The Watch - Is 'Star Wars' Saturation Possible? | The Watch (Ep. 225)

Episode Date: February 8, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and David Shoemaker discuss the announcement that 'Game of Thrones' showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will write and produce an upcoming 'Star Wars' trilogy and question whether the multiple trilogies in the works run the risk of creating 'Star Wars' fatigue for fans (1:00). Later, Chris Ryan sits down with director David Bruckner to discuss his new Netflix horror film ‘The Ritual’ (24:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by All the Pieces Matter. The Wire is considered by many, including myself, to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, television shows of all time. And now New York Times bestselling author, Jonathan Abrams, has the behind-the-scenes story of the show as told by those who lived it. I got to say, this is a great book about an incredible television show. Abrams is our guy. We're going to have them on the show soon. The book comes out February 13th. The Wire had this incredible. collection of veteran actors and writers and also got people who are so new to the industry.

You get this incredible chemistry, this incredible viewpoints on making a show, what the show wound up meeting to people. There's so much in the book that you never knew about this iconic and beloved show. All the Pieces Matter is available February 13th, wherever books are sold, and stay tuned for when John joins me and Andy on The Watch. Today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by the Showtime hit series, Homeland, The show with finger on the pulse returns for a new season starring Claire Daines and Mandy Patankan. The crisis in Washington continues with the attempted assassination of the president.

And now is the ultimate outsider. Carrie Matheson attempts to save a government heading off the rails while a resistance movement threatens violent revolution. Homeland returns with new episodes Sunday at 9 p.m. Download the Showtime app now and start your free trial. 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 am an editor at The Ringer.com, and today's episode of The Watch is Andy Free. Sorry, Greenwald had to miss today, but I was joined by a couple of very special guests. I first talked to Sean Fentasy, EIC of the Ringer and host of the Big Picture, and David Shoemaker, who hosts the Press Box and the Mask Man Show. We chatted a little bit about all the Star Wars news happening this week. We heard that D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, Game of Thrones showrunners, we're going to be joining the Star Wars franchise to make a trilogy of films

unconnected to the Skywalker saga that is the second group of movies now that have been assigned Ryan Johnson's working on his own original trilogy. We still have the Star Wars anthology movies with Solo coming on Memorial Day and we still have to figure out what's up with Kylo and Ray. So we have tons of Star Wars stuff happening. How much is too much Star Wars? That's the question we wanted to answer. At the second half of the podcast today, I was joined by a really cool filmmaker named

David Bruckner. We talked about his movie The Ritual, which is coming out on Friday on Netflix. If you are a horror fan, I highly recommend checking out this movie, even if you're just into, like, psychological thrillers or kind of strange, offbeat dramas.

This movie stars Rafe Spall, which is one of my favorite actors. He was in a really great British crime show called The Shadow Line a few years ago, and since then, has shown up in Prometheus, the big short, just a bunch of stuff. You can look them up. You'll recognize them immediately.

This is about a group of friends who go on a hiking trip, in Sweden to, in memory of a friend of theirs who has passed away, and they kind of go on this sort of like big chill type retreat to remember this guy. And basically everything that could go wrong does go wrong. I don't want to give away too much about what happens on this hiking trip, because that's sort of the fun of seeing a horror movie, is not knowing too much about it.

But David Bruckner does an incredible job as atmosphere, with shooting the landscape, gets really great performances, really understands tension. We talked about the ritual. We talked about some of his previous work on Southbound and VHS and The Signal. His time working within the Friday of the 13th franchise and never really came to fruition. And just what it's like to be a hard director in 2018. So it was a really cool interview.

Sean and David on Star Wars, David Bruckner on The Ritual. Andy will be back on Monday. Thank you for listening. All right. I am joined now by Sean Fennacy, my old friend and my old adversary. Hello. Editor-in-chief of The Ringer. And first-time watch guest, shockingly.

Amazing. I'm really sorry. Shoemaker, aka the Masked Man, the art director of the ringer, the host of the Mass Man show, the co-host of the Press Box podcast. Your favorite podcaster's favorite podcaster,

David Shoeemaker. That's great. I thought I was here to have an intervention about the watch logo. That's, yeah, it's without Andy here, that would be a good time to do it. Actually, I brought you two gentlemen here to talk about a galaxy far, far away. I want to talk about Star Wars. I want to talk about

Star Wars saturation. Okay, this isn't concerned trolling. This is just like an open and honest exchange of views. And that's what this is about. So this week we had the announcement that David Beniof and D.B. Weiss would be working on an additional trilogy of Star Wars movies outside of the additional trilogy of Star Wars movies that Ryan Johnson is scheduled to contracted to work on. And outside of the Skywalker saga that is maybe wrapping up with this JJ Abrams film coming out next year or maybe we'll continue on beyond that with the Ray and Kylo, the Skywalker saga, whatever. then we also have the anthology movies we got solo coming out at Memorial Day

one would assume that they have other ones in the hopper and Bob Eager this was kind of quiet as kept did a talk this week about a Disney earnings call and talked about Disney's coming streaming service that Bam Advanced Tech is making for them and said that they have multiple Star Wars television shows in development with quote

a level of talent on the television front that would be rather significant as well. That would be sort of the marquee titles in this Disney streaming service, which will also include all the content from Fox that they just bought, the FX stuff, the Disney stuff, the cartoons, everything. So now we're looking at six other Star Wars movies

outside of the main saga and television shows. One would assume some of them would be, you know, like prestige TV. We used to have to wait long, like decades for Star Wars content to come along. And now the block is flooding. And I want to ask you guys as two people who are Star Wars fans, like, how do you feel about that? I feel mostly good, though I have a low hum of caution. Not because I think that the product is going to be diluted, but because I think that the end game of this is less Star Wars content and not more because I think we've already seen a very modest dip in the returns on the last three films.

And so Force Awakens was an absolute masterfully unveiled marketing experience on the Lucas Film front. It's the most successful movie ever made. Rogue One was mired in some controversy and some reshoots and was less successful, though it was a more obscure kind of mid-story tale. So I think the expectations there were a little bit lower. And then the Force Awakens has been certainly a hit and certainly a world-conquering movie. The last guy. Excuse me, The Last Jedi has been a world-conquering hit, but has made less money. Yes.

And has also been mired in a controversy all its own around fanboys, around their reception. And that trend may continue as solo. And then you have a declining asset on your hands when you have four consecutive sinking box office returns. And then you have greenlit six more movies plus the other anthologies you noted, plus these TV series. And then what do you have when things are, garnering less and less attention and less and less interest. Yeah, well, I agree with almost everything you said. I think that this is sort of like a force versus dark side vibe going on inside me

because it's difficult to not, when you talk about the subject for more than 10 seconds, it's difficult to not let the pessimism creep in, right? I mean, that's the narrative that's easy, I mean, that's easiest to tell. I think that there's the sort of what we're seeing is the competing, like the competing, like the competing forces of the, you need to give this, you need to give this feeling of confidence to the audience, right? That's why everything's being unveiled as a trilogy before they even go into production, right? To invest in film number one, you need the average viewer wants the confidence that there will be two more or maybe many more, the TV show, TV shows.

But the flip side of that is, yeah, diminishing returns, that it's just not special anymore. You're not, you didn't just wait 10 years to see Star Wars, you know, you know that there's going to be one coming out. you know that you can wait. I mean, the turnaround time when the Disney app or whatever comes into existence, it might be three months from opening data. You can watch it on your TV, you know? I mean, so there's less of a drive to storm out to the theater and see it. So, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting spot they find themselves in.

I mean, I don't, I'm hesitant to kind of notch the last three movies off as like a downward trend because there's still, I mean, the Last Jedi is still what, like the sixth highest grossing movie of all time or something like that? I think it's fourth, yeah. I mean, it's crazy, but yeah, I mean, the expectations for this is so, for these movies are just so, so high. So for the last couple of movies

for Force Awakens, Rogue One, and Last Jedi, we've, I think, one of the overarching macro narratives about that to some extent has been people's emotional relationship to the original trilogy, because it's not only subverting our expectations about who the Those people are who Leah was, who Luke was, who, you know, what the dark side was, what the light was.

But it's also playing a lot of the same melodies from those movies in terms of an orphan with a gift, this battle for that powerful child's, like, powers. And, you know, this sort of collection of rogues and bandits that are around these people that are kind of on the margins that come into this central storyline to save the universe over and over again. Imperial colonialism versus a rag-tag bunch of rebels. That's the story of all of these movies. When they hired Benny Off and Weiss, the first thing that jumped into my head, obviously, is just like star Westeros, was that they were going to, they were being brought on to do the thing that they did with Game of Thrones, which is see this world on these multiple levels. And the thing that Game of Thrones does is that for all the swords and shields it has, it's basically people in rooms talking, making moves, making political moves. And the thing that's fascinating to me, and it once incredibly intriguing

and probably a little bit, a little bit scary, is this idea of Star Wars getting away from the wars or Star Wars getting away from the stars or whatever you want to say, however you want to put it, but Star Wars deviating from the tricks that we know work within it.

Because the last time there was a massive deviation from that kind of stuff was the prequels. And people didn't, at least initially, particularly care for the prequels. They didn't want to see a movie about taxation and Senate moves and the rise of something. We'll see whether or not this is like, I think that they thought they had a lot more on their hands

with the history of Star Wars, the pre-trilege history. And I don't know if they're really getting that. I don't know if they really actually have the gold mine on their hands that they thought they did because Rogue One and Solo have both had problems not only behind the camera, but I think people are like, Pon Solo is dead.

Yeah. Much a movie about a dead guy. Rogue One, I know what happens to those people at the end of Rogue One. Well, I mean, you also have to, I mean, there's a risk involved that we've seen, Rogue One was a great example. I mean, theoretically, that could have been a smaller, they could have allowed that to be a smaller movie, right?

That was, I think, initially the plan. Yeah, but they're worried about, as Sean rightly pointed out, they're worried about the, you know, the meta-narrative, about the trajectory. And so they start, they go all in with reshoots and with plugging it as, you know, a necessary movie, even if it's out of the trilogy. I mean, Solo, I think, is going to be really interesting because, like, in order for, if we sat around and came up with the story for a Han Solo, you know, backstory movie, I mean, you have to, in order for it to be, in order for it to possibly be really great, you have to risk it being really bad, right? Absolutely. And going the safe route is, is, you know, that risks this sort of like steady decline, I feel like.

I mean, and we're talking about Han Solo here, you know, people have been tweeting nonstop about, you know, it should have been a Lando movie or, you know, of course, every diehard fan would love to see a Boba Fett movie or something like that. But that's a huge risk. You know, there's no guarantee that people are going to line up to see a Landau Calarician movie with Donald Glover in the lead role. Like, we would be really stoked about it with a really interesting director or writer or whatever. But like that could be, that could make like a quarter of what The Last Jedi made. You raise a really interesting point. I think with solo, they actually did make a move towards taking a risk by hiring Lord and Miller to make that movie. And they got gun shy. Why they got gun shy specifically and why Kathleen Kennedy moved them off that project, we don't know. But that seemed to be a moment when we could imagine different complexion to each movie, a different tone to each Star Wars movie. And when I saw the solo trailer, I was like, oh, this is a Star Wars movie.

This is not a comedy. This is not some, like, lighthearted, like, high school movie set in. in the stars. That isn't what they're going to give us. They're going to give us darkness, a sooty atmosphere, you know, war-torn nations, rebel pilots, the same stuff that we've always seen, even if it's slightly different tonally. It's not a radical change. The thing with Benioff and Weiss is, they made Game of Thrones a worldwide phenomenon in two ways. One was because of what you noted, which is that they have this gift for dialogue and palace intrigue. And then the other thing is sex and violence.

And sex and violence don't really exist in Star Wars. There is virtually no sex, with the exception of one moment of incestuous kissing and, I guess, the native passion between Jabba the HUD and his slave women. And then on the violence front, you know, it's a world of blasters and far off death. And, like, there is genocide, but there's no blood spill. Right. And this is, there's never been a red wedding in the Star Wars universe. Could Star Wars sustain that? like to see it, but then that's an R-rated movie, which eliminates a huge audience for these movies.

It would probably work better as TV. It would probably work better as... And I just... One thing that really surprised me about them getting this job is that, you know, they've worked for the better part of a decade. Now, they've had to live in Ireland and go to these far-off reaches to shoot Game of Thrones, but I thought that they were going to be like, great, like, we did it. We'll be making money off of Game of Thrones for the rest of our lives. Let's go make a bunch of, like, crime films and, like, you know, our own little... like sort of movies for a while and they never have to move our families or live away from our families for years on end again. Maybe they can do most of this stuff for Star Wars out of Disney.

Like, who knows? But I keep going back to this idea of what is it that people want from Star Wars? Because I think when we first heard about these movies starting to come out, and one of the real excitements was, is it going to be like about Wedge and like Star, and like the Academy and what's it like there? What percentage of people listening to the podcast right now know who Wedge is? Yo, pretty high number. But Wedge is one of your spirit animals. Yeah, because I think he was representative of like,

there's a lot of stones unturned in this universe. And I think that they have stuck pretty close to either the major events or the major story beats of this, of what made Star Wars successful in the first place. The new trilogy is essentially following along with the first trilogy. And the biggest, biggest challenge, it's not going to be like, can you make a, you know, a saving private Ryan Star Wars?

Wars movie. Could you make an Ocean's 11 Star Wars movie? It's not really that as much as can you get away from a powerful orphan and the people who are trying to control them and the family ask like the family creation. To some extent, that's just like Western storytelling. I don't think they're going to get that far. But when they were like, this is about a politician trying to govern his planet as the empire moves in on it or something, that'll be really fascinating. Yeah, I totally agree. But I don't know if it'll be the most popular movie of all time. Yeah, I mean, to briefly touch on what Sean said, I think that the, I mean, there is room for sex and violence, and I think you're right that it would be a TV show. I mean, that would be the place to do it. But it's again, it's this weird branding question. We're like, one of my questions over the past several weeks is will we ever see a Star Wars project that doesn't have Star Wars in the title, right? The Marvel movies don't say Marvel. I mean, they do say Captain America Cole and Civil War. I mean, they do some of that, but it doesn't have to be Avengers at the top of every marquee, right? But having it, I mean, they, again, risk. you know, reducing viewership, if they take Star Wars out, I'm sure they would say that.

And also, but having it on the Disney platform, I think that reduces, if they did a Star Wars Netflix show, sure, they could have sex and violence, you know, but having it on your own native platform makes, I think it's riskier. I think they would be more reluctant to do it. I don't know. I think that the real risk with Benny Off and Weiss, and I love Game of Thrones, and I'm, you know, I think a relative supporter of theirs compared to some of the, some of the voices over last season, is that they are, you know,

they're not creators. They're really high-level managers, adapters. Yeah. And, you know, Ryan Johnson is, I think, a really great filmmaker. I mean,

Brick is one of my favorite movies. But every time I, every time he, when I saw Looper, I was just like, just let him do, just let him do the intuitionist. Give him a book to work from

because he's got so much talent, but it seems like he needs something to guide him. And it's funny because JJ Abrams, you know, has this expansive mind full of ideas. What he chose to do was remake the original trilogy, more or less, you know? And it'll be really weird to see what happens when these creators get their own separate trilogies where they have to create.

Yeah. Is it going to be the broom kid at the end of Last Jedi, who's the star of Ryan Johnson's trilogy? Or is he going to do something completely different that takes place in a completely other part of the galaxy? Our colleague, Justin Charity, on Slack yesterday, I had, I thought, an interesting pitch for a Star Wars movie, which is just make a droid movie, make a movie. make a movie from the point of view of a droid. Now, we kind of have that movie already.

It's called Wally. But it did have me thinking that I wonder if a Pixar ethic is a more interesting approach for them, where they can say, these movies have a spirit and they exist in essentially a universe, but it doesn't have to feel as connected. It doesn't have to be the MCU. And I think right now they're a little worried about everything, kind of all the puzzles fitting together. Yeah. And I would rather just see, like, what is the Star Wars version of Up?

You know, could you just do a family story inside of these kinds of movies? I don't know. That's not quite the same as what you were saying, which is Ocean's 11. I agree with you. But when you think about the first three of these newer movies that have been made, when you think about Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi, they're really emo. A lot has happened in them.

People have died. Like, maybe not violently, but major characters, granted, a lot of it is about killing the past and just getting, like, tying up loose ends from previous movies. but they are, you can go to a Star Wars movie and be like, something's going to happen. You don't do that when you go to Ragnarok, and you don't do that when you go to, you know, Justice League

where you're like, oh, you know, like, there's real... Do you think you'll walk out of solo feeling that way? I don't know. I don't know, because that would, I don't think that, I think that they thought that if they had a real rocket ship on their hands, they could make a couple of solo movies before he got too old and before it became unrealistic that it would be, buttrussing up against a new hope.

I don't get the impression that that's going to happen, but I could be wrong. I think, you know, one thing I would ask just in closing kind of is, do you think that this means with these three movies, Johnson's three movies, and TV shows? Is this the end of the Ray saga? Or do you think that they take characters from the Kylo, Ray, Star Wars movies that they're making now and continue to make movies, but maybe not have it just these three or four? people ping ponging off of each other. What do you think, David?

I think that... I don't think this is the end. I mean, I think that the... I think a rather kind reading of the first two movies in the new trilogy so far is, like you said, it's just... It's basically just a reboot, right?

We're tearing down the past and we're setting these people off on their new path, and we're not near any kind of logical end. We're near the end of this particular conflict. But it definitely feels like we're setting up all of these young actors to do future.

projects. Now, whether or not that'll be, you know, Ryan Johnson's epic or whatever, I think that we'll definitely see more of, see more of Ray and Kylo. I think so too. I think in part because of what I was saying earlier about the concept of legacy being such a huge part of these stories, they can't seem to shake that idea. They don't, there hasn't been a true spinoff yet. A true spinoff would be a Boba-Fat movie that takes place on another planet in which we don't know any other characters except for Boba-Fat. But they have created, they've done too much good work. They've done too much good work with Ray and Kylo Ren to abandon it. I mean, they made those two people international movie stars. They created, I think, like a really complex and interesting relationship between

the two of them. So the prospect of them not being in movies after 2019 just feels extremely unlikely to me. That being said, I don't think that there's a such thing is too much. I don't think, one, I'm almost certain that every single person at this table right now will watch anything that they put out. Yes. And that's because we are of a generation. in which Star Wars is branded on our bodies. Like we feel the need to consume it, even if we have some quibbles with things. Whether that will be true for 17-year-olds, I don't know.

Yeah, I will say that one of the reasons why I think they'll keep making Star Wars movies of this storyline that they're currently working on is that, like, I don't know that I've seen a character hit like the way Ray has. And in a way that I don't know that we even talk about very much, but, like, when I go to Christmas dinner with my wife's extended family and people are just like, Ray, Ray is my favorite character of all time. Like, that's my hero. Yeah, she's Indiana Jones. I mean, she's a generational figure.

Yeah. So I don't think that they're going to leave that as, like, we wrapped that up at the third movie. And I also don't think Daisy Ridley's, like, get me out of here. So, no. I totally agree. All right. More Star Wars. More problems.

But not for us because we love it. Thanks, guys. Sean Fennacy. David Shoemaker, check out the big picture. Check out the mass man show. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, ma'am. Okay, guys, we're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors,

and when we are back, we'll be talking to David Bruckner, director of the new Netflix horror film, The Ritual. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by First Leaf Club. First Leaf Club makes tasting and rating new wine an exciting event. It is the only online wine club that uses your reviews to make personalized wine selections match to your taste. The more you tell First Leaf what you like, like I might say First Leaf, I'm kind of a Cabernet Capsab guy.

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David Bruckner to the watch. David is responsible for some of my favorite horror stuff. I think over the last like 10 years or so, he had pieces of VHS and Southbound. And now he's got this great new movie that's coming out on Friday on Netflix called The Ritual starring a watch favorite, Rape Spall. I have to admit, that was like, as soon as I saw him in the trailer, I was like, yes. Oh, that's great. Rafe Spall's starring roles are few and far between. But, man, did you ever see Shadowline?

No. There's like this BBC crime thriller from, I think, like, five or six years ago. And he kind of plays like this, uh, it's like almost Gary Oldman and the professional level, uh, criminal nut. It's just, he's great in that. Yeah. Did you, had you, like, had your eye on him for a while or did you, were you just like, he was really our first choice in the movie yeah i mean he was top of the list it was like

you know we needed somebody that had a certain um who could play a certain alpha dominance that had kind of sabotaged himself in a sense and uh and i think that's always been rife has always uh he's been able to portray that a few times i mean all the way back to sean of the dead yeah he played the the 19 year old uh disgruntled 19 year old that simon Peg went up against. So, but I, I'd seen him in a movie called Scouting Book for Boys more recently, which had really, you know, woke me up to the possibility. And I was really fortunate because he was, I was in L.A.

and he was just finishing a TV show in Venice. And so we, we got together and kind of talked about the part and stuff like that. What was he doing? I forget the name of it at the moment. I think they had just wrapped. Okay. And, but yeah, he, he came on board instantly. And then I think we spoke a common language.

and he's really interested in, you know, characters' weaknesses, you know, like where they falter, in a sense. And ritual definitely dabbles in that dream. Yeah, he brings such like a great humanism to like these genre movies, whether it's Prometheus or whether it's even like a rom-com, like, you know, give it a year or something like that. Like, I just really enjoy watching him in almost any different kind of movie. So for people who don't know about the ritual,

and I don't think we should give away too much about maybe the bad. half of the plot, I guess, because people will get a chance to watch it on Friday. Can you talk a little bit about what it's about and also how you got involved in the project? I got involved. I had read the script by Joe Barton, and they'd been developing that for some time at the Imaginarium Studios in London, and it had this, I mean, first of all, Joe's writing has this just incredible, there was this incredible British banter at the center of it that spoke knowingly of the situation these guys had kind of wandered into. But you have a lot of, but you have a a real sense of character from it and, uh, and the movie, it was just nuts where it went. And, uh, I had a lot of

questions and, uh, instantly went and read Adam Neville's book by which it's based and just fell in love with the, the, the whole project. And so, um, I came on board and, uh, and we did a kind of a fourth pass on it together with, uh, me and Joe and, uh, Will Tennant at the Imaginarium. And, um, and it was, uh, it was about, uh, you know, certain masculine crisis. Yeah, you were, you were, you You were exploring not just who these guys were, but who they had been as friends at an earlier time and how the kind of alpha hierarchy of the group had changed under a certain circumstance. And so the movie dabbled in feelings of inadequacy, of feeling the loss of confidence in your friends. And I think that kind of idea of masculinity and crisis felt like a fresh place to stage a horror film.

Sure, yeah. I mean, usually you've got a lot of these movies are focused on, young people in crisis or people like teens or whether it's you know young people in the cabin in the woods idea is very much a part of that but like i really appreciated the fact that um you got the feeling like the the relationships within this group of guys had recently changed so that so that rafs ball's character had been sort of the guy that who was directing traffic for the most part and then almost overnight it became like everything that was cool about him was the uncool thing about him sure

Sure. And you can feel tensions on that front in the very beginning in a sense, but for Luke to be a bit of a braggart at the top and sort of shown his feathers, so to speak, and then to come up so short in this robbery and the situation that him and his friends find himself in himself in his self in was really interesting territory. And also to put that right on a line where you can maybe relate to what he doesn't do in a sense and ask yourself the same question, what would I do in this circumstance? And on one hand, it's like, you know, you want to be the hero, you want to stand by your friend. And on the other hand, it's like, is that just some McKeesmo stuff left inside, you know, from an earlier time and should it be abandoned? And what was interesting to play with was how it persisted, was how the failure on that front definitely still lived with him and within the group. And then he has another chance or another, he's faced with another opportunity to sort of save his friends, to help them, guide them out of this forest. I want to talk to you about the forest as a setting. Yeah.

Because I was curious as somebody who obviously has like a deep affection for horror films that worked in this genre before. Was that in the back of your mind? Like were you always like, I want to go into the woods at some point? Usually I'm more fascinated in kind of technological horror. Like something that, yeah, like being able to sort of satirize something that's particularly modern. Right. So the signal obviously does that.

The signal does that. I would even argue, I did segments in VHS and Southbound. In a sense, they kind of do the same thing. But no, this kind of came out of left field for me in a sense. There was something about dealing with all these kind of classic tropes and impressions of classic mythology and the way that stuff all kind of boils down into symbols in our minds. And, you know, I think of movies as nightmares, you know, horror films particularly as nightmares in a sense. So what you're encountering is both something that exists in this world, but it's also kind of a reflection of you in a way. And as a sort of like a purgatory, like a plane to go into that in a sense, the idea of a spooky forest on a mountain top at the edge of civilization felt like really exciting.

And it also had an endurance quality to it that excited me as a filmmaker. And then there's also, you have that great moment. I mean, the whole fact of who is a Dom who twist his ankle. Yeah. And the fact that, like, you do have this inciting event that's like, we have to take this shortcut. We have to get this guy off this mountain. Even though everything is probably telling us we probably should not go into the dark woods. We kind of have to do that.

It's set in northern Sweden on the Swedish-Norway border, but you shot it in Romania. That's correct. I was wondering, so you have this probably a forest that's in your mind, you have like as you're reading the script and as you're thinking about it, you have this thing that's in your mind. So you get to Romania. What's the thing that immediately was different about it when you finally are confronted with the physical space that you're going to be shooting with? Well, we had to look around a bit. You know, I mean, it didn't make financial sense to shoot in Sweden when the movie was supposed to take place. So we looked at a few different locations around Eastern Europe.

And we met a production services company in Bucharest that I had sent out a bunch of samples of what I had hoped the forest would look like, assuming I wouldn't get anywhere close to that. When you do that, is that photos that you have? Like just stuff I pull from the internet. Just I wish it did this. It needs another world equality. I mean, I wanted a certain like moss growth on the ground. We were looking for a certain kind of spiny, very intrusive, hard to pass through kind of environment.

And, and, and this production services company, um, uh, they, they sought and took us, they said, we know what you want. And they took us on a journey up into the Carpathian Mountains, um, 7,000 feet on top of the Bouchedge Plateau. and said, you know, check this out. And we were blown away, and it was, it was way more dynamic than I could have ever asked for. But it was also very challenging to get to. And we knew instantly that if we were going to take that on it, it was going to be kind of a rough and humble element shoot. Big crew or how many people?

About 100 people, yeah. But, you know, cast and crew, everybody up in one lodge up on top of the mountain for six weeks. So, you know, you lose your mind a little bit as you probably. Is your altitude sickness at all up there? At 7,000 feet, I don't think it kicks in until around 10 or 11. But the oxygen is definitely thinner. You can definitely feel it when you're scaling hills. And the environment was, you know, there were inclines everywhere all the time.

There's almost no flat ground anywhere we were at. So you're constantly scaling. And the actors would, Rief was pretty adamant as the lead actor. They would train most days before the shoot. They would go out. Just to get ready. ready to feel, you know, to be prepared for what they were going to face, but also I think to get in touch with it to some degree. So they worked really, really hard. There's, I think, you know,

with all horror movies, I think I'm probably more enamored with the setup than the payoff. I mean, I just always enjoy the beginning like that. And what I'm always fascinated in is this idea that you're in control of how much I find out and when and how much tension you're going to draw up and drive out of anyone's situation. And, and, and, you're in one situation. And, I thought this movie was incredible and how long it makes you wait for the really wild shit to start kicking in. And then when it kicks in, you're like, this is way crazier that I thought it's going to be. And even some of the characters are just like, it's just a bunch of guys running around the woods, try to scare us. You know, this is in your mind, like, how do you, how do you come across, okay, this is how much I'm going to release here, this is how much we're going to release there.

And then this is when I take my foot off the break entirely. Like, do you have versions of the script that tell us more, show us more earlier? What is that process like? Because I've always been curious about that for a harder director. I think the imprint from the book and a lot of what went down on the book and a lot of went down in Joe's first draft. I mean, it was kind of clear to me that this was a movie that I think somebody said, I can't remember who said it, but there's a term of just bug nuts.

It's just going to go bug nuts at a certain point. And I'd done that before in my shorts in a sense. I'd love the frenetic mayhem of doing that or just kind of crossing the line or to without caution, take it suddenly, you know, in one huge direction that can be polarizing to certain audiences in a sense. But I think that was kind of always in the DNA of it for me. So it became more about imposing restraint on the front end in a sense. Yeah. So that you could kind of condition to that.

And the hope is that there's the feeling of a descending nightmare that, you know, starts to go deeper and deeper into the wormhole than you hoped or imagined it would have in some ways. And, yeah, yeah. Because when you're in that, in the woods there, I think the amount of time that you spend putting the characters through the ringer, you're kind of like, you know, it could be any number of things could be after them. And it also does really feel like the, the natural world around them is out to get them. There are all those trees that have like these short little sharp branches that are sticking out like arms kind of all throughout the woods. And I was, I thought you did such a good job of like showing the way the landscape was almost

a, beckoning them in and then also, then keeping them contained once they got into the woods. It's such an incredible location. We often talk on the pot about sort of like the state of movie making, the state of filmmaking and television making and where people are finding these little spaces to express themselves. And it does seem like it's been a pretty exciting period for horror over the last few years. Did you come to it as like a natural like I'm just, this is what the kind of movies I want to make? Or was it a situation where you found this was a genre in which I can experiment a lot and not have to like necessarily be beholden to some of the other stuff? I mean, it seems like it's pretty hard to get.

If you were just like, I want to make a movie about four guys taking a hike to remember a friend, that might be a little bit more difficult to get off the ground than if you were like and then there's also this, this. horror element to it. Right, right. I mean, I think, I mean, I stumbled into horror. I was always a horror fan, but I'd been doing a lot of theater in Atlanta for a long time. And so we were doing like Penter by Day and Naomi Wallace and Frederick Schiller in the theater. And then we would go throw blood on the walls at night and do genre films. So for me, the concept that there was a clear division between high art and low art got murky for me really quickly. It's kind of of all the same stuff when you get into the basics of it. And the basics of drama and what's compelling to watch and how to keep the ball up in the air for a period of time. You know, what makes

you stay with something to the end. And I think it was, you know, in that context that we first made a horror film called The Signal that came out in 2008. And ever since then, that's been a lot of where my opportunities have been and what's just interest me. So I think the genre's had various moments over the period of time that I've been working. It seems to be an incredibly like inventive moment in horror right now. Like people are interested in all kinds of different genre. And I think they're also very open to genre that is, I think there is a better kind of public read on genre that is a reflection of internal conflict. You know, basically the, the, how symbolic the genre can be in a sense, which is super fun for me. Because it's, you know, it's a lot. It's,

should be a psychological reflection of your own demons in a sense, or it can be, I should say. And so that's always kind of interested me. And ritual didn't come to me as a proposition to go do a, you know, horror in the woods movie. It kind of came to me as this train that was already moving, that already dealt with all of these different things. And it was something that I felt like I understood and it made sense, you know, in the way the other stuff I'd done made sense. So, you know, I just jumped on it. But it's, it's probably hard for. me to sort of see or keep in mind what the trends are in a sense. You know, you, you, you, kind of zero in, or at least I do on what makes sense to me and follow it to the end. And if it,

if it has a place in that, great. Yeah. I know, I guess because we have like that way of, I mean, it's easy to read deadline and like blogs and stuff and just be like, oh, obviously, you know, if you want to make a Hollywood movie now, you have to basically be working in one of these umbrellas of like a shared universe or or oh sure yeah has something like that whereas it seems like if you're working kind of under the radar and horror you can do all sorts of stuff with original characters that maybe you would have to rec con to be part of something bigger but you know it's always interesting to hear from people who are actually doing it because i'm not sure if that's a superficial reading on it or not you know i know that you see where you were maybe going to do

friday the 13th right i was on friday the 13th for about a year and a half yeah was that an interesting we just can you talk much about that experience? Yeah, sure. I mean, it was awesome. I got to work with some really great writers. I mean, when I came on board, Richard Nang and Ian Goldberg had a draft.

And at that time, the challenge was to see if Friday the 13th could be a found footage movie, which I was pretty apprehensive about. But it was worth exploring. Was it said in the 80s still? Or was it going to be a more contemporary thing? I think that was a take that came. Yeah, I can't remember if it was our draft or if they already had a take on it that was set in the 80s.

I think we may have steered it back to that at the time. And that period was short-lived. We were kind of exploring that. There wasn't a ton of traction. And then the door opened up to do a kind of a classic, you know, like reboot that wouldn't be constrained by found footage. And there had been a lot of discoveries in their draft and our development process that we thought would translate to a proper reboot. So Nick Antoska came on and we did kind of a dream draft of just, okay, so there's no found footage mandate.

You guys can have fun. It's 1989. It's the last day of summer. If you could make the ultimate Friday of the 13th movie, what would that be? And we were really, really proud of it. And ultimately it didn't become a movie. And there were some lessons for me in that experience, you know, just as a filmmaker about where I'm going to put my time and stuff. But there were a lot of great people that were a part of it that I think fought really hard to get it made.

You know, it's interesting to hear you talk about that because I think that, again, you know, you just, if you just experienced all this stuff through reading about it, you don't, I think you come away with and you're like, oh, that must have been a bad experience for the guy if it didn't wind up happening. But to hear you talk about it, it sounds like you learned a lot. It sounds like you met some cool people and that it was like a worthwhile experience, even if you didn't wind up directing a Friday of the. 13th movie. Yeah, you get to collaborate with a lot of great people and you learn a lot, definitely, but also life is short. Sure. And it'd be better to be shooting something at the end of the day. And when you look up and you go, okay, I've been spending my wheels on something for a year and a half, I mean, part of that, I think, comes with the job. Yeah. But one of the things I've been learning is that part of the job is navigating that in a way that you end up on set. So that's as much

a strategy as anything else. Have you been, is there anybody else who's working either within the sort of loose genre idea of horror or outside of it recently that you've been particularly inspired by. I think, you know, I was just curious whether or not you feel like you're watching stuff and being challenged by it. Any... Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's probably been well spoken of and, you know, certainly would not be uncommon to say that, you know, what David Robert Mitchell did with Ed Fala's. I thought it was incredible. I know that was like one of the best horror movies I've seen in 20 years, you know, that comes to mind instantly. Obviously, get out was just incredible. I mean, the concept of a social thriller. I mean, I feel like,

I think anytime you can take, you know, any kind of contemporary anxiety and use that as the starting point for a horror film or use, you know, the genre mechanics of horror to explore modern anxieties, I think it's really exciting. Not just because you can kind of make a comment on that stuff, but also because people are uneasy about the modern state of being. And so you're mining that for scareb. beats at the same time. You're mining that to sort of, you know, get to those dark dimensions that horror films allow you to go to. I wouldn't want you to tip your hand about future scripts. Is there an anxiety that you're seeing out there that you think would be ripe for that kind of

treatment? A lot of what I'm interested in tends to be technologically provoked, you know. It's a good time for that. It is, right? I mean, you know, we made this movie back in 07, the Signal that was all about media fragmentation and how if you turn the dial up on media a little bit louder, everybody would just lose their minds and become increasingly polarized. And those ideas, of course, have only become more so the case in a sense. But yeah, I think, look, a lot of what social media is kind of doing to collective conversation and how that's contributing to polarization, I think it's particularly frightening. I think, I don't think we yet, although X. Mackina was an incredible movie, I think we have only begun to explore the dimensions of artificial intelligence and what

that's going to do, not just in terms of creating robots that kill us, but also finding, uh, uh, systems that are better equipped to kind of manage our needs than human interaction in the sense. And there's some frightening ideas about isolation ahead. And, and, and movies are going to be a territory that we can explore some of this stuff and invent it. And I think it's, right. Exactly. Um, what are you working on next? Uh, nothing specific that I can really talk about. but yeah, some TV and some movies and stuff. But everything, it's all kind of horror. Okay.

Some of it flirts with other subgenres and stuff. But yeah, to some degree, a natural extension of some of this stuff. Okay, well, everybody should check out the ritual. It's out on Netflix. It'll be out tomorrow. Thank you so much to David Buckner for coming by, man. I really recommend the movie. Thanks.

Right on. Thank you. Great. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Showtime's hit series, Homeland. The show with its finger on the pulse returns for a new season, abuses of power. Civil Unrest. Agents and double agents isolated from the White House and the CIA. Carrie Matheson finds herself with few resources and many disbelievers

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