from the outset that we wanted to, you know, our way of address,

the kind of the strange disconnection between these various layers was to treat the top of it as like an absurd circus and the bottom as a horror show. To make that absurd circus ring true, we knew we wanted to create a character that was going to be big, you know, that was going to play like, you know, this guy had let his in a World War II general come to the surface, you know. So was it always going to be Brad as the star of whatever you guys collaborated on? Jeremy and Dedy brought the book to me, you know, in the hope that I would be writing something for Brad to play. But, you know, in the absence of a script, you never know if that's

actually how it's going to pan out. It was just very, it was just exciting that, you know, he, when I first delivered him a draft of a script, he was, I mean, it felt like, it felt like, Like he just put everything aside and said, I want to make this movie and I want to make it now. So he's made some very specific choices in the movie, his accent, the way that he runs. You know, it's a very physical performance. How much of that is in the script? How much of that do you guys talk about beforehand? Or does he just show up to the set and say, it's me, it's McMahon?

No, we talk, you know? I mean, I think the basic building blocks of it are in the script. You know, it's like we knew we wanted to make something that was kind of wild. even from our first conversations. You know, Brad is a, one of the things that makes him a great actor is that he, like all great actors, understands that a performance or the building of a character is about a collaboration between an actor and a director.

All of the minutiae of that performance is, you know, stuff of his invention. You know, it's why you just, you know, 90% of my job is just getting the right people in the room. But we, our conversations become about where do we pitch this and, and was there any ideas that he had that were too far or didn't quite work or, you know, did he want to have a strange mustache or something like that? Not that I recall. I mean, in part, you know, when we made the decision to to make the movie be about a kind of, be about disconnection, to be about, to feel tonally schizophrenic, you know, for it to be quite clear that there was some, dangerous remove from the hubris of the executive level. To make that thing, we decided to go big, and it was just really for me about letting him off the leash.

You know, in a way, I didn't just want to make a movie about the madness of war. I wanted to make a movie that actually felt mad. In terms of his performance, there was no such thing as too big. It meant that it just presented challenges for me in the edit, not to try and alter his performance in any way, but to just make sure that the movie felt like a whole thing. What was that like for your first two films of a very serious tone, their approach very seriously? There's pure comedy in this movie, there's satire. Like, was it, was it fun to be changing that up? Obviously, all the stuff on the ground with the execution of the war is fairly

serious, but was it good to be in a room with nine actors and just kind of be reeling? Yeah, there's just a, there's just a joy to be had in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in in the in in in the i experience the you know my experience on set is one of sheer terror you know it's you're living on adrenaline constantly in fear of each new day being the one that that that undoes you what what what do you afraid is going to happen what it what what what could it come apart well that I'm going to discover that a scene is just bad mm-hmm or that something a bad its execution isn't working. I mean, it's always, it's, I enjoy the adrenaline of it and that you, you know, it's every, every, it's not even just that every day, it's every scene is kind of the

same for me, and that you walk on to set, you, uh, you bring the actors on, they're moving at half pace, they're only in half wardrobe, you know, you block it out and you, and you run it through, and it just feels dead, always. And then you've got, then you send them off to get hair and makeup up done or whatever and lighting tweaks and I've got 45 minutes to work out how to fix it, you know, or not even that, sometimes just 20 minutes or whatever. I love that part of the process. I can just feel my brain firing on all cylinders and it feels creative. What do you do? How do you adrenalize it like that? I don't choose to. But how can you convey to everybody else on the set that you have, you're thrusting the energy into it. You know, you're making, you're putting

some urgency on making the scene work. It's an imperative. That's all it is. It's just like, I don't want this scene to be the one that lets the movie down. And then you do that for, you know, whatever. It's like first movie was 35 days, second was 42, this one was 55, and then you just do that every day until you stop and then you collapse and you get the flu and then walk into an edit room for that whole horror show.

What, um, I've had to do that. a lot of filmmakers here, especially those who have worked with Netflix, they've all said that it is the most easygoing creative experience that they are very helpful and that they support the vision. Is that also true for you? Yeah. I mean, I feel so lucky that that window opened for me at this time. When my first movie was released,

it was such a, like a, such a special moment for me. because it was received so well and it did well for me. And I felt like I had an enormous number of opportunities suddenly opening up for me, but I didn't know where the outlet was for the kind of movie that I would want to make. You know, I felt like I'd arrived 10 years too late, you know, that all of those,

all of the specialty divisions of the studios had closed down pretty much. And interesting filmmakers weren't getting to make their interesting movies with good budgets anymore. Was that just something in your head, or was that manifest than even the conversations you were having after the success of Animal Kingdom?

It was partly just, you know, the observations I was making of the movies that were out there. You know, I mean, movies, you know, the writing of them, developing of them, it's like I didn't want to start head off, you know, naively and blindly down roads that I knew would turn out to be dead ends. You know, I didn't want to start writing a movie

that I kind of just by, looking around could see was probably unmakable. Did you consider going to one of the big Hollywood studios and trying to do a project like that? I mean, you've now worked with A24 Netflix, which are sort of two poles of creatively supported filmmaker homes. So was there a different, an alternate universe where you made a movie at Sony? Yeah, there might have been. I mean, I actually remember straight after Animal Kingdom,

I did a kind of development deal with Dreamworks. and nothing ever came of it. I mean, I really liked the conversations I had with them, and we were looking for something to do together, but it just never happened. You know, and yeah, I was kind of, you know, my observations also of the landscape were such that I could see that even if I did find a way

of making a film at one of the big studios, that seeing the kinds of movies that they were making and the ones that were working and not working and how that was all kind of manner as risk aversion, I was wary of getting myself into a relationship that I would experience as painful. And that was, you know, this is all leading to where I am now and suddenly this beautiful opportunity opened up for me at Netflix where it was like, oh, this is the way I get to make the kind of movie. Something unusual, bold, tonally ambitious and that kind of stuff.

but with a budget, you know, there was really no way of making this movie cheaply. And I was just lucky that those guys were incredibly supportive and encouraging of the risk-taking. How much do you think about how many people are going to see what you're making? Because obviously a lot of people go to the studio films because they want an audience, they want to feel like people are engaging. Obviously, Netflix presents a different kind of reach, but a pretty massive reach. Is that something on your mind? I wouldn't say that I've ever not wanted to find, you know, have like an audience.

I'd like everyone to watch everything I've ever made. I don't know how they will receive those things, you know, but that never really, it never enters my thinking. You know, it's like I think I would lose control of what I was even trying to do if I started thinking about that unknown Citizen X that I was making the movie for that wasn't me. You know, the guiding principle for me has to be make the movie that I would want to see and be honest with myself about what that is.

What is your line on the film-going experience versus the streaming situation that your film will be delivered in? Is there any part of you that regrets that or misses that? How do you reconcile that? I choose not to. I mean, if I'm to be completely honest, the Netflix model pretty accurately represents

how I watch movies these days. I like watching movies at home. I've got to, I actually don't have a good TV. But even with a bad TV, I still like watching movies at home. We're in such a strange transitional phase at the moment. You know, it's like watching all this stuff unfold between Netflix and Cannes, the opening and the closing of release windows and all that kind of stuff. You know, it's clear to me that, okay, something,

there will be some radical shift, seismic shift in the landscape in the months and years to come. Where it will land, I'm not entirely sure, but I would like to believe on some level that it can. Even if that experience of going to the theatre to see a movie becomes not just $15 in your tracksuit pants just because you've got nothing else to do, but it actually becomes a special experience, you know,

that you experience it that way. Maybe that's what the future holds. Yeah, the Ken situation right now strikes me as kind of a birthing pain for something that has gone. going to come in the future. Do you feel like you are on the right side of history in some way by doing this? Or is it just sort of a matter of circumstance that this was a great opportunity to make this film with this company and with Brad and Plan B? Oh, no, it felt like we knew that what we were doing that it was a, I mean, not because of me. It was actually largely because

of Brad. You know, Brad going to Netflix was a big deal. But we loved the idea of it. We knew from the outset that we were making a film that felt kind of in the current climate, in the current cinema climate felt bold and anti-establishment. It's been really interesting for me how I feel like piracy, for instance, hasn't entered any of the conversations that I've been having. It's almost as if Netflix has, the advent of Netflix has kind of on a certain level rendered that conversation redundant because they address the very thing that people have always been saying is the cause of piracy. which is giving people the ability to watch the movie when they want to watch it, you know?

Here it is, straight away, you can have it now. You don't have to steal it. Yeah, that's very interesting. So given some of the secrecy around viewership data and things like that, how do you define success for a movie like this, aside from just personally feeling satisfied and proud of what you've made? The opinions of, you know, even just a small group of people whose opinions I respect, you know. I mean, that's all it's ever really been for me.

I feel like if I'm out there like trying to chase a number, I'll go nuts. I know when I feel like I've tapped into something that is landing with people who are important to me and I'm not being, and they're not lying to me when they say they like it, you know. Is that happening often? Well, you know what it's like no one, deep down I think humans are good. You know, they don't like to hurt other people's feelings. I don't know if that's the message of the movie though. I think it might be.

Really? Well, I think, you know, I certainly think Brad's character is, I feel like it was very important to me that I not paint him out to be an evil guy. Sure. That he is, his intentions are true. He's just delusional. It feels like the pride comes before the good, though.

You know, the self-delusion comes before the good. Yeah. I'm not saying we're all good. Okay. I just think we're kind of good. Fundamentally. Let's, I always like to wrap by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen?

You said you watch a lot of films at home these days. Have you seen anything recently that blew your wig back? Oh, God. I hate this question. Well, in a part because you're asking the wrong guy, I hate everything. And I even annoy myself now because I do, you know? Because you just, do you see the flaws in things or the,

is it what you would have done with something? No, it's never what I would have done. It's always, I just always feel, relentlessly underwhelmed and I don't know why I want that joy back though you know it's like the whole reason I make movies is because I just remember those experiences I had when I was young of watching of watching of those movies that made me feel like I was having some kind of spiritual experience you know I mean I I that's the juice you know why is that gone well I think in part because of the stuff I'm talking about you know it's like the studios aren't making these movies

anymore. This experience that I've had getting to, you know, whether or not I've succeeded and making something that fits that bill, it remains to be seen. But certainly it felt like a big deal that Netflix were making this movie. I mean, it was, it felt a little bit game-changing. There, hardly anyone's getting, you know, it's like Paul Tom Zandison's getting to, he'll release another movie at the end of this year. I'm excited about that. But there aren't many people who are still getting to, to, you know, make those movies that, blow me, this is terrible. I can't stand that I'm even saying this. And I know the second this interview ends,

I'm going to walk away and then think of five things I've seen recently. I actually thought were really good. We might have to jump back on Mike, so we don't have the first ever decline to this question. Yeah, no comment. Okay, well, David, thank you very much for being here, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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