The Watch - 'Fargo' and 'Veep' Return (Ep. 143)

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss the music of their youth (1:00), their early impressions of 'Fargo' Season 3 (6:28), and the season premiere of 'Veep' (22:43). Then, Chris is joined by film critic and writer Adam Nayman to discuss a talented filmmaker and the subject of his new book, ‘Ben Wheatley: Confusion and Carnage’ (27:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by HBO's Silicon Valley from executive producers, Mike Judge, and Alec Berg. The Emmy-nominated comedy series Silicon Valley returns for its fourth season this Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO. Silicon Valley has been lauded as one of the top comedy series on television by major publications like Entertainment Weekly, Slate, and Variety. And this season changes in the air as the Pipe Piper Guys pursue their video chat app Piper Chat. Join them as they fumble along the road to success in an attempt to leave their mark. this Sunday, April 23rd at 10 p.m. only on HBO. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.

Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio. It's my more successful twin. It's Andy Greenwald! Fun fact, the Stussies are not twins. We'll get to that. One is an elder brother?

One is the younger brother. We're going to get to that. We're going to talk about Fargo. We're going to talk about Veep today, man. Also at the end of this podcast, you can hear a chat that I had with rare contributor, Adam Neiman. We talked about Ben Wheatley, who's one of the most exciting filmmakers working. Thrill. Director of Kill List, Sitesiers, High Rise, and the new Free Fire, which I very highly recommend to anybody who is interested in a really fun, irreverent, dark shoot-em-up.

It stars Bree Larson and Army Hammer. I'm one of those people. It's really good. It is an excellent movie. It should be out in most major metropolises this weekend. So Adam and I talked about Ben Wheatley. You should also check out Sean Fennessey. He has his podcast on Channel 33 where he talks to filmmakers,

and he has an excellent conversation with Ben Wheatley. That's also going up on Channel 33, so you should check that out. That's a lot of content, man. Podcast Mavens. Chris, I'm just coming in hot today because... Yeah, first of all, you're fucking swole. Can I talk about this? Andy is lapping me in like the chiseled dude department now?

Is that a weird thing to say? Yeah, because it's not true. Yeah, you look good in this T-shirt. You look chiseled. Wow. Diesel. But that's, I'm doing the runs. You know, I run now.

You're doping like a Juventus midfielder. I run a lot. Here's just all you need to know about this. Chris and I are both becoming more active now that we live in California. And our producer, Zach and I were talking to Chris about stretching before you run. And Chris asked if you have to stretch before golfing. Oh. So I just feel like we're going in different directions.

I'm taking a more athletic track and you're taking a more presidential one. I definitely played golf the other weekend and half of the time talked about Turner Classic movies. So I've definitely. Dad. I think I am Which one of us has kids? Moving past a certain generational marker. Thank you.

I am coming in hot in non-physical ways too because on the way here, Chris, I was listening to a little record called Only Built for Cuban Links. Oh, interesting. And we are of an age now, I think we can be honest, where you can say,

oh, that's one of my favorite albums of all time and realize you just messed around and didn't listen to it for like seven years. Right. Is that the case with Cuban Links? Yeah, I just hadn't listened to it. And, God, you know, first of all, that's a real good record. And it sounds pretty good.

to when you're trying to just drive a Subaru through traffic. You know what I mean? It's really, it moves with you as context moves. It was made you listen to that way. I feel like that's how you got lives his life now anyway. But what I wanted to say was it's very interesting to revisit the classic rap records of our youth, something we can do on this podcast. Yeah.

Because they age differently than pop or rock songs. What I mean is, let's say the Beatles, young group from Liverpool. They had a song called, I want to hold your hand. That sounds quaint even now, but it sounded quaint then, and it actually could be. metaphorical for something else, right? Our man Ray Kwan on this record says that he is the black Trump. That didn't age well.

You know what I mean? That's just not, that doesn't age so good. And it's like, took me out of incarcerated scarfaces. Did it? Follow up, though. That's what took you out of incarcerated scar faces. That's not what took me out. What took me out was this. Our man was trying to say that like his vision is clear, right? Are you really taking him literally? No, no, I want to tell you what his analogy was.

Okay. He's like, my vision is clear now. Like, I can see better than I've ever seen before. And what he says to relate that in a way that the men and women and the people of 1995 would appreciate that. What is so clear? What he says is, my vision is clear and extremely Jonasera New York Times staff photo as a 27-inch zenith. And my only thought is, wow. Yeah. That's not that clear, man. Yeah, I know. Like, imagine, we lived in a world where we were like, if we could only have the clarity. Boy, if I get that 27-inch, I know I've arrived. I'm just saying. I know.

I know. That stuff, that stuff dated itself. You know what? I was going to ask you about this. This is interesting that you're bringing up. I wasn't going to ask about Wutang, but I was, we both were exchanging text messages about. And we talk about Wutang on Monday with Damon Lindeloff. We do you talk about Wutteg with Damon. It was about, so this weekend,

this week it was announced that there was going to be this big festival in Chicago called Riot Fest. Yes. And among the artists playing is Jawbreaker, which is a very exciting thing for me. I'm a huge Jawbreaker fan. I have people in my life who are even bigger Jawbreaker fans, much bigger,

but jogger fans than I am, but still love them. But weirdly, that news that Jawbreaker was getting back together was sort of overclouded by the return of Paramore. Wow. Wait,

in your own... Not in my life, but it was like almost just like, the job, Jobbreaker is like the last of the 90s bands that hasn't gotten back together. No, they basically were never going to.

Yeah, but Paramore, who's riot, album came out 10 years ago. That's crazy. They're getting back together, too. Which one matters more to you? Well, they never went away.

They just, like, took... You just took my question. ...to a break. Which one matters more to me? You know, I've written about both bands, Chris. That doesn't... It's not an answer.

I like Jawbreaker more than Paramore. Good. Good answer. That's my answer. But, in terms of a going concern... Is that what you get by Paramore the best Jawbreaker song? It's a really good.

song. I mean, one of them is a, one of them is reforming as a, you know, for all the old feels and one of them maybe, maybe they made a good album. I don't know. Yeah. But you, you sent me a very, very teenage text about Paramore. You were excited. I think that's what you get is like an all-timer song. It's great. She's great. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit. Let's do Fargo first and we'll do V's second. Fargo premiered last night. First episode of the third season. You can read about, Allison Herman wrote about it on The Ringer, Andrew Good at Rower, about it on the ring or two. Swango Hive.

Can I start? I'm going to start with my negatives, my notes, first. Okay? Yeah, take out the little flip notebook. I have a couple of, there's a couple of things that I don't. Like, you know, like, my wife hates watching movies that incorporate people being on a quiz show. So you can imagine how she feels about the movie quiz show.

She doesn't like seeing people participating in game shows on, in a movie. I don't know why. She also hates watching people lose money or get bilked out of money. she doesn't really like watching con man movies. How did she feel about win at all? She did not enjoy her experience watching. See, it's tough for some people. I hate the shattering of the fourth wall that happens

when the same actor plays more than one part. With the exception of certain Eddie Murphy comedies, I have never really liked, nor have I ever walked. I think it's great what Orphan, like, what they do on Orphan Black is cool. You support that. wasn't like, it is just one of those things, Orphan Black Works because they're clones. Can you explain to me why Ewan McGregor is playing both of these roles? Well, I will say, I will counter your point.

I agree with you in the broadest strokes. I remember sitting on these mics back when I used to fly in airplanes and see movies. One of the movies I watched was the Tom Hardy-Kray Brothers movie, the name of which I don't remember. I didn't like that either. You did see it. I thought he was great as the twins. I liked that. Yeah, twins is one thing.

But the fact that these guys aren't even twins. I mean, it is a bit. It's a thing, right? Like, you want to get a star. That's the problem with this show. Okay. So it's just a little... This is Fargo syndrome.

Every season of Fargo starts out the same way for me, where I am a little bit like, what's going on here? These things seem deliberately slow in a way that doesn't actually have any, like, meat to it. there's like setting up like a lot of storylines

and a lot of characters to eventually have a payoff down the line. So I will say all this by saying like I fully expect the season of Fargo to be good and get better as it goes along

but the idea of having this like everything in this is just like a little bit too cute for me in the first episode so the one actor playing two parts the parole officer and ex con

who are actually like in love with each other because they're great bridge players. Like everything in it is just a little too like perfect. Yeah. And it's in its, and it's like construction. It's cleverness.

Yeah, it's cleverness. And I feel that way also about like the music supervision, like the cues of like constantly like having a song and every, it used to be like I feel like that has just become really overdone. I agree with prestige television in general where like there used to be like a song played in the last episode over a montage at the end of the season. And you were like, oh, yeah.

And I think, you know, obviously you had like grays and stuff like that that had very heavy use of pop music. But now I feel like there's just like a Scorsese school of like in and out of every scene needs to have a pop song. And it just seems it's like super confusing and also like way too intrusive emotionally. Yeah, I find it very manipulative in general, the overuse of pop music on the soundtrack of shows, particularly in the end of seasons. And particularly when when the words go silent and the show is now telling us how to feel about something with the song, you're basically outsourcing. the hard part of the writing to the song to capture the emotion. I agree with that. Here's what I think so far.

And I've only watched one episode of season three. I did not. I think they sent critics and former critics two episodes. I only watched one. It was interesting to see the reviews because they were remarkably uniform in saying, well, it's starting to feel a little bit familiar now. And there are good things in this, but, you know, it's, we're starting, the cracks are starting to show.

I thought actually, to my mind, the best review based on, again, the only episode I've seen was Jim Pano Wozik in The Times, who basically said, yes, it's familiar, but procedurals are familiar. And this is sort of what... Procedurals generally have the same characters, though. Right, but the idea being the characters that carry over are that cleverness, is that vibe, are the accents, you know? Like, that is what this show does. It'll tell you a different story set to the same melody, basically. So, and his point was that's not the worst thing in the world. And I agree with that. Yeah, I'm being a little bit churlish, but I think it's because I have pretty high expectations.

Well, I think a couple things. I think that, so I think those reviews were generally right, but I also think that it is especially unfair for Fargo. And this is also a situation FX has put everybody in, to be honest, because they have rushed this onto the air. Not saying there's any dip in quality because of it, but they're very much still filming the show. and only began filming the show in December, January. And so to contrast that with Leftovers, season three, the show we've given the belt to, while Fargo, while having seen this episode, we've decided this for now anyway.

The Leftovers gave critics seven episodes, seven out of eight, and you could sort of get a sense for the whole thing. The one constant other than the accents and the mishaps and the cleverness across the two existing seasons of Fargo is that I think they both started a little slowly. Yeah, but they're also, both about greed, stupidity, impulsiveness, and virtue in the Midwest. I mean, like, there's not, like, and that is sort of the other, Allison touched on this, and she was talking more about the relationship of the television show to the movie

and how when you, like, take a step back from the first two seasons, you're looking at sort of a prequel and a sequel in a way. But for this, even the setup, even introducing us to another virtuous law enforcement character, even introducing us to another satanic sort of dark prince of. the underworld, though I'm a huge David Thulest fan, so it's not like his performance in this is. I am not like, I'm not like, I don't want this.

I'm just saying like, it's very interesting to watch them go back and forth between this idea of continuity in a universe because it's a it is still sort of happening all in the same world. Having repeated beats that you feel like you've seen before or character setups or

whatever, but I'm sure that as the season goes on, the Carrie Coon character and the Allison Tolman character will have a lot of separation. As the, the, They both wound up did. They're not Marge Gunderson necessarily. Or they might not. And reading an interview with Noah about the season,

I think it was the one that was in Vulture this week, he basically said, well, to his mind, Carrie Coon's character, Gloria Bergel, is quite different than Allison Tolman's character because Allison Tolman's character is basically very innocent to the world in the beginning.

And Carrie Coon's character begins from a place of already having had the wool pulled from it. But again, even the way he's describing it is, well, I did it this way, so now I'm doing it this way. Right. It is very, very hard for your brand to be quirky, unexpected surprise.

You've got to be surprising. You've got to be surprising if you do it. And I also wonder, and I say this with no knowledge of where the season is going whatsoever, much of what... I mean, I think season one was absolutely excellent, particularly after the first three.

I think it sort of took off after four. Season two, I think, is a modern marvel and a masterpiece of television just across the board. But what I know about season two, and this is not. really coming from having worked for Noah, but coming from what he thinks he's said very much publicly.

A lot of season two felt chaotic while it was being made. A lot of it was things that they stumbled into. I mean, in the very beginning of season two, there was a very dramatic visual style with the wipes, you know, very 70s. And that wasn't intentional when they filmed it. It was that he wanted to fix things that he didn't think worked. And so he chose that to sort of cover up the whatever. He also stumbled into something deeply emotional with season. season two, both in the relationships between Ted Danson and Patrick Wilson and Kristen Miliani, but also the fact that they had the establishment of we know what happens to to Luce Alverson and we know what happens to his wife because of the first season. So we're already emotionally invested.

Coming into season three, I had two feelings. One was, I was dazzled again by that opening. It's so funny and it's so weird. And I love what Noah does the TV where he's just like, I'm having fun. Come on, bus is leaving. Yeah. but there was also a feeling of okay I'm pretty I don't know what but there was an element of I don't know why we're back here yet because there's nothing connecting to what I saw before I mean it's like there's like a whinness to it that I think lingered over the first few episodes of the first season if I remember correct yeah set that Oliver platt stuff is mostly in the first half that season and you just remember I remember sort of being like where is this going and I think I think there's because of the second season and because of you know we know that Noah's very good or a great television maker, there should be a degree of trust. And I think that this is probably a product of

there's just being a lot on. And there's like a lot of, you know, and there's a lot of expectations for this show. But other than, I think it's fair to say, the performances are just stellar across the board. I mean, shouts and RIP to Scoot McNary, glad you could come play for a minute. Mary Elizabeth Winstead has always been good and she's, she's on fire in this role. David Thule Thule Thule's is just awesome. Stoolbarg. Stoolbarg's just doing stoolbargy and things. I mean, it's, it's, it's, That is great and a lot of fun. But it's just, it was just one of those things where it was that gimmick, the over, and the, and the music.

You McGregor struggling with the accent a little bit. I can't even tell. Yeah. Really? I felt a little bit. Not that he's not getting the accent right, but he's still a little Scottish around the edges. Yeah. I mean, like, but if it's good enough, it's just going to be like McNulty in Baltimore.

It's not going to bother me. You know what I mean? I know. I guess I would just say that what it doesn't have yet is, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, maybe it'll come. But like, even in the beginning of season two, we had Bocheme Woodbine show up. And you're like, holy shit. What is this? You know, there was something that was gleeful and exciting about it. And I don't know. When does Gene Smart show up in season two? Very beginning. Very beginning. Yeah, she's there from the beginning. And it's, you know,

and again, you're like, okay. Season, the thing that was so risky and crazy about season two is that it set up such distinct storylines because Gene Smart and the whole family, Jeffrey Donovan, there in one, they're literally in one, they're in a different state than where Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plymouth are. And so how are all these things going to track?

But it gave us a lot of things to look at in the beginning. So it felt more, it felt busier. Do you look at this as, do you go to Fargo to be emotionally stimulated or do you just sort of marvel

at its like... Chili heart. At its construction and the kind of like the veneer that it has. Well, I think maybe we were spoiled. I think that. That's where we are. I mean, I don't think I was as emotionally invested in season one.

Emily Nussbaum from the New Yorker was probably the loudest. And one of the few critics of season one for that reason. I think she was impressed, but it left her cold. Because this is a criticism the Cohen brothers got too. For sure. But I actually have never bought into and think is like a complete misread of what they do, actually. I completely agree too. I mean, I think that the Cohen's in their filmmaking. I mean, they're very, they're very cynical and they're very funny and they can be arch, but all these characters are basically like we are lost in an unfeeling, ununderstandable universe. And there's some deep, they're channeling some weird, deep, almost alien pathos whenever they do anything.

And I wonder if Fargo is a victim of its own success in season two, because for whatever reason, it synthesized that, but also added the emotion that we come to expect from TV. I mean, remember in season two, there's the, it's Rachel Keller who starred in Legion. She plays the daughter of one of Jeffrey Donovan's character from the crime family. And the show basically recreates Miller's Crossing a little bit. Miller's Crossing, one of the more, that scene that we're talking about is just wrenching. The John Titoro scene, yeah, yeah. Unbelievable scene.

But the way they played it in Fargo, because Fargo was a TV show and because it was a young woman that we'd come to care about in other ways was in some ways more emotional. I felt. I'm not saying it was a better scene, but it was everything that the Cohen brothers did plus TV on top of it. Yeah. And I think that that also speaks to just the different way that you have to tell stories episodically rather than like you've got somebody's attention for 90 minutes to two hours to two and a half hours if it's the Avengers Age of Ultron. I mean, it's an interesting first episode. I wonder if we had been, I would like to go back and hear the first few episodes of the podcast that we did about season one of Fargo. Yeah. Well, I wrote the piece that was pretty critical of the very beginning of it before coming around. I mean, it's... It needs, you basically need a Mariano to come through.

Like, most seasons have, like, a really, really, really big bench player who takes, like, whether it was Billy Bob in the first season, whether it'll be Thulis in this season, and was Bochim in the second season, who really, like, make up for any of the distractions that are going on in there. Also, second season, then you have Ted Danson, just as, like, the steady bass drum. And it's just like, you love him. It doesn't matter. Ted Danson. I also wonder, the other thing to watch here is, are we seeing the limits of the anthology format,

which has become incredibly popular, and is a go-to for a lot of people because of the possibilities. If you had to guess, do you think that this third season will eventually tie together to the first two? My guess is, I think Noah likes, I think he's playful. I think that there almost will have to be something. I don't know whether it'll be, and I have no knowledge of whether it would be major

or the smallest, smallest, Easter egg that someone might find. Sure. But what I mean is, think about how everyone gets very excited about the anthology season because, oh, you can just change everything and you can tell a whole story in one season.

But you also have to remember, you've taken away the one thing that has helped TV creators for half a century, which is you can't bring the characters with you. You can't build on the back of the success that you've had from the year before. You have to make people fall in love again every time out.

And that is extremely hard. And it might be hard when the place you're starting from, The only constant is this chilliness in all senses. Okay. Let's take a quick break from and hear from our sponsors, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about V. Hey, guys, today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by Sonos.

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Everything sounds better. on Playbase. See for yourself at sonos.com to learn more. That's S-O-N-O-S dot com. Today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by Amazon's Bosch. Amazon's acclaimed crime series, Bosch, is back for third season. Titus Wellover stars as Detective Harry Bosch, an honest cop driven by a dark past who is obsessed with punishing criminals,

no matter what the cost. Haunted by the discovery that his mother's murder was covered up by the police, Bosch also finds himself implicated in the death of a serial killer he's investigating. Now Bosch must navigate the dangerous waters of a police department, that believe he's guilty while working with a partner who is no longer sure he can trust him. Bosch will fight to prove his innocence even as he pursues a dangerous group of ex-special forces assassins willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. Against the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles,

Bosch will risk everything clear his name while bringing down the murderous crime ring, no matter how many rules he has to break to do it. Based on the best-selling novels by Michael Conley, streamed season three on Amazon Prime starting April 21st. Okay, let's just quickly talk a little bit about Veep. You know, with these kinds of comedies, especially ones as consistently enjoyable as Veeb, it's hard to avoid anything other than listing jokes that we thought were funny. I do think that this is a worthwhile conversation just because it's not strictly in the halls of power anymore. In fact, it is what it's like to be in the janitorial closet of power or way outside of the building.

the level of like I la I cackled through this episode even though there wasn't the rise and fall part of it that was quite as like enjoyable where you're kind of like watching her in the Oval office but the Jonah stuff the Amy stuff the Dan stuff on CBS this morning um putting Kevin Dunn Kevin Dunn working in an Uber board meeting uh what did you think of the Selena stuff here's what I think about the show in this current iteration. First of all, it is, must have been so fun to get the writers back together and be like, okay, what are each of them doing? Must have been so fun, and they nailed it across the board. Jonah's fake cancer school dessert, like, vibe is amazing. I like Danny Egan on TV.

What I think is, the last season was kind of a miracle, but it also, showed the very key differences between David Mandel and who's the showrunner now who came from Seinfeld. Right. And Armando I Inoucci, who created the show and has a very, I would have said, inimitable voice, except the show has thrived and won an Emmy after he left. It's truly amazing. I think what I think Ianucci pound for pound when he was running the show, and some of his writers still work on the show, the jokes and the crispness of the dialogue was perfection and was better. what I think Mandel has done that I think is really smart is he has made it in many ways a more traditional comedy

and a little bit more serialized and it builds off the ensemble towards a place and so I remember watching the first episode of last season being like this feels a little bit like Veep karaoke you can't just say swears and have it be poetry in the same way it's like they had a VE curse word generator and it fell a little off but then it built and it built and then you get to this beautiful chaos

like classic farce like the thing about are we having the fake meeting, you know, the fake meeting after the meeting? And then two episodes later, they run it back, so there's a third fake meeting. Yeah. And it was gleeful and blissful, and it was also deeply serialized. You were caring about it in a different way, week to week. Yeah, so that you get a moment like you got with the Julia Louis-Drey's Hugh Lorry showdown. Exactly.

Yeah. So I think we now know what their particular skill sets are. So I thought this episode was very funny. I thought it was B-B-B-minus as a VEP episode. But as a reset towards wherever we're going this season, I thought it was terrific. And I love just, and I'm not even talking jokes, I'm just talking structure. I loved that no one wants her to run. I love that she has no money and has to beg her daughter.

I think the interesting curveball with that is the, her obviously having had a nervous breakdown and like this sort of underlying trauma that is very real to like what that would must be like. Yeah. But also not quite, it's not, she's always been third or fourth in command, you know, depending on where she is. and she's always been right around there and showed some level of like, at least other people think she's competent enough to do with the job.

And now it's just kind of like, oh, is this going to be, is this going to be, like, is she going to be on a perpetual state of nervous breakdown? It's interesting that I did get a vibe, and maybe this is where my head is, the show definitely does play differently in our current era and current administration.

Well, it's almost good that she is out of the White House because it would be strange to be watching this. Yes. Yeah. But what's strange about it for me, it isn't like, well, things are crazier in real life now. It's that things are so much stupider in real life now. What I mean is all the characters on Veep are snakes and sharks,

but they're smart and they're clever and they're too clever for their own good. They don't show how good they are by drafting good policy, but it's in terms of like being sharks, they're very good at that. And so it was never going to succeed if people, are turning to it as like, well, this could be a successful satire of the Trump. No, it's just not that at all because now we are through the looking glass in a totally different bizarre world. Yeah, I agree.

Well, we'll check in on Veep as the season goes along. Now we'll stop. We have my interview with Adam Neiman, a contributor to the ringer who writes about film for the site. We're talking about Ben Wheatley. Free Fire opens tomorrow. Andy and I will be back on Monday with a very special episode. We talked to Damon Lindeloff about leftovers and the first two episodes of the first two episodes of the first of the third season and wu tang and wu tang clan he's a big big fan and uh yeah that's a really

exciting episode and we'll be back next week for the re-up um so take care okay right now i'm joined by one of my favorite film writers and i'm lucky enough to have him writing over at the ringer it's adam namen adam is a film critic and also a source of withering toronto raptor's criticism on twitter and he has written a new book about ben wheatley one of my favorite filmmakers called confusing Confusion and Carnage, which you can get on Amazon. Adam, I don't know if there's like a preferred source you want us to go to for this. No, I would say go with Amazon, go with Barnes & Noble. You can order from the Critical Press website.

There's a number of other good new film books under that imprint under that imprint as well. So Ben Wheatley has... Or just tweet at me. Just just at Adam. At Adam and at Dwayne Casey. And you can probably get a book out of them. Yeah, that's a whole other podcast. When you sit down and you're like, I want to write about, I'm going to write a critical appreciation of one single filmmaker,

especially one who's still in, like, relatively in the infancy of their career. What is it about Ben Wheatley and Ben Wheatley's films that you noticed that was like, this, this is a rich enough text to write another text about? I remember when I saw his film Kill List, which is his only pure horror film. It's his second feature. It's from 2011. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival that year and had that sensation that the movie kind of followed me out of the theater. It was sort of like sitting on my shoulder for the rest of the day.

And I knew that I really wanted to interview this filmmaker. I knew that I had a lot to say about that film because even though it was a very visceral and upsetting experience watching it, I just felt really activated intellectually by it too. There was just so much going on in it. And so those first two films of his kill list and then his debut, Dan Terrace, were extremely promising. And then like a lot of other critics, I kind of just started following him forward at that point, made sure to see each new film either when it came out or before it came out, if possible, to try and write about it. And I would say that that initial promise did not disappoint going forward.

He's made six films since 2010. Each of them in its way is fascinating, rifts on genre, rifts on tropes that. might be familiar to horror fans or action movie fans or midnight movie fans, but always with a tremendous amount of style and personality and I think a great deal of substance there as well. One of the things that's really cool about Wheatley, I remember when I was working on this Blumhouse piece a couple of months ago, one of the guys who works over there, Cooper Samuelson, was sort of lamenting the fact that a lot of our best filmmakers simply don't make enough movies. and Wheatley is obviously different.

I mean, like you said, he's made several films just since Kill List. And with Free Fire and High Rise, these last two, he is sort of not, I wouldn't quite say dipping his toe in the mainstream waters as much as pissing in them a little bit. And I was wondering, do you think that Wheatley's prolific nature is part of what makes him an interesting filmmaker, just the sheer amount that we get to chew on? Yeah, I think that's a great question because it does come up a lot. You get these kind of, I don't want to say like not reclusive genius filmmakers, but, you know, with a long, I remember in the 2000s, a lot of people's money was on someone

like Amnite Shamilland becoming, I remember Newsweek called him the next Spielberg, right? There was this five or six year period between films, you know, Tarantino almost made a joke out of how long people had to wait between Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and then Jackie Brown and Killist. And I've always been really fond of those directors like Stephen Soderberg, who just sort of keep working and get something out of their system and then put something else in and then get something out of their system. Again, obviously Soderberg's now, you know, pseudo or claims we retired from feature filmmaking. But I think with Wheatley, that pace and that restlessness, some of it's making up for lost time because he became a feature director

a little later in his career. This is not a guy who was like a 20-year-old. You know, all the big Hollywood temples now are being directed by these 20-somethings, you know, fresh out of Sundance. You know, Wheatley started a little later in his career in his late 30s. But I also just think he and his filmmaking partner, Amy Jump, just keep having ideas or just keep attaching to projects that are good outlets for what they're doing. And I think that the pace is connected to what's exciting about his movies. They're filled with ideas. They're filled with energy. They don't waste moments.

They don't waste time. And so I think speed is one of the common. denominators in his work for sure. It definitely impacts how I appreciate the movie. I'm watching Free Fire, and it's such a blast of literally and sonically and emotionally. But it felt cool to just be like, you know what, this guy did High Rise last year, he did Free Fire this year, he's got something else in the pipe, I'm sure, and they feel like short essays rather than these belabored, you know, I love Paul Thomas Anderson movies, but they

take three to four years to make and release. And you kind of like, if you get something like Inherent Vice, which I quite loved, but if Inherent Vice had come right after the Master, I think it would have been, you know, it would just be like, oh, cool, cool, like he's working. He's just trying stuff out. And that's a good point of what you're saying about, like, how the, it relates to the energy. So for people who aren't familiar with Wheatley's films, are you primarily attracted to him for the thematic content of the movies?

Is there something about him visually that draws you to him? Is it just his worldview that you find compelling? What is it if you were trying to convince somebody to watch their first Ben Wheatley movie? What would you tell them about it? Well, if it's the worldview, then I don't know how that reflects on me because there's a bleakness and a cynicism to the work. But I think also a great degree of emotion in there, too, if you know how to look for it. I mean, for someone who hasn't seen the films, if you start with something like Down Terrace,

in outline when you describe it, you say like, oh, these low-rent British gangsters, it's this family in Brighton. It's a little bit like the Sopranos, and people's mind might immediately go to that cycle of British gangster films you had in the 2000s, like that sort of gangster number one or the Guy Ritchie stuff. And if you read the reviews of Down Terrace, all the British critics invoked them too, but not as a comparison. They said that this was some kind of crazy contrast. Right. Because even working on an absolutely tiny micro budget and, you know, shooting a film in eight days,

if he's talked in interviews that that film was almost made with a stopwatch, just blocking off, you know, chunks of time for scenes and then moving on to the next thing, you know, it simultaneously has more energy and zip and pace than all those, you know, highly praised, more expensive British gangster movies, but it also has such a huge amount of soul in it, where it's really a film about a couple of parents in their six years. who are really hesitant to turn the family business over the fun, and there's a great fear of mortality there, and something incredibly perverse about these older people who don't want to cede the future to their kids. And in a way, it's like the exact opposite of what parents are supposed to do. You're supposed to want to make way for the next generation.

And here it's like the parents are almost trying to choke that generation off. And I thought that there's a lot of soul there, and there's a lot of feeling, and a lot of incredible fear connected to family dynamics. And then that carries through in a movie like Killist, which I wouldn't dream of spoiling here, but even though it's an occult horror film and people have compared it to The Wicker Man, and I in my book compare it very closely to Don't Look Now.

It's absolutely a study of a family. And then Sitesayers, which he made afterwards, is one of, I think, I mean, again, it's bleak, but it's one of the most incisive movies about a relationship, particularly a new relationship that I've ever, scene where you meet someone and you hit it off with them and you have shared interests. And then immediately that becomes kind of competitive or paranoid the more time you spend together. And it's an outrageous idea because it's about this couple taking a road trip

through Northern England and, you know, one of them reveals that he's kind of a serial killer on the side and then the other is, you know, she's very excited by that. But there's a very insightful study of relationship dynamics underneath that surface. So when you ask what I like about, about the films, I guess the answer is kind of all of it. Because I don't think you really have to compartmentalize. I think that the interest and excitement of the aesthetics is connected to the depth of the ideas, and the misanthropy and the bleakness of the movies is pretty bracing. But that can also be what turns some people off about them,

and he's been very polarizing for critics so far. Yeah, I mean, I think that you made a passing comment about people in their late 20s and early 30s being pushed into franchise filmmaking, whether it's Ryan Coogler or Denise Villeneuve, who's a little bit older. But I think that one of the things that happens when, like, a talented filmmaker gets sucked into that kind of franchise world where they have a lot of responsibilities outside of the, just the simple story that they want to tell and the way they want to tell it, is that you start to get a very, like, tunnel vision view of what that filmmaker is capable of.

Whereas with Wheatley, like, whenever the lights go down. at a weekly movie, I'm just like, I have no idea what's going to happen. This is so exciting. And it's because he's just working in his own mind. And you just don't know, he's not responsible for Logan or Black Panther or even Creed, you know, an Apollo Creed character to connect dots that like a mega corporation needs them to connect. No. And even when he makes something that within his career arc is the equivalent of what you're talking about, which is high rise, where there's a certain responsibility to a bigger budget. It had the producer Jeremy Thomas, who's worked with David Cronenberg, who worked with Nick Rogue, a kind of first movie star cast that he has, where he

has Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Moss, and then a responsibility to the source material, because G. Ballard's obviously, you know, considered one of the great 20th century novelists. What's amazing about High Rise is that he simultaneously, I think, understands and honors Ballard and makes a movie that a lot of, I guess, Ballardians or Ballard scholars have liked and responded to more than some film critics have. But he and Amy Jump is his screenwriter, also his wife,

his filmmaking partner. They're very unafraid to change aspects of the book and make it sort of their own. Just the ingeniousness there of making an apocalyptic film set in the past, right? Yeah. Making a film that's sort of about the end of everything set

in 1975. It's not just evocative of how Ballard at that time would have been looking forward. It's very resonant to sort of see them looking back and see the 70s as a kind of hinge point, whether you want to see it politically on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's election or socially and culturally the beginning of the 80s and that that period of late capitalism, like they are simultaneously respectful of Ballard and really willing to get their hands dirty, putting their own stuff in there.

And, you know, I make a joke in the book that the title of Down Terrace refers to a time, house on a tiny street and high rise is this big vertically integrated structure. Yeah. So there is an upward motion of Wheatley's career, but we're not talking about moving from down terrace to Kong Skull Island. We're talking about moving from down terrace to secure film like high rise or even something like Free Fire, which is a fascinating response to High Rise because instead of a vertically integrated space, it all takes place on a single horizontal plane.

Yeah, and Free Fire could have been called Warehouse and, you know, we... Because that is, ultimately, I mean, one of the things you talk about in your book, especially in the Free Fire chapter, is the relationship that Wheatley has often with his setting and with the way that the settings of his films, and you can tell it from the titles alone, a field in England high rise. Yeah. You know, Free Fire's warehouse is almost as deep of a character as any of the people who are in the film. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even when you're just talking about his titles, I think my favorite of his titles is Cites here is because there's something so innocuous about tourism, but it also indicates that kind of visionary aspect that that movie has. Yeah. He manages to make a caravan tour through Northern England hallucinatory at times. It's an incredibly dynamic movie to look at. But yeah, with Free Fire, the space is kind of remarkable. I mean, I just think the idea of the film is so strangely ambitious, which is to take.

something that is typically a chunk of an action film like a shootout. Yeah. Whether you're watching a John Wu movie or Ringo Lamb or or any American action movie you can name the shootout is like a building block and he's taking the building block and just chiseling an entire movie out of it. Like essentially what if you had a 90 minute movie and 75 minutes of that movie was the gunfight. Yeah. And then you know what problems does that create in terms of actually being able to tell a story and actually being able to keep things spatially coherent and dramatically coherent, narratively coherent.

So even though I think a lot of the people writing about Free Fire are saying that it's almost like this crowd pleaser after High Rise, which really was a divisive film and a difficult film, I think, yeah, on the one hand, Free Fire goes down a little easier, but there's still something very ambitious and strange and unusual about it, which is not even really. represented well in the ad campaign. Yeah. You were saying... Sorry, gone.

No, no. I mean, you were talking about high-rise and high-rise being this... Almost this sort of, like, reflexive analysis where it's Ballard's vision of the future, which is now even more prescient. There's something about Free Fire that I'm still... And this is the best thing about Wheatley, is that, like, you just get it stuck in your craw, and you can't kind of figure out... It's a lot of fun to unpack his movies. there's been something about Free Fire that I've been trying to get my head around with the way in which, and from here on out, we can just kind of have a spoiler discussion of Free Fire.

So I highly recommend you see it if you want to save this part of the conversation for after you see it, you should do so. I've been thinking a lot about how all these, you know, for the most part, beautiful movie stars, Brie Larson, Army Hammer, Shalto Copley get, Killiam Murphy, like, get shot in the arm and the leg. in these sort of like flesh wounds that don't really actually affect them at all, except they just level them out so that they have to crawl everywhere. And the extent to which that's like a kind of commentary on shoot-em-up movies in general and what we expect from movie stars in those movies and who's going to live and who's going to die and who's going to be able to continue fighting even though they shouldn't be able to

because they've been shot. All this stuff that's happening on that side of things, I was wondering if you'd notice that as well. Yeah, the film really sort of seems to humble everybody. Yeah. And there's things that are just very startling. I mean, like Brie Larson, who, I mean, granted, she wasn't an Oscar-winning actress when she was cast. But seeing Brie Larson, who's now this kind of big, you know, American movie stars, seeing her just sort of be shot in the leg and crawling around sort of on the same level as all these other actors, you know, there is something to it.

There's also something to the, I mean, I don't want to overstate it, not geopolitical, but just the internet. national aspect of the story, which is it's Wheatley's first movie set in the States, and the showdown is sort of between these two groups of characters, one of whom have a sort of background in Ireland that's set during that period of the troubles in the 70s. They'd come to America to get weapons, and so there's this interaction between the Irish visitors and, you know, they're American hosts, and in the middle, there's this South African arms dealer played. It's the first performance of his ever enjoyed, which is Charltoe Copley, who I think is quite hilarious. sort of doing a version of Robert Carlyle almost, but he's funny.

And so there is underneath all of that, this sort of different ideas of aggression and violence and even gun culture, like coming to, you know, we, he's a British filmmaker. And when he finally makes a movie that, if not shot in the state, set in the States, it's where everybody is shooting at each other all the time. Yeah. And I'm curious to see if the film's reception is, if anybody is going to pick up on that, And I don't want to say criticize the film for it, but consider whether or not the film is a critique of gun violence or just a celebration of it. Not that I'm a fan of reading movies this way, but it seems like if the movie is going to have a critical reception in the States, it might do with the fact that it basically imagines America as a warehouse full of guns.

Yeah. Where everybody is just chasing each other around the whole time. It was interesting. It was interesting to watch Free Fire almost immediately after seeing. atomic blonde, which is the David Leach movie with Charlie's Theron, basically playing, I mean, it's David Leach directed John Wick or co-directed it, and this is basically a Cold War born movie with John Wick violence. And it's actually, there's some incredible set of pieces and it's really entertaining. But we, you know, there's that, there's a brief moment

where you're like, oh, is this going to be, you know, like a Hong Kong shoot him up? Or is this going to be Ben Lately does the raid and and it just turns into this incredible physical comedy with a lot of like knowing you know Army Hammer having this sort of like playing this this almost self-conscious like one-liner machine like he's like the one character shipped in from a Shane Black movie or something and I just loved the contrast of that and the idea of that Wheatley can kind of apply almost like an obstacle course

for characters that he's going to put them through into any genre that he does, whether it's high-rise and he's going to take this movie star and put him through just an absolute sewer of depravity

or he's going to take these gorgeous movie stars and just have them crawl around on their chests for so long you could just feel the movie theater like kind of be like, are these guys ever going to get up? It was just amazing.

I mean, I mean, I mean, I think that it's a longer conversation to have in general about whether movies are designed to work with an audience or, you know, whether you can watch a movie on your own. I think that in some ways, Wheatley's movies, there are a couple of them that I think work extremely well in isolation. I mean, I've only ever seen a field in England kind of by myself. I've never seen it in a theater. I kind of can't imagine what that would feel like to watch it as a midnight movie, which is sort of how it's designed. But I think Free Fire is absolutely a movie to see with an audience, not necessarily because it's a crowd pleaser, but just because of that energy that it has. But I love that phrase you just used earlier talking about an obstacle course because that's one of the things that's unique about him. I mean, he's not the only filmmaker I would say this about, but I feel very strongly in his case that there's challenge and difficulty in the work, and then that challenge and difficulty is rewarded.

So, I think in some ways is kind of his most remarkable film in the title's not a metaphor. It's literally set in a field in England in the midst of the English Civil War. It's kind of difficult to understand the character's relationships to one another. There's a lot of historical context

that American viewers might sort of miss. But when you push through that and push through the static, stilted aspect of the first 45 minutes, you're rewarded with like just about the most kinetic, mind-fucking extended passage in a recent movie that I can even think of.

And I think for some people, that might not be a reward. That might be a punishment. And that's not necessarily a movie for them. But for people who get on that film's wavelength, the way that it finally just lets itself go and pulls itself apart, is really something. So I guess I would say I've never been underwhelmed by one of his movies. No, and I think that your description of leaving a movie theater

after seeing one of his films, especially, you know, leaving Kill List. And you just don't have the same reaction you do to 75 to 85% of the movies you see where you're like, okay, there's my take. You're literally left haunted by him. You've seen Kill List. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't sleep afterwards.

Yeah. I mean, we, I did a launch for this book. I was really grateful and lucky to do it at the museum of the moving image, their programmer there, who's also, I just think, one of the best American film critics, Eric Hines, actually got a print of it to show. I saw it. My wife had seen the movie before, and there was something about seeing it on film.

The images were so intense. The images were so brutal, even though it was a small audience seeing it there in one of the theaters. I rarely had that feeling in a movie theater before. And this is a movie I'd seen like 10 times before this. Yeah. It felt like the screen was attacking the audience.

it felt like when the movie is at its absolute highest fever pitch or at its absolute most dislocating because that's the film that has a really elliptical editing structure and at times it cuts all over the place it's like the editing has been weaponized the the audience that was watching it they were tremendously uncomfortable not restless not bored not even offended just kind of on edge and that included people who'd seen it before And I think that to make a film that can get that kind of visceral response, even from a horror movie audience that claims that they've seen at all, it's not negligible. Because it also doesn't feel gratuitous. I don't feel like Killist is a movie that sort of trying to break taboos or to push limits or to set records. There's just something about the tone and the feeling and the subtext of it that you just cannot get out from under it while you're watching it.

I wanted to finish off by talking about Wheatley within a sort of larger context of British filmmaking. And I want to talk a little bit about Alice Lowe, obviously, who's got a film called Prevenge that will have been out for, I think, a little while once we release this podcast. One of the coolest things about what is happening in England right now to me is, you know, Andy and I, when we do the watch, we often kind of like marvel over like, Carrie Fuganaga is going to make a television show or Stephen Soderberg's going to make a television show. This has been happening in England for 20 years now almost. You know, I mean, and Alice Lowe is somebody who has worked in television on a variety of different kinds of shows on BBC and Channel 4. And Wheatley's done television, too. Alice Lowe is one of the stars of Sitesyers, and she's got this movie Pre-Venge-Out. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're seeing from some of these British filmmakers and some of the work they're doing in genre and coming in and out of television?

Sure. Well, another guy whose movie you've seen, and I haven't, and I'm dying to see. see at Edgar Wright, is one of the epicenters of this, too, because, you know, he did spaced and worked on a couple of other British TV shows. So that's the same orbit as people like Wheatley, Richard AOTI, who made the double, and blanking on the title of its first film. And so, yeah, there is that sort of cohort that, but TV wasn't like just an apprenticeship to filmmaking. The slippage between them was, I think, a lot, you know, more even kind of even ground. It's not like Ben Wheatley made cheap, you know, small TV shows and all of a sudden, like, they gave him

the keys to make a big movie. I mean, he made down there in a spare time. I was self-finance, right? So, you know, that little movement that you're talking about, you know, you have, you have right as one of the progenitors of it. Wheatley has sort of become a center of it. He's also a producer on a film by the actor Gareth Tunley, who's in a couple of his movies, directed this thriller called The Gould, which came out last year. It is very effective, a kind of a really lo-fi-lynchian detective procedural thriller. But, I mean, my money is on Alice Lowe because this is just such a phenomenally talented actress.

Her performance in Sitesyers, which she also co-wrote, is just amazing. Like the gamut from kind of meekness, just absolutely terrifying intensity. She's so funny. And then she wrote and directed and stars in this film called Prevenge, which showed last fall in Venice and at Tiff and is getting a release earlier this year, which is a very funny idea, which is about a woman who's pregnant and the father's not in the picture. And the fetus inside of her is sort of compelling her to commit these murders. And the question is, you know, not really whether this is supernatural or not,

but what is the film saying about the life force of pregnancy versus this kind of death drive and how much is she satirizing depictions of pregnancy on screen? But the attention that it's gotten, it just showed it south by southwest as well, I think is really rewarding. And it shows that in addition to being a really fabulous actress, she's got some chops as a filmmaker as well. So whether or not this is going to be like a blip or whether or not there's going to be another big group of filmmakers who comes out of this is a sort of exciting thing to speculate about. Yeah, it's one of the most fascinating scenes out there right now. Adam, thank you so much for joining me. Your book is called Ben Wheatley, Confusion and Carnage.

It's available now from pretty much Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else. You can grab books. You can also get it through the critical press. And Free Fire is out now, and people should definitely check that out as well as all of Ben Wheatley's movies. And we'll have you on again sometime soon to talk more movies, Adam. What a pleasure. Thanks for having it. Thanks, man.

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