The Vergecast - The director’s episode: how tech makes movies

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of questionable .mkv files:  02:46 - The Verge's David Pierce chats with Matt Johnson, director of the upcoming movie BlackBerry about what tech movies get wrong, why the BlackBerry really died, and how to portray the rise and fall of a top-of-the-world gadget. BlackBerry director Matt Johnson on why the iPhone won and why most tech movies suck 30:38 - David and Vergecast producer Andru Marino try to find out why it's so hard to find director's commentary on streaming services and the obstacles movie fans go through to listen to them. Where’s the director’s commentary on streaming? 57:25 - David talks with the directors and producer of the movie Missing about a new genre of movies that take place entirely on a computer screen, and how they get made. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of questionable MKV files. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am actually, believe it or not, going through my DVD collection. Okay, well, collection is strong. I have a few DVDs that turned up in a box that my parents had in their basement for like decades, which they randomly decided to give to me. Thank you, parents. So now I've gone from zero DVDs in my life to like six, and two of them are clueless. So that's fun.

These boxes have been sitting in my basement for a few months now, and the thing that inspired me to finally sit here and go through them is actually today's episode. This episode is all about movie making. We're going to talk with Matt Johnson, the director of the new movie BlackBerry, about everything from the story behind BlackBerry's demise to why he hates most tech movies. We're also going to try and figure out why director's commentary seems to be no longer a thing in the streaming era and whether or not we can bring it back. And then we're going to take a look at a new genre of movies, the ones that take place entirely

on a computer screen. We're going to see if we can figure out how those movies actually get made. It's a fun show. And oh, I should say, I promise there are no spoilers in this episode. I mean, I guess if you consider BlackBerry is not popular anymore a spoiler, then fine, spoiler alert. But really, we tried hard to make this episode about making movies, not the movies themselves. So even if you haven't seen any of the movies we're talking about, you should still be good to go.

All of this is coming up in just a second, but first, I have to go see if I have a thing in my house that plays DVDs anymore. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports. Mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

Welcome back. Next week, a new movie called BlackBerry is hitting theaters all over the U.S. Yeah, what can I do for you? Okay, picture a cell phone and an email machine all in one thing. There is a free wireless internet signal all across North America and nobody has figured out how to use it. You should see the movie, though. It's great. It's one of the funniest and most fun tech movies I've seen, at least in the last few years. I won't recap the entire movie here or the entire history of BlackBerry, but here's the Cliff Notes. This company, Research in Motion, started by a guy named Mike Lazaridis, and then joined by a co-CEO named Jim Balsely,

invents a device called The BlackBerry. It put email on your phone. It was huge. People were obsessed. And then the iPhone happened, and it died. In that way, the story is fairly straightforward, but it's also really not that simple. Matt Johnson, who's the movie's director and co-writer, and also plays a character named Doug Fregan, who is kind of an amalgam of several research and motion employees, said that he liked that it wasn't that simple.

Matt's not a tech guy, really, and he's definitely not a tech movie guy either. When you're watching movies about tech people, it's like you're going to a zoo to watch people who aren't like you. And my experience growing up was that my friends who were really into engineering and really into very nerdy things were exactly the same as everybody else. They always got such a bad rap. But he said there was something about the BlackBerry story that grabbed him. So that's where we started our conversation. Like I said, up top, this is a pretty simple story about a popular and then not that popular tech gadget. So why make a whole movie about the BlackBerry?

I've been asked this question a lot. And I notice that every single time it's asked, it's almost with the same kind of tone, which is, oh, this seems like such a stayed, played out, almost like a dead concept. Like it seems like this is more like a movie of the week style subject that somebody like me, you know, I'm an indie filmmaker from Toronto who makes very bizarre comedies with my friend group. And so I understand the confusion around approaching a subject like this. But I can't stress enough how that confusion and that apprehension towards the subject matter is what drew me to it. Because I thought, oh, here is an opportunity for something that's on its face. is so broad and so universal. It's a product that is universally known in a way

and almost known as a joke or a has-be or a wannabe product. And I thought, oh, finally, I wanted to do at least one project that would be very easy for general audiences to find. And I thought this would be a great way for me to Trojan horse not only the way I see the world, but the way my friends and I make movies, into a story that a general audience may be interested in seeing

because I'm not sure how much of my other work you're familiar with, but I make like really, really niche comedy films and comedy television shows that are made for a very small audience, a very specific audience, and I felt like if I'm ever going to do something broader or for a larger audience, it's going to need to be kind of hiding in plain sight in something like this.

And because nobody knew anything about BlackBerry, nobody knew who Jim Ballsley and Mike Lazaridis were, it was just a really, really great canvas for me to do something. something in my style. So exactly tone of the question in some ways answers it itself, right? Like, why would you ever do this? Like, that is what drew me to it. That's really interesting. Well, and in that frame, the BlackBerry is sort of perfect for exactly the reason that you described. If I'm understanding correctly, it's like the BlackBerry is a thing that everybody knows.

Like a whole generation of people had one or several and had strong feelings about them. But like nobody knows the story of Blackberry in the way that like if you wanted to do a movie about like Apple or Google, just like the world knows so much more. So is it like it does kind of occupy a sweet spot that I had never really thought about that. Like everybody knows BlackBray that nobody really knows anything about it. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's why I said that the canvas was at once framed. So it was on the wall, but there was nothing on it.

And that was really, really exciting because there weren't a lot of, one, Canadian stories and two stories that had this much of a global impact that were available to someone like me. And so when I read this book and my writing partner, Matt Miller, who's also the producer of the film, it was like at first we were so bored by the content. We thought, oh, well, like, there's nothing here. And then again, it was like in that nothingness, we saw the opportunity to tell this story because it meant we could fill it in with some really interesting stuff. Totally. Were you ever a Blackberry guy? I feel like there are moments of this movie that make it seem like this is made by somebody who loved their Blackberry. Well, I'm coming by that in a fake way.

I've never touched a Blackberry before I made this movie. I never touched one. But my cinematographer, Jared Rab, is such a technical person, and he's so obsessed with the minutia of the way technical things work, as well as my production designer, Adam Belanger, that they really brought a love for the product to the screen, which was very important because my Lazaridis in real life truly has a kind of Pygmalion-esque obsession with this product, and that kind of like narcissist drowning in a pond of his own. product was something that we really wanted to at least touch on because I think there is no

bigger fan of the Blackberry than Mike Lazaridis. And it's why at the end of the film, you see him unable to let go of the idea that this is still going to be a relevant product for all time. And that very much is true to life. Not to spoil the ending, but the last shot of the movie is pretty, it's pretty profound. It's really good. But one of the things, I was reading a bunch of interviews you did about the movie. And one of the things that jumped out to me was you read this book that the movie is sort of ostensibly

based on. Yes. And then decided, like, this is not enough. I need to go do a bunch of research and figure out what is going on here. And again, from a, from a reporter standpoint, that was really interesting because it's like, to some extent, this story has been out there for anyone who wants to pay attention to, right? Like, Jim Ballsley has talked and I think done a lot of revisionist history over the years on what happened. Hugely. Yeah. So what did you do? Like, how, what was the process of going to learn what the world didn't already know about what was going on? Like, what did you find out that had not already been out there? One of the things that I love is meeting real people and hearing what their interpretation of events were.

My second film was about the Apollo 11 mission. Operation Avalanche, excellent one. Everybody should watch it. Yeah, and I spent a lot of time in Galveston, Texas and the Houston area talking with people from NASA and sort of getting their story and putting them on camera. And I learned that, one, I'm not a very talented writer. I'm not a writer by trade. this movie is sort of the first screenplay I've ever written. And what I really enjoyed doing was almost in like a detective-y investigative journalism way, like finding the things that I felt

were left out of the book for reasons of one, Mike and Jim didn't want those things in the book. But two, the book was written by tech journalists. And in Canada, you know, journalists don't want to get their hands dirty. It's a small town. And you can't go around putting people's dirty laundry in the street, right? And so I knew that there was way more to this. And so I started hunting down ex-employees who had moved on, who had left like in the early 2000s, basically as soon as the culture shift started to happen and started talking with them. And the things that I found were unbelievable. There's one employee in particular who is in some ways the basis of the character that I play. Like a lot of his ideas were things that I just straight up stole. But he kept

these massive photographic journals. He kept like a diary of things that were happening day to day. And so much of what you see in the film in terms of like what movie posters are on the wall and the culture that they're interested in and the kind of naughty, destructive, like, oh, like this is basically just one big house party. A lot of that comes from what he did at that time when the company was only 15, 20 people. But I love that stuff. It's so much more fun than like the official account. Because as soon as you're talking to the people who were there who had not. no power who aren't famous, who aren't rich. Those are the people that I'm interested in.

How do you sort of square that back to real life? Like, one of the things I've also read you say is you weren't super concerned with, like, exact sort of nonfiction detail, correctness. And it made me think a lot about like when the social network came out. And Mark Zuckerberg was like, this is unrecognizable to me. Everything about this is not true. And David Fincher and Aaron'sark, and we're like, we weren't trying to make a documentary.

We're trying to make a movie. But like the names of the people and the companies are real. And I think in a lot of ways, people think about Mark Zuckerberg as like, like as played by Jesse Eisenberg whether or not that's real. They always will. Yeah, that's him for the rest of his life. Did you think about that at all? Like, does that change the way you think about sort of what you can do or can't do that like there are people who have these names and companies that did this stuff and how to get that right?

No, I defer to Werner Herzog's concept of the ecstatic truth with this. And that's that he's quite adamant about the idea that there is a truth beyond the facts and that the facts are actually kind of dead and cold and in many ways don't matter to anybody but accountants and that the truth, like the real truth of who somebody is, of what somebody did, it is beyond a encapsulation of the facts of what they did and when and what they said. It's deeper than that. And that's what Matt Miller and I were interested in is what is the deeper truth of this story in their lives because that's what is enduring and that's what's useful.

two audiences, I think, as opposed to just a straight portrayal of exactly what happened and when. So while we are playing with, you know, the dialogue that's being used and some things in reality, we are keeping pretty strict to the timeline and the events that occurred with these guys. Yeah. But more than that, we're trying to sort of say what we think is really going on with them in a way that they, as Zuckerberg says in the social network, it's unrecognizable to him. But it doesn't matter. It's still true, right?

the social network is still true. As much as he can argue that none of that happened, it did in the same way that, you know, the Shawshank Reddemption is true, even though there never was a friendship between Red and Andy Dufrain and they never went to Saywatinao in Mexico. Like, it's still true. And we know that it's true. And so I feel like that that's what we were going for in this film. I like that makes sense. It's an interesting way of thinking about it, especially after coming out of doing all this investigative journalism that you did. Like there are big pieces. of it that are very real and feel true. And like, you know, we were doing reporting on back then. And it's like, I remember when that happened. And so the, so it's just, it's an interesting mix of like the big stuff feels true even if the details don't have to matter so much on the way there. And I also love the essential, like, trickery of that. All my, I mean, Operation Avalanche, which you brought up before is also like a completely false account of the CIA faking the moon landing. So it's obviously completely untrue. And yet I'm trying to present it as though it is like dead. really real. And I like that. I like the magic of that of like lying to an audience, but also

being like, well, where is the line between what happened, what didn't happen, and letting that play in the mind of people watching it? Because I think that's fun. I like participatory filmmaking in that way. So tell me why you think Blackberry ultimately failed, because I think the sort of conclusion the movie draws is really interesting because there's this been this line of thinking for 15 years now that Apple showed up and killed it and BlackBray didn't see it coming. and wasn't able to respond fast enough and just sort of died at the hands of Steve Jobs and the iPhone. But after watching the movie, I almost ended somewhere different, which is like, I kept asking myself, like, if BlackBerry had just not gotten distracted by this Apple thing and kept doing the stuff

that they cared about and wanted to do and believed in, maybe it could have worked? Like, where do you land? What killed Blackberry at the end of all this? In a nutshell, what I've been saying, and I think that that's true about the people in the product is that the Blackberry was a technical device that solved an immediate problem, which is how can we get basically data into the hands of consumers and how can we have email mobile? And that's a very small box, right? Like what Mike and Doug were trying to do, like they're trying to solve something extremely local. But the product itself, and I think you'll agree, especially since you're a tech reporter, really had no vision. The product did not present a vision of culture and the future. and how human beings would relate to one another in the way that the iPhone did, right? The iPhone is a product with incredible vision. And it's saying that you are going to change the way that you live in order to make this product integrate with you. Whereas the BlackBerry was, we're going to give you this tool that is going to help you with the tiny problems that you have.

And it's going to be very, very useful. And so I think that it's almost like the scope of what they were doing was so, so, so, so much smaller than the scope of what these new products were doing. But that in some ways is not the question you asked. I think that you're right to land on this thing that the film is getting at, which is that BlackBerry seemed to get distracted by the threat of something new, and they tried to pivot quickly towards it in making the Blackberry storm. And in some ways, that very short-sighted, very anti-Blackberry product winds up,

getting them in so much hot water with Verizon and really starting the slow descent into obscurity, whereas if they had maintained that original almost startup culture that they had where every day was exciting and they were always, I mean, BlackBerry, you know this, they invented so many things that they'll never get credit for. Like double spacing to create a period is an invention of BlackBerry, auto complete on emails where you start typing somebody's name and then it goes through your address book and instantly finds them. They invented that. Like, the pace of innovation that was occurring because you have all these engineers all in the same place, all trying to come up with new stuff every

single day, was insane. And we still live with a lot of the things that they created that they'll never, ever get credit for. And so I think that if they had just maintained that almost like land party center of, well, what's fun? What do we want? What do we want this device to do? And kept going, then I think we could have seen a world of parallel products. And I really would have liked to see that world because with the BlackBerry gone, we essentially just have clones of the iPhone, which is a product I love. But it really isn't the same as what a BlackBerry was. Because what BlackBerry did that was so cool and in many ways was Mike Lazaridis's central manifesto. He wrote a manifesto in the mid to late 90s about what he thought the mobile product should do. And he said

they should do as little as possible, as little as they possibly can do. And that's how you break into a new market. And it's so funny because nowadays, it's like every week or something, I'll see a report and like a pop news report about, oh, this company is putting out a cell phone that does nothing. Don't worry. There's no social media on it. It has no apps. All it can do is talk and text. All it can do is send simple emails. And so it's so weird to see now a kind of culture trying to recapture whatever it was that the Blackberry was trying to do at first. And so I really do wish that they had kept doing that because a scaled down Blackberry with just a keyboard that can only do a few things.

I think people would love that product. I honestly think so too. Like there's a world in which you could just start the Blackberry from scratch right now and I think it might be hugely successful. So do I, especially with what we know about like manufacturing. Oh, man. Well, who knows? Who knows?

Maybe there's a revived interest after this film. Yeah, could be. It was a really interesting moment to watch this movie because it is, to some extent, it is like a story about like what happens when you become successful and how that like corrupts you and all the problems that that causes and all the problems that come with it. And I'm like watching this movie in the middle of like Silicon Valley Bank failing and everybody panicking about the future of the tech industry and everything is falling apart. And it's, I got to the end of the movie and couldn't decide if you had done this as this like

incredibly damning critique of everything that makes the tech industry go. Or if it was sort of a sad. ad movie about just what happens when you become successful and how hard it is to grapple with those things and how complicated life is. Do you land one way or the other? Do you like want this to come off like sort of a screaming critique of the way tech works? Or is there something else going on? You know, I learned a long time ago when I made my first movie that if I knew what my movies were about and I could explain it to you in a sentence, they would suck. And that really is true. and I think that that holds for almost any movie that you love.

To explain what the point of it is, like I can't. I truly can't. You know what I did? I was like, I love these characters and I tried to follow their story and I tried to treat them with dignity. And yes, this is where Blackberry wound up, but was I making this as I, I've talked with a lot of people who think that I was trying to do a general critique of capitalism or, as you say, the inevitability of innovation and how it's the,

world really is innovate or die, and that no matter how successful you are, you will fail in the end. And to be totally honest, none of these things are philosophies that I think about at all. Okay. At all. From my own experience, I know that as soon as you lose the kind of catalyzing beginner's mindset or the child that lives inside you, as soon as that goes away, then you may as well be dead, which in some ways is kind of what this film is about. but I don't have a larger philosophy on how that applies to the larger tech world, although I do like to see these themes playing out in the real world.

But we'll be fine. I think that goes back to what you were talking about with the characters even to some extent, right? Because so many of these movies, and the last thing I'm going to ask you about is tech movies. So get ready for that in a second. But so many of them in some way or another are just basically like look at these assholes. It's either like the nerdy engineers or the like dickhead money guy. And it's like somebody's an asshole. and I feel like I got the distinct sense

you went out of your way to be like actually nobody in this movie is an asshole. Even Jim Ballsley who is objectively an asshole is like not an asshole, right? Again, it was just really interesting and it was like that was why it was so hard for me to come out of this being like, what does this guy think about the tech industry?

You know what? I was very, very specific in trying to make sure that there was absolutely no sadism in the characters, specifically Jim, because what I often find in any type of villainous portrayal is that they have, a level of sadisticness that I go, what? I don't know anybody like that. Like, nobody's successful. It's very difficult to be a success in industry and to be a sadistic or quote unquote

evil person. I also believe it's very rare to find people who are like truly evil and successful. It's very hard to get people to work with you if you're an evil person, extremely hard. And again, my theory behind personalities is that one, everyone's funny. And, you know, everyone's funny. And two, everybody thinks they're doing the right thing. And so if you treat characters as though those two things are true, you won't wind up with people that audiences are just like, oh, I completely hate them and I want them to die. Like, that's not what I wanted. And also, that's not true. If you spent time with the real Jim Balsley, you'd be like, ah, this guy's great.

And even when I watch him in the film, he's the guy I'm rooting for. I'm like, man, I really hope this guy gets what he wants because he seems to really sincerely want it. Also, those guys were going fucking nowhere if it weren't for Jim showing. up and being like, all right, look, unfortunately, you need this prototype done tomorrow or we're going bankrupt. Like that, he's sincere in his desire for power, but also without that, this company was going to go bankrupt and the dugs of the world were going to wind up in their parents' basements doing nothing thinking about the good old days.

Like, you do really need these forces to come together. And I think that it's insincere to think that one of them is totally bad and one of them is totally good. Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. And like a funny central tension of the entire tech industries. Everybody's always looking for villains and it's super unclear who the actual morons are. Of course, even the VC assholes, even the people who are like, oh, we're going to take these people for all their worth.

They're providing an essential service. And so many of these companies fail miserably. They're taking insane risks. Yeah. It's not as black and white as people like to think of this. I wondered a lot about how many tech movies you had watched in like the pre-production for making this movie. And as a guy who agrees with my stance that most tech. movies are bad. What tech movies do you like and what would you think of as like influences for

what you wanted to do in this movie? Are there any good tech movies? Okay. I think people would be surprised to think that or to hear that like I remember when I first saw the social network, it was with this entire team that made this movie. We saw it in theaters. And I was very, I was very bored by it. And like that film, even though it is like considered a classic and like universally beloved, there are parts of that film that I really love, but it's so manicured and so controlled and so operatic that it doesn't represent reality to me in any way. They were not people that I could relate to. I'm not trying to say it's a bad movie. It's just that in some ways we were trying to do the anti-social network. We were trying to do a social network where

you are watching people that you recognize and you thought, oh, I could be this person or these are people that I knew. And the stakes, not to say were lower, but they were the kind of stakes that I feel like most people experience when they're dealing with problems like this, which is, oh, it's not as cut and dry as a like massive corporate betrayal involving the signing of stock documents. It's much more like about a culture that shifts as you and your friends grow apart because you want different things. So in some ways, that was a bit of a good guide map for us. Like, oh, we want to be like what a bunch of young Canadians would be like in this situation. And then technically I'll talk like Adam McKay's The Big Short was shooting in a style that we really liked because we wanted to be observational like our previous films very much in a documentary space but with much longer lenses.

And this is maybe getting overly technical. But in order to do that, in order to shoot handheld documentary style with like 500 millimeter lenses, which are gigantic. Oh, wow. Yeah. You need to shoot in a certain way just to get these cameras into these spaces. And so we stole a lot of technical stuff from that movie. Did you watch all the tech docs? There's a bunch of sort of well-known, you know, old school tech documentaries,

especially from like the 90s, the sort of Pirates of Silicon Valley, like all that kind of genre. We watched them all. And I got to say Pirates of Silicon Valley was a major reference. And so was that documentary about GovWorks. Do you remember this film? No, I haven't seen this. It came out. It was about the dot-com crash.

And it was about a company that made paying your parking tickets. online possible. They were the first people to do that in a certain region. And that documentary was a major influence in terms of the culture of what we were seeing. It's an amazing documentary. But then also, even before that, most of our references were documentary references, because that's sort of the aesthetic we were going for, but the Penny Baker film, The War Room, which is about the Clinton Carvel campaign, specifically in the South, that was a huge influence on us. So, yeah, we watched all of that stuff. And I love those films. And I like those documentaries you specifically are like major, major touchstones for us.

And so what we were trying to do in our movie is create that same feeling of you are there and the camera doesn't know what's about to happen to varying success, I would say. But those were our big references. And it's why I love talking to tech journalists so much because it seems as though they've seen a lot of the same stuff. Pirates of Silicon Valley is great. I want them to make more stuff like this because, again, I think it's an era that although we are getting these like giga movies about this kind of stuff, whether it's the Uber movie or the Theronauts movie. I guess these are series, yeah.

But there is an era that I feel like is slightly forgotten. And that's the mid to late 90s where we really were transporting from a much more technical, like, oily, tangible product into an entirely digital product. And that's the era that I really love. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. It's super different now, obviously, because all these companies are so big and so buttoned up. And it's like if you want to be in the room with some of those people, you have to get through, you know, 85,000.

thousand marketing executives. Yeah, it's impossible. Right. And then the lawyers will make you sign away your entire life. There was kind of that moment then that it was like most of those people were actually doing it because they thought it was interesting, not because it's like the thing you do after you get an MBA, which is what it is now. Dude, you know, I think there was an amazing movie out there about Bezos in the 90s when he's driving around in that shitty old car trying to figure out the future of Amazon. And the movie only takes place between like, you know, 95 and 99. And that's it. Like, I think that there's a movie there that people would love. It would be a bit like eight mile about Eminem.

So you never see him. Jeff Bezos in a hoodie. Well, right. You never see him get rich, right? You never see him. You just see the struggles. If Bezos were smart, he would try to find a way to secretly commission that film. Because right now, him and Elon Musk are seen as like Lex Luther, like the most psychotic

evil people on earth. And I think something like that would be able to rehabilitate him in a way that. that could be really good. Again, super low stakes. Dude in his car, just trying to figure out how to sell cat food online. That's a good idea. Make that movie. I'd watch that movie.

I can't. I can never reenter this space. It's over for me. I got to do action movies now. All right. We've got to take a break. And then we're going to see if we can bring back director's commentary in a big way. We'll be right back.

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That's grammarly.com. Welcome back. So the streaming era has been really great for lots of things. More access to movies, no driving to blockbuster, no rewinding anything. It's all good stuff. But one thing that we've lost in a big way since the DVD era is special features, deleted scenes, blueboreels, alternative cuts. All that stuff is just nowhere to be found now. Sometimes things will end up on YouTube or as weird nine-hour black and white square things on HBO Max thanks to Zach Snyder.

but mostly they're just gone. And the one that we miss most here at the Vergecast is director's commentary. There's really something wonderful about watching a movie and then essentially watching it again while the director whispers in your ear about all the stories and Easter eggs and fun stuff happening

in the movie that you're watching. And now there's just not much of that anymore. And we wondered why. So Andrew Marino, our producer, went to find out and now he's back to fix everything. Andrew, welcome. Have you figured this out for us yet? I think so. No, I don't think the streaming services have not figured it out yet.

Okay. So you've basically been trying to answer the question of like what happened to bonus features. Is that a fair way to say it? Yeah, particularly director's commentary because that's something you don't really see at all anywhere. True. On streaming services. But recently there was an announcement from Netflix. We had an article on the site. Glass Onion is getting a director's commentary on Netflix. Hello, this is Ryan Johnson. I wrote and directed Glass Onion. You probably know that because you went to the trouble of getting this in-home theater commentary track. So I think that was a little misleading, actually, because have you watched this director's commentary? I watched it last night because you told me to.

And it was both an extremely cool and extremely cool and extremely. frustrating experience because on the one hand, it's like cool to have a director talk you through the movie that they made, right? That's the whole point of director's commentary. Like, I love it. It's delightful to just sort of listen to someone talk about the movie that they made, especially if it's a movie you enjoy by a director you care about, right? I love Glass Onion the first time I saw it. I think Ryan Johnson's great director. That was awesome. The user experience of it was just garbage to me. Like, it's not a director's commentary track on Netflix. It's a podcast you have to watch where he counts down and then snaps his fingers when you're supposed to press play.

So here we go. Three, two, one. And I buffered for slightly longer, so I was like a half second behind him at all times. I couldn't pause the movie and go pee because then the podcast would be off. It's just like the whole process of this drove me nuts, despite the fact that like the stuff he was saying was interesting. This is exactly how I feel. Okay, good.

I went on my iPad to go watch the director's commentary of, like, Last Onion, and I was looking through the other audio options, like with the different languages and stuff. And I was like, where is the director's commentary? So I had to Google it. And yeah, I had to go to Spotify and play it at the same time, which like you said, if you have to leave to go to the bathroom or something, you have to pause both them at the same time. My favorite part of the whole thing was there was a moment in the actual commentary where like, I forget what it was, but there's some detail. And Ryan Johnson goes, oh, you could just see right there the tape recorder fly into the bag, by the way, if you want to rewind and, or maybe don't, you'll mess up the timing of this. But. And I was like, this is the point, y'all. Like, we did it wrong. Anyways, this was exciting to me that there are actual director's commentary being added or even thought about. But yeah, it's not in the actual streaming services. The only streaming service that I've actually seen this in is the criterion channel.

Which sort of makes sense, right? Because it's like those are the people who buy DVDs and Blu-rays also. And that is kind of the only place these things still live to some extent. Like if I go buy Blu-rays, does some of this stuff still exist? Are there bonus materials still out there? They're just only in that one place and I guess on the criterion channel. Right. Like, it's not a Netflix. It's not on Hulu. It's not on HBO Max. It's not in Tudine Plus. It's not in Paramount Plus. It's on Peacock. There's movies that I loved growing up, like, Back to the Future. And I've seen two different versions of the commentary on that film. And none of them are available on any streaming service. I couldn't even find them on, like, iTunes or Apple TV or whatever to buy. The part of why this is so interesting to me is that it seems like this would be the most obvious way for any of these streamers. to differentiate themselves, right? To say, like, okay, there's tons of content everywhere, but we have the bonus stuff. Like, we're the ones who got the director to do this stuff. We have all the deleted scenes.

We have the blooper reels. And the blooper reels for everything have seemed to end up on YouTube. So, like, we're covered there. Feel good about that. But all this other stuff just seems to either be hidden or have totally disappeared. But you went out to figure out, like, why this is actually going on. What did you discover? Is there, like, a simple answer for what has happened here?

I think the obvious answer is that there's some sort of money involved in the answer. So I talked to a few people about it, one of which is Julia Alexander, who Vergecast listeners may remember longtime friend of the show. What I can say about the director's commentary is that it has effectively shifted. She's now the director of strategy at Para Analytics. So she has a lot of insight about where streaming services are spending their money and what type of media of those comments. companies are focusing on. So when I asked her about this, this was the first thing she told me. The only thing I can potentially think of is that they have internal data that shows there is not as much interest in pursuing this. So if you say to the director, hey, we want you to film a commentary

that we're going to add on top of this as a bonus feature. It's going to take an additional days worth of work. That goes into a labor cost, although it would not be super huge, but that takes to account additional cost. They're going to put on the streaming service that you're then hosting this piece of entertainment for, they may have done the cost analysis and it's determined actually our viewers aren't necessarily interested in this. It's a waste of time and potentially a waste of investment for us. I guess that tracks. I mean, we do definitely watch movies differently than we did when we were buying DVDs. In the sense that you don't make an event out of it, you just sort of sit down and find something and press play. And if you don't like it,

you go watch something else. And you're not spending as much like time. and energy with movies because there's just so many other things to watch. I guess I buy that logic. Yeah, Julian mentions this as well. Like, when you used to go to a video store and rent a DVD, you had like days to watch it. It was the movie that was on your mantle. They pick up the DVD case. They turn the DVD case around. They're looking at what's on it, right? There's all the beautiful package design. There's just a different type of value that we put on that experience. Then when you're kind of just searching through something and you put something on and you have the ability to just hit back and then go watch a totally different movie in less than 30 seconds.

So let me come at this a different way then. The versions of these things existed on lots of movies. Like you're talking about Back to the Future has this stuff. And yet, you can't find it anywhere. It's not making more people buy Back to the Future DVDs. Like I suspect everyone who owns a Back to the Future DVD, A, listens to this podcast. So hello to all of you. And B is the whole list of people who is ever going to buy a Back to the Future DVD.

So, like, what's the upside of not having them at all? There's this giant back library of cool stuff that just seems like it's going to die on Blu-ray discs. Yeah. The thing that I think is a big reason is licensing issues. It might make sense that the Criterion Channel has commentary on their streaming service because they also have physical distribution. So maybe the rights are included in that sort of package. I asked Criterion and Collection about it, but they declined to comment. But I did talk to Julia about it.

There's always licensing it. The music industry and the film industry and the television industry is complicated from the right side. There's like 80 different parties that own 80 different facets of this. So that's definitely part of it if the title is a focus features film and they're trying to figure out who owns the director's commentary to that that they did 20 years ago. They're trying to figure out how to incorporate it. You're going to run into some rights issues. This just sounds like sports licensing to me, right? where it's like you can watch certain clips on Twitter.

You can watch certain clips on Instagram. But if you embed the tweet on your website, the rights change. And then if you want to watch a game on your phone, you can. But on your TV, you can't, but you can airplay phone your phone. And it's just like I can sort of imagine why, especially if going back to what Julia was saying before, you've decided that this is not necessarily the most valuable thing, that you would just sit there and be like, you know what, this is not even worth the legal paperwork to do this.

Right. And it might make more sense for the. companies to just like make their own content for their streaming services. You see this on like Marvel shows and Star Wars shows. There's like a making of special on Disney Plus. Marvel Studios, director by night, a behind the scenes look at Werewolf by Night. Now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're literally like propaganda for the movies and I love them. I don't know. They're like long trailers, but I find myself watching many of them and not watching the movie, which is weird. Yeah, and that seems like the trend now. But it's proven that there is

audience is what we see with kind of Disney and even HBO Mac to an extent taking this opportunity to do a couple of different things. They'll either do the docu-series. They will do podcasts. You see it with like succession. You see it with other shows where they're like, we're going to do an official podcast. That's effectively taking the show creator, director, and writers and getting them to do directors commentary, but then they can put it on YouTube and Spotify and Apple and because they have whitelisted programming and they have whitelisted advertising. They can make additional revenue off that from other sides. Okay, so this helps explain the Glass Onion thing too, right? Yeah. Glass Onion is a thing made for Netflix all the time. It's not a movie that existed 20 years ago

that they have some sort of licensing window to. Like it is a Netflix funded Netflix distributed production. And so all they have to do is presumably pay Ryan Johnson a little bit more money to do this. Yeah. So I asked Netflix about this. And also if there was a specific reason to why they put the commentary on Spotify and not the Netflix app. All they could tell me was the director's commentary was also available on all platforms where podcasts can be found. I mean, fair enough, but I would just point out that one of those places is still not the Netflix app. Right.

So the thing that makes me wonder, though, is whether the directors want to do directors commentary anymore, because you would think somebody like Ryan Johnson, like the takeaway, got from watching Glass Onion again listening to the track was he seemed like he was having a very good time. Right. Right. Like he talked way too much for the whole time. Yeah. Like I ended up having to mute the movie and literally just watch the movie on silent while I listened to the podcast because I couldn't do both simultaneously.

So like way oversharer that Ryan Johnson. But he seemed like he was having fun, right? He's just talking about the movie and it like made it an enjoyable experience. And it made me wonder like, do directors hate doing this and are glad to have a reason not to? Do they miss doing it? Like, did you talk to anybody? I did. So I actually talked to a director that works with Netflix, Mike Flanagan. I did commentaries for Oculus, for Ouija, Origin of Evil. I did commentaries for The Haunting of Hillhouse and the Haunting of Blind Manor on Blu-ray.

So he's made a lot of horror shows on Netflix. He mentioned Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Blind Manor, Midnight Mass, Midnight Club. He's all on board for a director's commentary on streaming. I've been shouting about this on social media for a number of years. I don't understand, especially commentaries, because streamers have the ability effortlessly and for free to add that as an additional audio option. They translate these shows into every language on the planet. They very, very easily could add one audio track that includes a commentary. Yeah. So even a director that works with Netflix is frustrated that this is not happening. He says his fans are always asking for director's commentary and bonus features from his

stuff. I get tweeted about it every day. So at least once a day, there's an inquiry about whether or not one of my shows is going to be released. When Blind Manor came out, it was an avalanche of people wanting to know where the deleted scenes were. I think it's absolutely on fans' minds, and I interact with it all the time on socials, all the time. This makes total sense to me, right? And this is, like, we talk so much about fandom and how people interact with culture now. And it's like, if you want to make something that people care about, which as we've talked about on the verge cast before, like Netflix is one of many companies in desperate need of like good IP that people give a crap about in order to do all the stuff it wants to do.

One way to do that is to just get people super, super deep into it. I also, his point about audio tracks is really interesting because what I was going to say is that maybe people have just never thought about changing audio tracks. And so the idea of like burying it in a menu, nobody would ever find it and what's the point. But he's kind of right. people are getting used to doing that. Like, that's a thing people understand because of the way that things are being translated, because of how dubbing works.

Yep. That, like, I think he's right. You could just put it in there and people might find it. Yeah, it's so much easier now to change that stuff instead of back on the DVD. It was like, go back to the main menu. Sometimes it was just a completely different video you had to just turn on instead of just, like, turning it on and off. But, yeah, like he said, he did commentary for haunting of blind manner, haunting of Hillhouse. but it's only available on the Blu-ray release.

So Netflix funded a show, did the director's commentary, and then only put it on the Blu-ray. Yeah. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, Andrew. That is like, what an incredible, like, deliberate middle finger to anybody who wants director's commentary. I mean, if you think about it, like, hey, if you want to listen to the director's commentary, pay 40 bucks for the, I don't know how much is a full season of a show on

Blu-ray, you know? Something like that, yeah. So they get the 40 bucks from the people who actually want it instead of just putting it on the app for the people who are already subscribed. So then that makes me think maybe the next turn of this is that as DVDs and Blu-rays slowly kind of continue to die, the discs continue to go away, all that stuff has to live somewhere. Like maybe they might as well put it on their streaming services. Yeah, I know. And like, if you go to like Apple TV or iTunes or whatever it's called, you can get some director's commentary digitally. It's not on every movie that I know has it on the physical release.

There's like a bunch of discussion on Reddit about someone trying to listen to the director's commentary for the Batman, which you can get on iTunes. Okay. And that's a relatively recent movie. So yay for continuing to do directors commentary. But you're only able to listen to it like on Apple devices. Oh, God. And there's a great line here from someone on Reddit who bought the director's commentary through Apple. The video is also terribly spiced together. The audio will continue as normal, but the video will freeze upwards of 20 minutes and then will sync with the commentary momentarily. Then freeze again.

I got so frustrated that I set up my iPhone onto a Bluetooth speaker with the commentary. Then watch the 4K HDR version on my TV. which is connected to a soundbar and tried to sink the two. This is almost exactly what we did watching the Glass Onion commentary. This actually makes the Glass Onion thing seem like a delightful product experience. There's a lot of stuff going on in the Discussions.Apple page about people trying to play audio commentary on Apple TV purchases. This is the kind of thing Apple, in theory, as somebody who sells movies. Because I can see it being the kind of thing that if you're just streaming them, you're like, well, we don't accrue any extra benefit for.

that. But if you're Apple, you're selling these things, people own them, you would think that all these extra features, which exist would be a reason for people to want to buy more things. Yeah, I don't know. I'm running out of reasons that this isn't a good idea. Like, I wonder if Julie is right that it's just a lot of licensing and everybody's just like, ah, we don't care. Let it die. Yeah. And now people are just like going to go in torrent this stuff. Totally. I've seen a bunch of message boards of people asking like, hey, do you have rips of this commentary for this movie? Good. I support that. It would just make me very happy in a certain way if Apple wanted to, like, get really litigious about people using the director's commentary when it refuses to actually care about the director's commentary. Like, let's pick a fight on that one. I'm into that. Yeah. And now people are just taking in their own hands. There's a podcast called Commentary Cast that will just invite the director on the show and just do the whole commentary while they watch the movie. Oh, wow. And then you can go and listen to it and sync it with the movie. For those that are new to our podcast, Grant, this week's guest and you are going to be having a conversation while watching the film. And if you listen to The Cue at Home to hit play, you can watch along or just listen along at your own leisure. Mike Flanagan was the one who told me about this, actually.

He did commentaries for his movies Hush in Gerald's game on podcasts, similar to the way Netflix did it with Ryan Johnson. But this has no involvement with any movie studio. That's really smart, honestly, because that's also the kind of thing that could live outside. of all of these ecosystems in a way that's really useful. Because I would think part of what's challenging for like back to the future is where you stream back to the future seems to change all the time. Right. And so the idea of having like a stable place to listen to the thing, even as the place you

watch it changes, might be a good idea. And it means people can do all kinds of different stuff. Like what if we got to a place where it was kind of like the alternative sports broadcasts you get where it's like, I want to listen to these people talk about it or these people talk about it or people from different perspectives. like maybe there's a whole giant genre waiting to be unlocked here. That's a great point. And maybe it makes the most sense to put all this stuff on Spotify.

It's just such a crappy product experience. It's such a crappy product experience. It's so bad to watch. What's hilarious is there's some bootleg DVD commentaries on Spotify that people just ripped from the physical release and put it on Spotify. I was recently listening to the DVD commentary of Superbad on there because someone just uploaded it. I have no voice in the scene, if you can tell.

I'm really hoarse. You scream through a lot of the movie. I got food poisoning when we were shooting at the school. This was the last day. See, this is the kind of thing where I'm like, I love that movie. I haven't seen it in a long time. And now I'm going to go watch it again with commentary. And this is what every streaming service should want me to do.

Like, this seems so straightforward to me. It just kind of blows my mind. So is the glass-anian thing a harbinger of good things to come? Like, should I take the fact that it was a big movie with a big name director? and they did a director's commentary thing as a good sign? Has it done well? Do we have any idea if this is the thing anybody cares about? We'll see where this goes after Glass-Sennian,

if there will be more being made. But Julia did mention that, like, as less and less of this stuff comes out, there will inherently be less and less demand for it. Yeah. You're kind of seeing this beautiful game of chicken and egg where the studios and the networks and the production companies are seeing

that there's not as much demand for this type of commentary. So they stopped making supply for it. And as the audiences age up, the audience that comes in that never grew up with director's commentary doesn't know to seek it out. And therefore, there's no demand to increase supply. And Mike Flanagan has even seen this lack of demand for director's commentary on the Bluroy side, too. Quite bizarrely, I did not do one for Dr. Sleep. And that had a robust physical media release, and they weren't interested in a commentary track on that. There's a behind-the-scenes doc and there's a director's cut.

But they were like, no, we're good. What? So, okay, so that to me is the clearest evidence so far that these folks just don't think it's additive in any meaningful way. I mean, and I guess to some extent that feeling is now, like you were saying before, it's being replaced by the like official companion podcasts. And the rewatch podcasts make me think of all of this where it's like I can listen to two of the actors on the office, tell me stories about every episode of the office, which is close enough to a director's commentary. It's sort of spiritually the same thing just kind of out of sync, like literally and figuratively. And I wonder if that is going to be the closest kind of next generation replacement we get, because those are hugely popular. And they're like close to serving the same need, but not quite the same.

Right. And a lot of these directors are on Twitter or social media talking about their work. That sort of replaces the director's commentary because you have such a direct interaction with the fans. And like, someone can just ask you a question on Twitter and answer it, you know. And Ryan Johnson does this all the time on Twitter, too. So, okay, let's come back to the product experience of all of this. Because I think even if we allow for the best possible version of this, right, where the thing that is great about director's commentary, where you sort of get to understand how the film was made and what went into it and how it all works. And like, just listening to the Glass Onion one and seeing all the times when he would talk about, like, the structure of a shot.

Yo, yo, yo, ma. So he's a little fugitive minor. He's not here. He's, we shot his part months and months after we shot the scene. So Jess was just looking off screen there at nothing. And there are all these moments where it's like, it just sort of teaches you how to watch movies in a very cool way. But let's assume in the best case scenario, all of that gets replaced in new and different forms. I still feel like I would pay five more dollars a month for something that is synced with the show that actually like works as I'm watching the show and isn't a whole separate podcast.

I have to seek out on my own and then sync it when they clap. Like, isn't there a version of this that goes back to? Like, I just want to press play, but also learn all this new stuff. You would think, like, that's a technology problem. I think we'll get there eventually. There's so much competition in this space. So maybe there's some innovation coming. So, like, but somebody like Mike Flanagan, like, what does he think about what happens

to this feeling for movies now? Like, does he miss this being gone? Does he feel like it's being semi-successfully replaced by rewatch podcasts and official companion stuff? No, he does not see that as a good replacement. He does think that movies should be able to stand on their own without the context of a director track under it. Sure. But there's a great artful benefit to director's commentary for people who love film and want to get into making film. There's something about archiving the experience of the third.

filmmakers, the actors in real time with the film or with the show that is immeasurably valuable to people who want to learn about how to make movies and can be incredibly entertaining in its own right. They are exponentially enhanced any time you're brought in to the process of how they were made. And I just think that just for cultivating a respect for and a love for filmed entertainment, we need that. It's just invaluable. I wish we got to do more of it. I really do. I think he's right. I completely agree. And if it means bootleg, Spotify uploads, I'll take it. But it just doesn't feel like that's the best answer we could possibly have here.

No. Andrew, you've answered all of my questions. I don't know if you've made me feel any better. But thank you. And please send me that super bad, like, because I'm going to go watch that movie as soon as we hang up here. Oh, yeah, I will do. All right. We've got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and talk about this new on-screen, on-screen kind of movie. and how to make a movie that looks like a bunch of screen recordings. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Welcome back. Over the course of the last few years, a handful of TV shows and movies have explored what feels like a new genre, on-screen storytelling. I don't just mean a story that shows a lot of screens. I mean a story that takes place entirely on a screen, where everything that happens happens inside a window. The movie, Unfriended, did it. Can we get rid of this person? I don't know. Was I here the whole time? It's just probably a glitch.

The movie profile did it. I created a fate profile. Posing as a young combat. Even modern family did it. What's the best first-person shooter about genetically modified space marines? Hello. But the two best examples of on-screen storytelling I've seen so far are a movie from 2018 called Searching.

We'll handle the ground investigation. But as a parent, you can help us with who your daughter talks to. And a sort of spiritual sequel to it from this year called Missing. I'm not giving up on my mom. There's got to be a way to find her. I need you to go to this hotel and ask for their security footage. They're both movies about trying to find a missing person. And by the way, I promise I'm not going to spoil any more than that.

And the titles kind of give that much away. You're going through Kevin's email? You need to let the police handle this. I try. But we're running out of time. Who are these people? The technical term for these is apparently computer screen movies. And I find this kind of movie making totally fascinating.

It feels so modern. It's like if someone in your life was missing, wouldn't you spend most of your time on a screen trying to find them? It is also a really weird storytelling device. And when it's not done well, it does get really old, really fast. But I wanted to learn more about how these kinds of movies get made, like tactically. How do you make a computer screen interesting to look at?

for two hours. Is the future of movie making just screen recordings because that's how we live our lives now? So I called up three of the people involved in making searching and missing, and they gave me a crash course in how all of it works. There's Nick Johnson. I am one of the writers and directors of missing. There's Will Merrick. I'm also one of the writer directors of missing. And Natalie Kasabian. One of the producers on missing. All three of them told me that when you start making a computer screen movie, it's completely different from the very beginning. Even the script itself looks totally different. I remember on searching, Anish and Sevre who wrote that one, they sent me what was like a

word document, like an outline, a treatment. It wasn't even really a screenplay. Because how do you take, you know, what do you do in interior or Facebook window, you know, within that, like it can get kind of clunky. So on that movie, we realized like, yeah, in some ways writing a screenplay would be to service. But then when it actually came time to like breaking the thing down, my mind just as a producer was like, I don't even, what are we even shooting? Like, what are we shooting versus what are we creating? So we did go, well, I say we, I made Seven Anish translate that like treatment word document thing into final draft form. And I share that anecdote because I think it's representative of the whole making of these movies. Like there are parts that are very similar and there are parts that

are very different. So did it end up with interior Facebook screen, by the way? Like, is that stuff that's in the script for this? We sort of slugged separately in bold. We would do the normal headlines, and then we also would just slug in all caps bold, the application we were in, which gets a little shifty when somebody's switching back and forth quickly. At a certain point, there's no way to write it down perfectly. But the computer screen element definitely was part of the initial concept of this idea, along with the characters, you know, along with the story. I think, I think part of the reason we wanted to even tell a missing person's story is that seems like a uniquely good movie, you know, to tell through screens. And every scene along the way, it was how do we show this through screens?

If we can't, how can we imply it through a completely different scene? It was core to the idea. Why do you feel like a missing person's movie is the perfect setup for something like this? The answer to that question, I think, goes back to searching, which was in Seven Inches' initial pitch of that movie, they were looking for, something that was like the best genre for telling something on a computer screen, because they were basically tasked with telling a computer screen story. And that was it. And it was very open-ended. And what the genius of what they came up with was that a missing person's detective mystery movie, you're looking for clues. And I think they found like the perfect little vehicle for that

because in searching, David Kim is searching through Margot's laptop that whole time. So it's also, it offers this like kind of really interesting tab below. of a character's personality that you get to see, and you're also able to just throw a bunch of clues onto the screen. So it's like a little sandbox, I think, for the audience to dig through and find all these clues. It's one of those things where the format perfectly matches the genre. One of the things I kept thinking about watching, searching, and missing

is how many character choices you have to make about technology in the most fun way. Is the main character a Mac person or a Windows person? Would they use Facebook? Are they the clean desktop type or the messy desktop type? You can learn so much about someone just by looking at their home screen or their computer desktop, and I would think you would have to figure all of that out ahead of time. Will told me that, yes, there is a lot of that discussion,

but also the truth is you just have to cheat a little bit sometimes in order to tell the story. Apple has an app called FaceTime that we can conveniently leave open in the background to show June's face at all times. So I think they won over our characters being Apple people just for that so that we can kind of cheat and see their face. She doesn't use Facebook though because a lot of young people we know of today don't anymore. So there's still a lot of character work there. Yeah, I mean, those were things that in the script level we were always talking about and also things were rapidly changing. You know, the rise of TikTok. Obviously, Facebook became more and more irrelevant for people of June's age in the time since we made.

made searching. We even had like conversations all the way down to the finish line of how many unread notifications does this character have? You know, like Will and I, for instance, I've got right now, I've got 131 unread messages in my messages. And our editor was like, you are a psychopath. We did field research. We started like texting people between 18 and 20, like siblings, cousins and whatnot because we're like, we're not even, we can't even relate anymore. Yeah, yeah. So like every little detail in this movie always came down to a conversation of, does an 18-year-old actually use this? Would they actually do this? And like Natalie said, reaching out to our siblings and younger cousins to try to make sure we're

accurate. The one that just kept jumping out to me is like there are very much two types of people in the world, like messy desktop people and tidy desktop people. And it's like, it felt right that June was a messy desktop person. But I just throughout the time, I just kept seeing icons behind our apps and being like, just use stacks. Just clean up the eye. It's fine. Just put the icons over there. It's all going to be fine. That's a really good example of like using. the screen as production design for a movie like this because she is messy. That informs her personality. But then also as the movie goes on, we had, like, I think maybe 10 different layers of

desktop clutter that we kept layering on so that you're literally seeing things that she realistically would have screenshoted as the movie went on. And it just gets more and more cluttered and kind of informs her psychological state, which is just this anxious state. Like I said before, it's a weird process. But eventually, they told me, you get something. that feels almost like a normal script, and then you get on set to make the movie.

And there, Natalie said, it feels more or less like a normal movie set, ish. In terms of the actual set, it's totally like all the positions that you would imagine on a traditional film. They're all there. I think where it looks a little bit different

is, you know, the camera's locked off. Sometimes the camera is like much smaller. I think we used the red for like one or two days, but we shot on like, we shot on iPhones occasionally, not always. The confines of. of the actors in the frame, I would say, are like where things look different. And oftentimes you have one actor acting against a computer. Was there a computer there? Or was it just a camera that

you had to pretend was a computer? There was like a camera rig that our DP, Steve Holleran and his team created that was essentially like a dummy MacBook with a couple of lights on either side. And then a DSLR, the A7S, Sony A7s mounted on top. To get really technical, we were shooting at really high ISO and then stopping down a really like F-11 and upwards F-8 and upwards so that we had really deep focus. And that was one thing that that we watched a lot of, you know, movies that tried to recreate FaceTime. And the dead giveaway is always that shallow depth of field. Yeah, there's not a lot of boca on your webcam. Yes, exactly, exactly. And so we need a lot of light and we're shooting at high ISO. And so we needed a camera that really wouldn't completely fall apart at the high

ISO end. So that's kind of what we were doing. And I think the one, challenging thing from a directorial perspective on set, I would say, is that you don't have coverage. So everything is more or less a oneer. And you're, you know, it was a quick shoot. So we're shooting out a lot of pages. And so you're almost blocking everything like a stage play and trying to block things within this very narrow confines of the frame. And then mentally, as you're shooting in this big wide, trying to, in your mind, create the coverage that will eventually create later on in post. So I think that was probably the biggest challenge for us as directors. There's also a lot of tricky bits with eyeline where, I mean, the actors, they not only have to like bring all this emotion a lot of times by themselves, but the eye line of your eye looking around the screen doesn't play in the movie quite like it would if you really looked at that part of the screen. You actually want to have their eye way closer to the camera than it would actually realistically be.

And then when a character's on a FaceTime call, the eyeline rules are suddenly completely different. you switch into like a 180 rule situation that is not the same as where their eye would actually be on the screen. And so there was a little bit of trial and error in testing trying to learn where characters should even be looking. And on searching, we had an entire movie to try to learn the rules of the eyeline and somehow on day one of missing, we screwed it up. And then we ended up flopping that footage. And then we learned from that. And then we were good the rest of the way. The actual shoot, it turns out, is only a small.

part of the process. Natalie told me that with missing, they shot for about a month and a half and then spent two years editing because you can't just screen record, unfortunately, not if you want the resolution that they had in order to be able to move around and zoom in and out on the screen. So you have to start from nothing. I think the analog is like our computer screen in a wide is our set and then we're just shooting it. We're blocking it with the mouse. We're production designing it with all the icons and windows and then we shoot it with a digital camera. Not one shot in the movie is screen recording. Like everything is built custom, like pixel by pixel basically.

Wow. If anyone out there is trying to make one of these, you just have to start with really rough screenshots and just throw it together, cobble it together, and it'll look blurry and terrible. And then you edit, and then you picture lock, and then you do your graphics. I thought you were going to say for anyone out there that wants to make one of these, just don't. Don't do it.

I'm just saying, though, they have made two of these movies now. So they must like doing it a little bit. And the funny thing is, I think making a movie like this has gotten a lot easier since 2018, even just from a storytelling perspective. In missing, a huge part of the movie only works thanks to a ring camera on the front door of the house and a smartwatch with a camera and a car's reverse camera and Google's location tracking. The surveillance economy actually turns out to be kind of an amazing storytelling tool. I think when we got the treatment, there wasn't that Google tracking.

thing yet. It was, they were tracking her through a credit card or something, Will, if I recall. And we were listening to a podcast to live in Dian, L.A. and they were using, I think, cell phone data tracking. And then I always have had my Google tracking turned on. I've always liked that map, that kind of diary of where I've been that day. And so that started getting our brains, like, you know, the gears turning about how could we incorporate that into it. It felt like tracking such a prevalent thing now and the pros and cons of that, that we had to get it into the movie. So, yeah, that was one thing where we were very happy that existed, because that formed the backbone of our, basically our entire act, too.

The outline for this movie was written as a treatment by Anish, Chaginty, and Seva Honey, and I know that as part of their process in that initial outline was to sort of list out, like, what are things we didn't do the first time? The watch made it in at that point, some security camera stuff. I think we added the car reverse camera. Oh, yeah, that was a good one too. There was a lot of brainstorming of like, what is something that we haven't seen? I know a couple ended up on the cutting room floor, but part of the fun of this movie is getting as many things in as you can,

as many ways of seeing things or screen as you can just to show how pervasive that stuff is. The wildest part of this to me is that almost all of this tracks. There are cameras everywhere. Very little of it feels forced or wrong or like they had to fake it to make the story work. There was one moment where the team did kind of cheat. I actually didn't catch it watching the movie, but Nick fessed up to it pretty fast. She's recording on her watch and the picture is showing us what she's seeing. I don't know if a watch would show you generally, this is so, so specific.

Generally, the video streams to your phone and you record it on your phone. And there was a whole beat in the script, I kid you not, where we wrote, she downloads this app onto her phone so that technically we are seeing all this on her phone, but it's actually through her watch. But then that's a perfect example of something where it's like if you take it to its logical conclusion, if you really want to do hard realism, it's actually more confusing for the audience because then you're seeing, well, why is she downloading this thing on her phone? Why are on her phone, but she's on her watch? So that's something where literally, if you're trying to surreptitiously, you know, record somebody, you're not going to pick. a watch that has the literal video that you're taking of her on your watch. It works in the movie, and no one so far has pointed that out yet. And that's what I was wondering if you were going to point out. But I buy that watches have pretty good battery. My watch has like a 30-day battery.

It doesn't record video. So, you know, it's plausible. All I just kept thinking was like this battery would be so dead by now. It's true. That's probably true. That's probably true. But anyway, one of the moments in the movie that stuck out to me was this big, dramatic scene where the character is trying to find a crucial piece of information and it builds and it builds and the music swells and the whole climax is her entering a password. On a screen, that's the drama. Like, that's the moment. I raised this moment to the team because I thought it was so funny watching it. And they thought it was very funny that I noticed. A lot of the fun of missing is turning really mundane pedestrian things that we do every day into these massive cinematic set pieces. Really literally

what we're talking about in the edit room is we'll be trying to convey an idea and we'll say, hey, remember that moment in Jurassic Park when you saw that puddle? Like, what's the cinematic, what's the screen equivalent of that? And so we're just taking cinematic like tropes and visual beats that we love and trying to find a clever way to do it with typing and a password and mouse clicks. It's the loading icon, right? Yeah, like when the ring comes in and it's loading or something, there's like, and we cut away, there's like that beat of tension of like what's coming. You know, it's just always thinking about that, and that's what makes the movie fun. That's like that magic trick when you sit down and you're like,

how are these guys going to make this entertaining? And then we manage to just keep stringing those beats along, hopefully. Right around the same time I watched missing, I wound up rewatching this great video from the YouTube channel Every Frame of Painting, all about texting in movies. And the ways that filmmakers are trying to find new ways to make text appear on screen without making you stare at a phone for seconds at a time, or without immediately dating the movie.

It's an interesting conundrum. Texting is kind of visual, so in theory, this shouldn't be hard. And yet, every time a filmmaker cuts to an insert of a phone, you can hear the audience yawning. So I brought that up to the team, too. Movies like these exist in such a specific moment, with specific technology,

most of which will be ludicrously out of date in just a few years. I mean, even searching features Facebook heavily, and, like, nobody uses Facebook anymore. They basically said that's true and you kind of just have to lean into being a time capsule. My hope for it would be that people, you know, when they watch it in 20 years, they don't have to doubt that what they're seeing is what it actually looked like that we managed to, even on like a graphical level, capture it accurately enough. I mean, it's going to age. It's going to age in very obvious ways, but I think very good ways.

There's timeless movies and then there's movies that are cool because they're of their time. And yeah, the hope is that this is the latter. We joked very early on on searching. I think when there was like a software update or something, we were already so deep into post. We couldn't. I think Facebook updated. And we were like, well, we've done eight months of work.

So we can't like undo everything. And we realized in that moment, I think maybe Anish said this very aptly that like we were making a period movie while we were making it like or it became a period movie during the making of the movie. So like we just accept that and realize that we're, we're capturing a very specific moment in time. And yeah, like Will says, hopefully it's cool. This kind of movie is still pretty rare, but I suspect it won't stay that way for long.

You're already seeing so much content morph to the screens that they're on. I mean, vertical video is taking over the universe, right? I'm 100% sure that we are going to eventually get a high budget theatrical movie shot entirely with TikTok filters. I don't know how to feel about that, but I'm pretty sure it's coming. Honestly, I'm surprised there's not more of this yet. And Nick actually said he is too. I think a lot of it is that it's just un-cinematic or it's been deemed un-cinematic because there have been so many attempts to make it cinematic by putting texts on the screen and

and doing all this stuff. And it's just at the end of the day, visually not that interesting to watch someone text. I think Uncut Gems is a great example of doing it really well where you just kind of point the camera at the thing and see them, you know, text. And it all comes down to just interesting situations. But I think we've been scared to write that stuff in because, you know, because it just maybe just isn't visually that interesting. And then on top of it, technology has created a whole host of issues with, like, the cops

showing up. You know, you can always call the cops now. You can always call somebody. And so it just becomes this, like, this intruder in your story that you have to constantly try to explain away. But hopefully as we, you know, move forward because technology is such a huge part of our life, it's a fact of our lives, you know, you can start to craft stories around it and not just use it as like a plot point or something to avoid.

The last thing I asked before we got off our call was what might happen in another five years, when they make searching to or missing two or we found him or whatever it's going to be called. I expected them to talk about AR glasses or drones or whatever other cameras might come out. But first, Will and Natalie brought up AI. I do think the whole AI thing is going to be crazy and is going to be the real deal. The technology will just increasingly become more pervasive. And so more and more things like a Zoom wedding will become acceptable to see. in a movie. So the storytelling opportunities will continue to grow, I guess.

The way to show that cinematically to me is always going to be the question mark. And I think that's the hard thing to crack. Like, how can we present this new, whatever form of tech or this new setting or world, but like still make it cinematic and not gimmicky and like bring the audience in? I'm excited to see that. Which is why Nick said things might actually be getting worse. because one very important piece of computer screen storytelling is under serious threat. I also think this franchise dies when the mouse disappears. When we get to the point where, because already mobile makes it really hard to tell stories, that was a big struggle for us.

And if we do eventually get to the point where we're controlling the mouse with our eyes, or the concept of a mouse isn't even necessary anymore, for instance, you know, I could see that going away. It starts to get harder and harder to tell those stories. I'm sure someone could find a creative way, but the existence of a mouse is pretty critical to this movie. Yeah. But as long as computer mice still exist, and I hope they exist a long time,

I hope we keep seeing more computer screen movies. It's a fun way of watching stories that feels like life now. Missing and searching are both out now. You can find them both streaming, and I highly recommend both of them on a dark, scary Friday night. Even if I do still think it's totally insane that a smartwatch battery would last that long. It's going to take at least five years before I buy that storyline.

All right, and with that, we are done with The Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who talked to us for joining the show today, and thank you, as always, for listening. I hope we didn't spoil any movies. Please send me mean emails if we did. There's lots more from all of this conversation, especially with Matt Johnson at theverge.com. We'll put a bunch links in the show notes, but as always, read theverge.com. It's a good website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or movies you feel like I should see,

you can always email us at Vergecast to theverge.com, or keep calling the hotline. 866, Verge11, send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas and feelings about movies. We love getting all of your questions. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Google stuff and Microsoft stuff and chat GPT, and it all just keeps happening, folks.

We'll be back. That's the Vergecast, rock and roll.