The Watch - Marvel’s Supporting Avengers, Plus the Creators of ‘Unfriended: Dark Web’ Stop By | The Watch (Ep. 275)

Episode Date: July 19, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald catch up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe by discussing ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ and then unveil the supporting Avengers that they’d like to see in upcoming Marvel films (2:04). They also review Showtime’s ‘Patrick Melrose’ (18:20) and later Chris sits down with director Stephen Susco and Blumhouse producer Couper Samuelson to talk about their terrifying new film, ‘Unfriended: Dark Web’ (27:46). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 wringer.com. And joining me in the quantum realm, it's Andy Greenwald. Hey, buddy. Andy, what's going on?

We're recording this on Wednesday for a Thursday publication. So don't make any news culture. We're going to chit-chat a little bit about Showtime's Patrick Melrose, a limited series. We were a little late on that. starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which we checked out the first episode of and wants to chat a little bit about that.

Andy saw Ant Man, but we're going to talk a little bit about the lesser-known lights of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And also, after all that stuff with Andy, I have an interview with Stephen Susco and Cooper Samuelson. Stephen is the director of unfriended Darkweb

and Cooper is an executive over at Blumhouse. Cooper's been on the show before. I love talking to him. Really excited to talk to Stephen. Darkweb is rather chilling. rather chilling movie, but it's really, really, really great. I don't know if you guys saw unfriended. Don't know if you like to watch movies

where people's lives come apart through their computers, but it's really awesome. And this one is actually the rare sequel that improves on the original, I think. You're going to talk to them about how, I feel like their sequel strategy is very smart, right? I think their whole deal is amazing because they operate from these sort of restrictions

that they use as almost like Brian Eno cards, like improv cards. They're like, what if I told you you could only do this? okay, what if you can only show this? What if we have to have it tie back to this? And they wind up using these what would most people would look as like boundaries or walls to their creativity as like ways

of being even more creative. So I'm really excited to talk to this guys. Could we try that on the podcast later in the summer? Like, could you tell me that I have to do a whole Thursday show without using adverbs? I have to do Thursday shows without you for a while. That's possible as well. Possible as well.

Oh, what's up, Snowflake? This is your new thing. Yeah. Chris is doing this podcast to own the live. Guys, buckle up. Greenwald, do you want to talk about Patrick Melrose or Ant Man first? Okay, so I saw, I wanted to talk to you about... I did not see Ant Man. Too many people getting traded to see Ant Man.

Here's the thing about the Marvel Studios Disney release, Ant Man and the Wasp. Here's some things I can definitely say about it. Guys, no spoilers. An Man in the Wasp is definitely a movie that was filmed on cameras and released into theaters. There is no question that someone directed this movie, an actor showed up and said their lines. I mean, it's just inarguable. It is hard to imagine a less essential movie being made in our lifetimes, to be honest with you.

But I'm not here to quibble because I think that a lot of the narrative around the... Is it because it doesn't do anything? It just doesn't do anything. And I think the first one, a lot of the charms of the first movie, was that it was solo stakes in a universe that had previously just been about the highest of stakes, like cities being destroyed or... It also felt the most contained. Yes. this is so contained to the point of asphyxiation in that it's basically a lot of the bits from the first movie run back with no real stakes whatsoever. And I mean, here are my lingering questions.

I want to know how the offer was made to Bobby Cannavalli and Judy Greer. How were they presented with this? Were they just gifted an edible arrangements basket with two round trip first class tickets to Atlanta for the weekend? because, or was there something else like a shopping spree at Kroger? Because I honestly wonder, like, is it just fun for them to hang out? Like, do they go to the Coca-Cola Museum?

Why are they in this movie? I don't know. I mean, Paul Rudd, I met him once. Lovely guy. I'm beyond spoilers at this point, so you can tell me, are Judy Greer and Bobby Conavale part of a nine-picture trajectory

in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? One suspects not. Okay. But, you know, that's out there. That's in play, I guess. Because you know that the end of Infinity War Michael Pena is the only person who's alive, right? If that were to be the case,

they should not make any more movies. They should just set up a GoPro in that very quiet place and let him go. Because the star of Narcos Mexico... Dude, don't even get me started. I'm just saying he shines. He comes through in the Sandman movie. Okay, I had another question for you about it.

Well, one's kind of a note. you may remember from your time watching the first Ant Man, which I know was a rich, a rich text for you, that there's a lot of talk about how Michael Douglas... Summer of Love. It was a little bit younger then. Michael Douglas was like,

previously the Ant Man and the previous Wasp was the mother of Evangeline Lily's character and she was lost in the quantum world. Thanks, thanks Stanley. The thing that we learn about the quantum realm from that movie is that yes, it looks like a King Crimson album cover melting and it will do a similar

job on your mind, right? It's this trippy space where you can't you can't hold your brain together because you're so small and you could never come back from it and Paul Rudd does come back from it at the end of the movie but he's changed man, right? This movie posits a different question which is were you to lose

yourself in infinity of miniature three decades previous could you just be hanging out waiting to be rescued in it. And the answer, sorry, here is a spoiler. Yes, you are. And when they rescue you, you are fucking regal queen Michelle Pfeiffer

with cascading like Elric white hair. She looks like some sort of elf king from a book I didn't read in the 80s. She's got a hood. She's got a fabulous makeup job. She's got some sort of staff and she's just like, bet, let's go. Like live Tyler and Lord of the Rings or something?

She's just been living inside of an infinitesimal molecule and she looks dynamite. Okay. She has had a full glam squad working with her in a place where nothing exists. And I guess I'm bumping up against my own expectations here because on the one hand, we definitely want to applaud a major film franchise having the space for a movie where it's just like, eh, let's do some bits. You know, like, let's relax.

It doesn't always need to be about Thanos or saving the universe or whatever. but are we really going to yada yada yada what it was like to live in nothingness for 30 years and come out looking dynamite looking like you just lived like a fabulous baker boy so you wanted to be more like the dude when he drank the false grail and last crusade or just that would be one option or just like gesture over your shoulder and be like yeah that's the castle i made out of tardigrade corpses like that's just my life Patrick melrose post speedball Well, we're getting to that. Okay, so those are my notes. I have two other questions from the Marvel universe related to my viewing of this film. One is this movie does something that has been threatened for a long time. And it's happened in other movies,

but this was a very prominent usage of it. Something that I thought would be an end-of-civilization-type thing and terrifying, but I actually kind of dug it, which is there's a scene in this movie where Michael, it's a flashback, and Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer say goodbye to kid Evangeline Lilly, and they CGI ping pong balled their faces so that they look like they just walked off the set

of Basic Instinct and Greece 2. And instead of being like, oh my God, how horrific, what sort of nightmare dystopian scenario is this? My first thought was, can this just be the movie? Like, couldn't we, like, wouldn't this be better if it was Peak Douglas and Peak Fifer just saving the world from nuclear missiles? How do you feel about it?

Because we're headed. Like, this is clearly going to be a thing. Yeah, when the Irishman comes. That whole De Niro movie is this, right? It's sort of horrifying, but at the same time, they don't make them like that anymore, man. I'm not trying to take shots, because I'm aging. Like, I'm getting older, and the other day,

it took me like five minutes to remember Ansel Elgort's name. My mom was like, did you see Baby Driver? And I was like, that's the one that stars, that guy, the guy. So I took me like... Is that because he just dunked on you so hard on the internet that you forgot? Maybe it's like... I've been retro-owned by Ansel... Ansel Elgort and retroactively I'm losing my memory.

But I understand what it's like to get older. And I love Al Pacino and I love Robert De Niro. But I think one thing that's crucial here with this whole, like, can we de-age actors, is you can make them look younger, but they still are old. Yeah, they still are. Yeah, right. So, like, if you listen to Al Pacino on Bill's pot and he's dynamite hang, right? Yeah, I think. Of course. but still like decidedly in his 70s.

So I think that the key with de-aging is like sure you can make Michael Douglas look like the China syndrome again. Yeah. But you can't bring the mental acuity, the sharpness back. You know, and I am saying that as someone who is watching his pencil tip getting a little bit dulled. Because you're right. Because the thing about Michael Douglas in this movie, and I love seeing Michael Douglas in this movie, especially just like the crankier and more immobile he gets. his main

vibe as Dr. Henry Pym the genius behind the quantum realm and shrinking stuff making it big, embigening it too, is that it's not that like the world is ending or I need to find my wife who I haven't seen in 30 years. It's kind of like someone just explained a hedge fund to him and he really, really wants to stick with gold.

Yeah. Like he basically looks like he watched a commercial that Alex Trebek presented on Fox News and was like, that's a good idea for my investment. That's his vibe. Right. It is extremely elderly. My thing is, like, I think we're going the wrong direction here.

I don't want to de-age Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer. I think more of our young actors should be following the lead of Johnny Knoxville and Spike Jones and dressing up like old people. Oh. Okay. I like that. Are you going to pitch Blumhouse on that? I think that's a really...

Yeah. It's a really... It's called, like, it's like senior citizen center, and it's like you wake up and you're old. So you're saying that we should reboot cocoon, but with like Timothy Schallelman. But with Miles Teller, yeah. Miles Teller, and yeah. I'm vibing on this. Okay, one more Marvel note to make, which is, yes, you know, despite my complete medium level of interest in reception to Ant Man and the Wasp, I do commend them for finding room for different sorts of movies.

I wish that they actually were more standalone than they are. but whatever. And that is definitely a lesson that can be, hopefully would be learned by these other would be contained universes like Star Wars or DC or whatever. But there's another lesson that we have now after 10 years of these Marvel movies. And that is we could, if we, so chose,

recruit an all new team of Avengers, which I believe we could call the Supporting Avengers or the Weird Avengers. No, Supporting Avengers. Because this is... You imagine me like, hey, I don't know you guys know me. I'm a member of kind of a big deal team of not quite superheroes. No.

But superhero adjase. And this is inspired by the bravura performance of watch pod favorite Walton Goggins in Ant Man in the Wasp. Again, I would pay almost anything for a behind the music, behind the screens, just like oral history of him being approached for this part. Would you pay as much as Walton Gagins was probably paid for the role? I hope not, because he plays a character named Sunny Birch, who is both a San Francisco restaurateur, who owns a French bistro, and is also a black market trader in tech.

Now, what kind of tech we don't know, he refers to it as tech. Often the tech comes in metal briefcases that are either containing the tech or are, in fact, the tech itself. his skin color is what I would call Old Penny I think this is not a natural color Like a dullish copper He also has a hair

Yeah very dull copper exactly He has a hairstyle That I think maybe we could workshop A name for it Okay Historically a mullet is business in the front And party in the back Walton Gagins is spearheading something

That is party in the back And shy and retiring in the front I don't really know what you would call it it. Maybe it's called like an Irish goodbye because it's leaving the party. You know what I mean? And this is his character arc. In the beginning, he's just making a business deal with Evangeline Lilly. By the end of the movie, he and his squad of, like, mustachioed and tattooed goons are administering pentothal injections and brandishing weapons in the middle of, like, Telegraph Hill. We should come up with this supporting Avengers. I like this idea. So I think that he is definitely like the brains of the operation.

Okay, because he's dealing with tech. Because he deals with tech. Yeah. Again, I don't know what else he's bringing to it. So I think the, but if we needed like a Nick Fury figure for this group to form the supporting Avengers, again, I don't know how you would do this without CGI. And I don't mean to speak ill of the departed whom we missed very much. But Gary Shandling's senator character, who is a cage, a member of Hydra, would have to be the guy going from franchise to franchise to recruit these other players.

You need to have someone who brings a little bit of continental flavor. Yes, exactly. So I'm going to go with Julie Delpy, who I personally do not remember being an Avengers, Age of Ultron. No, this was news to me. Yeah. But I'm going to go with that. Also, just think it has that kind of before sunset, before sunrise, romanticism that you need in these movies. Absolutely.

So let's bring her. And she apparently played like Black Widow's training agent, like her handler. I mean, Age of Ultron, what a cornucopia of a film that was. If I had to pick one nonsensical plot thread, would I choose Jeremy Renner choosing a quiet life on the farm? Did that happen in Ultron? Yeah. Would I choose Chris Hemsworth having dreams of thrashing around in a puddle? Right.

Or would I choose the flashbacks that I think are part of the Red Sparrow Expanded Universe? It's just like Russian Ballet School. FYI, we're living in the Red Sparrow Expanded Universe. Strong, strong point. I think that every one of these teams needs like muscle, you know? Like you need like a Hulk. So I'm going to reach back again from Beyond the Grave, unfortunately, to bring in a character known as Security Guard from the first Avengers film, played by legend Harry Dean Stanton,

who, if I remember correctly, and it's been a long time since I've revisited this film. But I believe when Bruce Banner wakes up in underwear, in a giant crater, he's greeted with the star of Paris, Texas, looking hidden on him. That's right. That's right. That's definitely a thing that happened. Now, of course, we also need some, like,

awards cred, you know, because you do one for the critics, then you do one for the cash register, if you know what I mean. And recent Oscar winner, Sam Rockwell, played basically the character I just described in regards to Walton Goggins in Iron Man, too. Okay.

So I feel like he should come back, right? Right? I mean, he's just always fun to look at. Yes. I'm also a big fan of the completely CGI character, director, Tycho, What Diti played in... I didn't know if that was a cheat or not. Corg? Yeah. I defa on Cork.

You need some light comic relief, right? You got anyone else on this supporting Avengers team? Yeah, I do, actually. Okay. You know, it's been a while since we've seen a really effective player coach. I don't know if you... Pete Rose kind of got brought down by that role, because people thought he was gambling on the results.

You know, he was. Yeah. And, you know, Bill Russell famously, player coach. And it didn't get really into whether or not this person was a player coach in the basketball game that they were attending. Right. And Dr. Strange. Oh, I see where you're going.

But he came back from paralysis. Yeah. Which is just about as huge of a mountain as you can climb. It's Pengborn. Oh, of course it is. Played by Benjamin Brad. The king. Yeah.

Let me also say recent cinematic history has changed the bar here because there was a film that came out a month ago, I think from your friends at Blumhouse, called Upgrade. And in that film, Logan Marshall Green plays a quadriplegic. It gets a little microchip that makes him be able to walk. Yeah. But the idea being to be worthy of coming back from complete spinal collapse is like bloodthirsty vengeance against those who did this to you and your family. Right. In the Dr. Strange film, a man gains the miracle. of ambulatory ability once again.

And he uses it in truly a pure way. He uses it to play against Fat Joe's team at the Rutgers. No, to play pickup hoops underneath the BQE. That's all he uses it for. Like it's kind of incredible. What would you do? Well, I can walk. Are you foreshadowing?

My point is just I shouldn't be sounding critically here because what I appreciate is the honesty of it. Like, I can walk right now, and I don't do anything special with this ability whatsoever. You know, like you, although when we were recording in the chapel studio the other week, you mocked me for choosing the stairs over the one flight of elevator ride. It's four stories up. Four stories up.

It's four floors up. There are a couple stairs. I was more mocking you because you seem to be like, we have X amount of time to spend together per week. And you were like, bye, I'm taking the stairs. You could have walked with me. We live in L.A. I got to get my steps to do. I got to get my steps to do.

You walk all day long. We're running a little short in time. want to talk about Patrick Melrose before you go. Watch the first episode. When did this come out? This is a limited series that was a co-production between Showtime and Sky, starring Benedict Cumberbatch based on the novels by Edward St. Auburn. Yes, and these are beloved books.

Julia Litman, who we work with, we love, loves these novels. I think they're among her favorite books. They are deeply autobiographical, deeply interior books. Yeah, Proustian, right, in the sort of investigation of this. self. And of emotional memory and of trauma, apparently also screamingly funny and quite ribald because there's a lot of drugs and bad behavior. Right.

As this young man, Patrick Melrose, sort of unpacks his terrible history, family history, and deals with various addictions on the road to, I don't know, some sort of better life. And Benedict Cumberbatch had said that the only two roles he really ever wanted to play as an actor would be Hamlet and Patrick Melrose. And this is the sort of project that... And now he's done both. Now he's done both. So he's done, by the way.

Yeah, right. He's announcing the news through me, through proxy on this podcast. Yeah, but it's also the kind of thing that would never be made unless Benedict Cumberbatch said, let's do this. And so they got a remarkable team around him. British playwright and writer David Nichols adapted all five books into five episodes of a miniseries. Hugo Weaving, Jennifer Jason Lee. And I must say, the director, Edward Berger, who did a brilliant job on a favorite of mine, Deutscheland-83. Oh!

directed the living Christ out of the show. So we missed this when it premiered, I think, back in May. All five episodes are available streaming now on Showtime. And, you know, I think I've said before that, like, I'm watching my brain change in real time into how I'm watching shows. And before we even get into the merits and the performance, I was watching the show for its production values

and its design and its editing and it's directing, and it is jaw-dropping. This thing looked like it not just cost tons and tons of money, but that the people who designed it and directed it should just be given egotts right now. It is so considered and beautiful and dynamic and exhilarating to watch something this expertly made with such intention

that I think successfully takes the story that is entirely internal, I believe, from the book about a man's hideous past and very, very, very intense drug addiction and makes it palpable. I was watching this hour-long episode. There was never a moment when it dragged, but there was a moment like,

where I thought the episode had to be almost over because it had been so intense and this is before he started injecting speedballs that he picked up in the meat markets of West, you know, of the lower west side of Manhattan. Oh my God, I can never go back. Anyway, it had only been 28 minutes. Yeah.

This show was a trip. Yeah, it's interesting because it was obviously based on these San Aubin books, but the vibe of the first episode kind of reminded me more of the books of Martin Amos and Will Self. Yeah, but that kind of very, you know, self-indulgent, destructive, diabolical, British sort of upper crust. I think about Will Self stories like A Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz and Martin

Amos novels like Money that are sort of just really debauchrous, you know, and that is something that I think is an interesting question. Your mileage with Cumberbatch really will vary. He plays it as this sort of almost like he has got a marionette operating. him. His limbs are flailing everywhere. He's on 100 in every scene that he's in. And you have these sort of reserved supporting actors

who are kind of playing it in a very straightforward way. But what Cumberbatch is trying to basically do is replicate what it must feel like to have multiple voices going on inside of your head at various times. And it's a little disorienting in the first episode because you don't know where those voices are coming from or what

the trauma is that caused them. And one of the voices is saying, please do more heroin. Yes. And drink more. And also, Kway, because quail leads are a thing. It's just the 80s. I would say I am, if it wasn't on your radar, you should definitely check it out. I'm eager to finish it,

although I've heard the emotional intensity only ratchets up from here. Yeah, and it's a gear shift into the second episode, which is more of a flashback episode. It was interesting, and maybe we'll watch some more of it, maybe we'll have Juliet come on to talk to us about it. She loves these books more than anything in the world, and it's been interesting to hear her talk to me about it because I keep using the word interior.

That's what these books were to her, why she loved it, this interior voice, and it's always a challenge to adapt something interior for an exterior medium like television. Having not read the books, I think they did a tremendous job. Finally, just to say, we've been saying this in sort of bits and pieces, but never all at once. Showtime is sneaky making moves. We talked about them a lot when we were saying that Halo was their big play for the Game of Thrones audience. It's a huge swing, one that may not even be based on, there is no guarantee that's going to work out.

But if you look at what they've been doing over the last two years, it really is a sign of a network that understands its position and understands its potential and is just reaching for stuff. Twin Peaks, obviously, in my mind, a huge success. Whether your mileage clearly may vary

on the Sasha Baron Cohen show, I'm having a hard time getting myself interested in watching it, to be honest. But he is a huge talent, and that was a huge get for them. DeSis and Mero is a big thing. And then if you just go down the list of upcoming programming,

there's this Black Monday comedy from David Caspby who did happy endings. that has Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannels, our friend Paul Shear on it, 80s comedy. There's a Michelle Gondry, Jim Carrey comedy called Kidding Coming.

Today they announced a remake of a show I loved, a British show called The Wrong Mans. It was Matthew Bainton and James Corden. It's one of those things where I don't know why they're remaking it because we all have access to the original and it was very good, but they are remaking it with Ben Schwartz and Jillian Bell.

And they're making the moves that I feel like a network in their position needs to make because every move they've made up to now, I would say, you know, a lot of the jokes that we've made about them in the past are that they get a good idea or a good series or good talent, and they run it for eight seasons plus eight seasons for shameless. Holding that line is not going to be good enough in a world

where AT&T is telling HBO to make $100 billion worth of programming a year. So taking these swings now, I think will pay off in a long run. It's kind of interesting to watch. Okay, we'll stop there, take a break here from our sponsors. And when we come back, I'll be talking with Stephen Suscoe and Cooper Samelson from the movie Unfrended, Dark Web. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by HBO's Sharp Objects.

When a young girl disappears from rural windgap, Missouri, reporter Camille Praker, is sent to investigate whether the case is linked to an unsolved murder. From the author of Gone Girl, the producer of Get Out, and the director of Big Little Lies, comes the HBO limited series, Sharp Objects, based on the bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn. Amy Adams, stars his reporter Camille Praker, whose proximity to the investigation, chilly mother, and mysterious half-sister, bring her own scars to the surface. Haled as a top-of-the-line detective story and truly twisted by variety. Sharp objects also features Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, and Eliza Scanlan. Watch new episodes every Sunday at 9 and catch up on the latest episodes on HBO Now. Today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring used to be hard. Multiple job sites, stacks of resumes, a confusing review process. But today, hiring can be easy,

and you only have to go to one place to get it done, and that's ZipRecruiter.com. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the world's leading job boards, but they don't stop there. With their powerful matching technology, ZipRecruiter scans through thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invite them to apply to your job. ZipRecruiter is so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day. With results like that, there's no wonder that ZipRecruiter is the highest rated hiring site in America. And now watch listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive. web address, ziprecruiter.com slash watch. That's ziprecruiter.com slash watch. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Hey guys, we're about to get into this interview with Cooper Samuelson, who's the president of feature

films at Blumhouse and Steven Susco, who is the director of the new movie Unfriended Darkweb. I saw this movie back a couple months ago at South by Southwest. It is gripping. I know that maybe horror movies aren't your bag, but I would almost call this more of a technological thriller than a horror movie, although some pretty horrific things happen in it. It's basically told through the perspective, all the action takes place on a computer screen between a group chat of these friends who are trying to just try to have a nice fun game night with each other, but then some really crazy stuff starts happening involving, as you can probably guess, the dark web.

I talked to Steven Susco about what happens when you have these restrictions and limitations on the work you're doing in terms of not only a budget and a time period over which you're shooting, but also this idea that all the action needs to be restricted to this small little screen, and we're kind of cruising through the apps that these people are using, looking at the different videos that they're seeing on their screens, but the action is restricted to this computer screen. And Cooper also chimed in with a lot of interesting notes about the movie and also talked a little bit about what's going on with Blumhouse right now in 2018. Obviously, they have sharp objects on HBO right now. They have Halloween coming in the fall.

They've had upgrade, dark web, a bunch of stuff in theaters, a bunch of of different budgets, budgetary levels. So it's really fascinating time for Blumhouse. Please check out Unfriended Dark Web. It's a very, very, very interesting movie. It's really creative. Now to my interview with Stephen and Cooper. I'm so happy to be joined by Stephen Susco, director of Unfriended Dark Web.

And Cooper Samuelson, executive vice president. You're a president of feature films of Blumhouse. Thank you for the demotion. Well, this is look at your LinkedIn. You've got to update it, you know? LinkedIn. Yeah. Like the desktop LinkedIn?

Cooper's been here before. Cooper is in the Tom Hanks zone of repeat watch guests, I think. You've been here once before. The Tom Hanks zone is how I refer to my set. That's on my LinkedIn now, too. That's exactly right. And I'm really excited to be talking. I saw unfriended Dark Web at South by Southwest.

Oh, yeah. And to a wrapped Alamo draft house audience at a midnight screening, which is like an intense, I think it was midnight, maybe 10. It was late. Yeah. You know, that's actually like an ideal way to see this movie. People will see it in whatever way they do, but just to be in that grip of this movie for the runtime, that late at night and just know that this is the last thing you're going to do that night, and then you just have to walk out and kind of just shake it off a little bit, which is a little tough on the dirty six in Austin afterwards. Yeah, it doesn't exactly send you out wanting to go have a party.

Yeah, exactly. One of the things that Cooper and I have talked about before with Blumhouse stuff is the sort of possibility of restrictions. that happen with these movies sometimes, whether it's a budgetary thing, whether it's an intellectual property thing that you're working from, like with Ouija II. What was the restriction you were working from here, aside from the obvious technical?

Yeah, I mean, the technical was the big one. I mean, it wasn't just budget, but it was how do you tell a story on a computer screen? That's told in real time, and that can be engaging. And then we also sort of set some other thresholds because the first movie had a ghost, and we were like, well, let's try to see if we can do the same thing but without a ghost.

And let's see if we can do it as a thriller instead of a horror movie and let's see if we can move things off camera. So it's always fun to start with restrictions. I think it is very freeing. I think you do something over and over and over and over and over and you don't have a lot of chances in this business sometimes to just kind of try something you've never even attempted before and to be in that kind of environment.

Because of the low budget, the approach to risk is completely different. There's less fear. There's kind of more adventure right from the beginning. What did you tell him, Cooper, when you first started? Well, I feel like the one smart thing I did on this movie was one of the things that we was revealed about the first movie was that it's just

screenwriting. It's almost like a stage play in a weird way. It's like rope or something. It is, it totally, totally. And so that is the, so having someone who has worked that muscle

like really hard for, you know, 20 years was really the most important thing. And really figuring out if that's the rule, if that's the rule, then how do you make the story propulsive given it has to happen in real time It has to be, you only have these five characters

and you have the powers that are available to someone who's really good at hacking and that's it and nothing else. And I feel like that was the box that we originally said. But the other thing that I think was so, we were lucky on the purge movies to learn that the audience doesn't necessarily need the same subgenre, sequel to sequel. Okay. The first purge movie is an home invasion movie.

The second purge movie is a Walter Hill, one-night action movie. The third movie is the head of Universal, like to call it, the Arnold Copelson mid-90s thriller. It's totally, which is totally what it is. And the fourth one is New Jack City on Persian night.

So that, I feel like emboldened us to be like, we don't have to, we don't have to quantum of solace this movie. Sure. And be like, what, you know, what happened the minute after? Yeah.

Unfriended one ended. Right. It's been tough since everybody kind of died. Did you throw, Did you pretty much say, like, this is for your, for your, when you're writing it, when you're working on it, you're saying this is just in, it's just in spirit, for lack of a better term, a sequel rather than like there's any kind of storyline that kicks over from one to two. Yeah, I mean, right away from the beginning, we didn't want to sequelize it. I mean, I was sort of tentative about the sequel anyway because I thought the first one was so singular. Yeah.

And it's like the worst thing it can possibly try to do is, is write a follow-up to something that is so profoundly unique. I mean, they made a movie that no one's ever tried before. I had never seen a movie on a computer screen before. So, like, one of the things I loved about this movie is the way in which it kind of mimics computer behavior, like computer usage behavior, deleting things that you're starting to type, clicking between apps and a kind of almost absent-minded, you know, constantly needing to be stimulated in five different places on a computer screen. And the way in which you kind of split the screen itself, the movie screen, up into these quadrants so that information is coming at you. in these different ways. How is that different to write and how is that different to shoot

from a traditional film just in general? It wasn't that different to shoot because, I mean, really, it took me until we were in post to kind of really wrap my head around the fact that this is an animated film with live action elements, but it was going to be an animated process.

And we've been editing since mid-October 2016. And Andrew Westman, the editor, was also the animator, and the first sound designer and sort of wore many hats. This is Steven's Coco. It might be having like a happier ending than Coco. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, no. Yeah, they're on the same level. Yeah, exactly. But with the animation side, yeah, I mean, I wrote the script very linearly, you know, because I had never gone down this road before. Sure. I wrote it very, very straight ahead. And it wasn't until we got into post that I sort of realized and was in working with Andrew

really started to figure out that, you know, sequence A that then leads into sequence B that leads into sequence C, maybe they should all actually happen at the same time. And I think that I didn't even fully grasp until we were in it. Just the way that we use computers, we are so now accustomed to doing so many things at once that an audience can, I think I was afraid because I was like, we're going to ask people to spend all day in front of their computer at work, get in their car, sit through traffic, and come watch a movie that's essentially a giant computer screen. He's going to sit right behind one. So I already felt like the threshold was high of what we were asking an audience to do. But yeah, once we started to show to people, we started to realize we can just combine and combine and add so many layers to it. and people will still be able to track the information

because that's the way that we use these things. How do you find the line? Because I know, so you're watching SportsCenter, you're watching CNN or whatever, and there's like a lower third, and then there might be something on a crying on the side, and they're playing something, but then they're also talking over it,

and there's all this information coming at you. And sometimes you could make the argument that none of that is actually super important, so you're just kind of ambiently watching all these different streams at once. But how do you decide how to tip the scales towards, I need people to know that this thing, is happening.

The mouse. You have the mouse. The mouse is an awesome tool. When we found weak spots, we would always rely on the mouse because the audience will follow the mouse. So we'll just make the mouse move and say that's where you really should be looking.

And mouse has never... What I always loved about these movies, and I remember Nelson Greaves, who produced and wrote the first one, like his capturing the mouse performance was always this intense. It was like, guys, everyone, shut up. Nelson is...

Nelson's like rolling on this. And he would move the mouse. And, you know, the level of a feeling of reality that you get when a mouse behaves the way it really does behave when you're operating a mouse is the equivalent of like the light bright in paranormal two. It gives you a feeling of reality. Like this could happen to you. And bad mouse acting. And we've seen some other screen movies where they animated the mouse. Yeah.

So it's not. It was too smooth. And you're like, you're gone from the movie. When a mouse moves too smoothly, you're out of the movie. It's not real. That's really interesting. You can get a lot of emotion. And it's interesting because the whole idea of these movies is that they're not found footage movies.

I mean, found footage movies, which I love, are passive, and they've already happened. These movies are happening right now as you're watching them, and you're essentially the protagonist. You're looking through the protagonist's eyes. So the ability of the mouse to give you a psychological state of a character that maybe you even haven't seen yet or maybe you haven't even met yet. I mean, because our movie opens with that password sequence. And we did some mouse action there. and just the ability to convey information, to understand from that sequence before you've seen anybody, before even know who you are in this movie, to know that this computer doesn't belong to the person who's using it,

and that they're tentative about certain things vis-a-vis the mouse animation. Yeah. It's just a really interesting sandbox to roll around. You know, there's the idea that you could learn a lot from somebody, maybe too much from knowing their Google search history, but there's something kind of revealing about seeing what people almost click on, and what people are kind of bored by and moving on from in that. What they look up on Wikipedia, what they, yeah.

Yeah, and so to that end, I was curious about how you go about working with actors in a world like this, because there's sort of a two-part question, but how do you calibrate performances? Do they have to be like that much more torqued up because they're going to be in these frames and they have to translate through that?

Or do you actually ask them to play it straight not think at all about how the performance will actually be rendered once we get to the end. I try to do it very organically. I mean, since it was written like a play, we rehearsed it like a play, and then we filmed it like a play.

We had five days of rehearsal, and we had, I think, four days to shoot all the dialogue. Oh, wow. Yeah, it was pretty fast, yeah. And then we had to think four days to do sort of all the other things that you saw in the movie. So I just said, okay, we have nine days.

Casting was so singular in this movie because, I mean, Colin Wadd has to be on camera for 90-some minutes. Yeah. And the camera's right here, and he's breaking the fourth wall. He's looking right into the camera a lot of the time. So it was pretty demanding. So finding the right actors who could kind of handle that,

and also who had theatrical experience, who had a lot of improv experience. Because I wrote this script really quickly. I wrote it in like two weeks for a draft and sat down with them on the first day and said, I need you guys to help me with this. Look at this as a template, you know, beat it to death, help me fill on the characters.

We need to figure out how to build backstories that one line of dialogue will tell us something about the relationships between these characters. I need to make sure it's watertight. And the way to do it was to do it like a play. Yeah. You know, and they were amazing because they really just kind of got into the idea of it being a team sport.

And the script really just grew organically. So I kind of let them do all the tweaking, to be honest with you. I mean, this is what they do. They're professional actors. They're unbelievable. Their way to sort of analyze characters. And I also did that as a way to separate them from thinking about what this was going to be.

We showed them the original movie, so they understood what it was going to be. But I think that also showed them that they just had to be. to live in the moment as much as possible. Were they probably more comfortable with it than they thought they were going to be in the first place? I imagine because people spent so much time on their computers, right? Yeah. Yeah, it kind of took day one, you know, because I kept saying during rehearsal, the first day

of filming is just the sixth day of rehearsal, but we're just going to be filming and you're going to be in costume, but we're going to do the exact same thing. And so first day of filming, we had put it in three-hour cards into the Gopros. And I was like, okay, so why don't you guys just start? Do the script. And I tried to be as hands off for the first three hours just to see what they would do. And it was amazing because they would just like, if they flubbed a line or if they got inspired, they would just say, wait, hold on, I got, why don't we do this? And they just started kind of directing each other.

And they realized that we don't have to cut. We're just kind of rolling. So they would kind of reset themselves. And anytime inspiration struck, they would go down some other road. And I would sort of steer them if I thought a road was interesting. Yeah. Or if I thought a road was awful. You know, I just kind of guided them.

But I think the approach I took was that these people are going to be the ones who breathe life into this. They're going to be the ones that give it the texture that it needs. And I just wanted to trust them through. The most fascinating thing for me in this movie is this, you know, you guys said like, oh, it doesn't have the supernatural element that the first one does. But the sort of construction of this, the idea of a dark web and they're just being like this, I can't remember, I was like the river sticks basically that they have to cross or whatever to get across to this other, this sort of Silk Road or whatever. it's interesting that we've created this fully like virtual world and also created an underworld for it and also created a boogeyman for that. Did you guys talk much about like what role that could play in this movie as an element of fear for the audience? Yeah, I mean, I kind of, to me that the dark web, I mean, you know, the distinction that's always used is the ocean, right?

And like the surface web is where we swim around and then the deep web is most of it. And it's just a lot of crap. It's like just a lot of detritus and, you know, Excel files from the late 80s. You know, it's a lot of deep water with nothing there. Yeah. But you can't really see it, you know, because there's no light down there. Right. And the deep web is just a space, or the dark web is a space within the deep web that people have said, let's build some encryption around this.

But in a way, it's like this is what humans have done throughout history. Sure. It's like we always find the darkest corner of the park. Black market. To do whatever we want to do. So this is just a virtual space that also has sort of immediate universal reach because everyone, once you know how to get in, so you don't have to fly to the corner of the park, you can just do it from the premier house. So I don't know.

It always has this kind of sinister vibe, but to me it's, I just look at it very pragmatically. It's just this is what humans are really good at, is finding their own little corner to do what they don't want other people to see. What's just shocking about it is the more you learn about how big these industries are. I mean, Silk Road, I think, was like a $10 or $20 billion a year. Yeah. I mean, it was shocking. The amount, and of course, what was available besides just goods. Right.

there were lots of things done in trade there too. Right. So I don't know. I think it's human nature to kind of find a way to take things that we create and find nefarious purposes for them. We're just really good. Unfortunately. It's also something that we've like, I think in a movie comes at a very interesting time

and for as much as it's escapism and it's just like a great thriller. It's, I think people more and more are aware of the dice roll that happens every time they get on one of their devices or open up another account somewhere. The trade, the convenience trade that they're made. It's a super convenient to have this. technology. I'm willing to trade for some privacy and some other things for that

convenience. I mean, I often talk with my wife, friends about like the norms of communication now and the characters engage in this all the time where it's like hey, how come you haven't responded to me yet? Like that kind of like urgency that goes along with stuff because you

know that that person can see it. And if they aren't responding, either there's something wrong or you've done something to make them not want to do that and that kind of constant anxiety that comes along. You remember, like, I was trying to figure out just the other day, like, when I was living in New York in the early 2000s, like, how did we ever meet up? You just made it your beeswax to be there when you said you were going to be there.

There was no improv. It was just like, meet me at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. I'll be in the magazine section and then kind of have like a 30-minute window that that would sort of take place in. But I just don't even understand now. I'm like, how did any event or moment ever take place? Also, the feeling of not being reachable is so rare now that when you're in some environment where you're not reachable, it's crazy. We did the new insidious movie up in the hills where there was no cell reception for two weeks from nine to, you know, nine and night.

It was it was supernaturally strange to be in an environment where nobody had cell reception. Yeah, the norms are just shifting and shifting. Like it was, there was like, when I remember when I first moved out to LA in like 2012, in business, like at work, it was still sort of like, I'm getting on a flight now, so I'll talk to you in four or five hours. Now it's like, like, did something go wrong with the Wi-Fi on your plane and you're not available? And it's actually, even when you're on the plane, I used to think of a plane as like, I'm going to get so much television watched on this thing. And then now I'm like, I'm texting and I'm on Slack and I'm sending emails and stuff like that. It's just, it really is, it speaks to a certain collective anxiety, I think. It really does.

And it also creates a lot. I mean, I think adults have trouble handling that. But, I mean, I can't imagine being a teenager and growing up in this era. What happens to your brain? I know. What happens to your brain when you can have that feedback constantly from this thing in your pocket? It must be. And if that's how you look at where you stand in the hierarchy of your social order.

Well, I think for people our age, we're like, well, we're trying to get back to a state of grace, right? Like we're trying to get back to summer camp or when we were just like chilling out. But for people who've grown up with that as a reality, I don't know if that's a possibility. Yeah, I think that's long gone. And you're right, but there's also this, that irony of, I mean, when I was starting to fall in love with film,

my favorite stuff was where the paranoia thrillers of like the late 60s and the early 70s, the kind of post-Nixon revelatory stuff, you know. And I love, like back then you were watching the conversation, right? And it had that epic last shot where he's torn the apartment apart and he just can't find that damn bug and he knows he's being listened to, or maybe he's not.

And we had that back in that era, and we've learned so much more about where our surveillance state has gone. And at the same time, like we're sitting on our couch complaining about it. And then we're like, hey, Lexa, by the way, what time is the concert? Yeah.

My smart TV is spying on me. The nest is spying on me. Terry Hall would go, he would tear apart everything. He would move to some island somewhere. By the way, technically this is not director bullshit. It's just, Susco has good taste.

No, it's true. I love that. Director bullshit is a specific thing. For listeners of the watch, it's different from having good taste. It's more just like when it's just completely unrelated. When you say I'm doing, I'll say it, when they did Kong Skull Island and they were just like, this is like we're really drawing a lot from platoon. I was just like.

So did Jordan vote Roberts almost losing his life in a bar fight? Did that bring you closer to buying that point of view? I felt like he was, he did that specifically to justify his director. Just to inoculate himself against. against your director bullshit accusation. I wanted to ask a little bit about like sort of this film in the larger context of Blumhouse coming out.

You guys are now operating on, I mean, you probably always have, but I'm going to contextualize it as you guys are now operating on all these different levels right now where it's like prestige TV with sharp objects and you've got like a huge movie coming with Halloween, but then you're still putting out unfriended and upgrade and kind of like,

what are some of the challenges that you guys have now that you didn't maybe before but like what's what's 2018 felt like over there um i mean we the the the it's been really interesting becoming an incumbent in a weird way and like the the the sort of privileges and anxieties of that um but the thing that the the funny thing is there's no it's not like there's a house style like i would be super anxious about like the mar you know the marvel machine and making how much differentiation do you have, how much continuity do you have? And the thing that we're really lucky about is that the way we do this in general is we just chase and advocate for artists.

So, so like there's no development, there's no brain trust Pixar development process that could have arrived at unfriended dark web. Like it just emerges fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. And I feel like that that is sort of future-proofing. There's no, you know, you just, if you bet on filmmakers, they will always do something that surprises you. But most importantly, that surprises the audience, you know. There's this whole canard that, like, horror comedies don't work in the theatrical marketplace. Well, yeah, maybe.

Yeah. But, like, Chris Lannon's really, really smart. And so happy death day happens because we're like, like, you know what, five million bucks, maybe Chris is right. Right. And that's, and by the way, sometimes we're wrong. But there's no cost to being wrong. Sure.

Except our time. Right. So. And then even when you're wrong, I bet it's still data, right? It's so interesting. Yeah. In fact, the movies that we've done that have not gone on 3,000 screens are so much more instructive to do new filmmakers.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We did this movie I love called Not Safe for Work, but Joe Johnston, my hero, directed. And we made one, it was supposed to be a home invasion movie, except it was set in the place you spend the other 12 hours of your life in office. And we thought, oh, we're geniuses. We figured out this new thing for a home invasion movie. It set in an office.

And then you started developing the script. You're like, oh, wait, well, if there's no emotional reason to protect your office. You don't care about your co-workers. Let's be honest. Then you have to start, Andy, if you're listening, you have to shut the doors. Well, shutting the doors is super, is not a satisfying emotional thing for a movie. It just, then you're just locking them in, locking poor Max Miguel into an office. And so is, you know, we learned something about the kind of emotional motor of these movies. It's not just an accident. That the purge is set in a house. it has an emotional motor to that.

So anyway, but so it's, yes, the, and the other thing about when you have a low budget movie that doesn't light the world on fire in the multiplexes, you're not, it's not a painful thing. Sure. Because it's not, no one's losing their job. Right. The studio didn't lose $100 million. You can talk about it without being worried, without being worried about reminding everyone that you guys have this movie that didn't work.

Yeah, you can have like a candid conversation about it. Yeah, like, I'm sure that there are candid conversations about John Carter of Mars, but I'm sure it's harder to have those conversations than it would be for a smaller movie. So that's, I think, what keeps, that's one of the things that keeps the thing feeling loose and laboratory because we don't have those anxieties. And did you feel that, like, loose laboratory feel? I mean, you've worked on a bunch of different movies. Oh, my God, yeah.

I love listening to you talk about this stuff, by the way. And it is, I mean, I'm so grateful because what they have created beyond just a really fascinating business model is that when you have that effect, and you're not kind of driven by fear. I mean, you realize that at most of the levels in this industry, almost every single decision is driven by fear. And that breeds an environment of negativity, and it breeds an environment where people are slowly make decisions. They want to pass that decision to other people.

Every draft of a script is like, oh, God, it's a great. Should I deliver it? And this environment is almost the exact opposite, because you walk the halls of Blumhouse. everybody's having a great time. Everybody's happy to be there. Everybody wants to talk about an idea. No one's afraid to throw a bad idea out. Everyone's free to talk about everything.

It's one of the most startlingly fascinating development process I've ever been in. And I was really fortunate that this was where I directed my first movie. Because it is. It's just like a fun, adventurous sandbox where no one's afraid to be wrong. It's just amazing how a specific business model can free up creativity and turn everything into positivity. Everyone's excited to shout out. The ideas that they have.

They don't sit there and like, I don't know if I should say this. This could, like, fall really flat. So somebody's sitting here. Checks in the mail, Sussco. Have you guys about maybe John Carter from ours too? Is that like, is that a bad thing? No bad idea. That would be, hey, hey, split.

Split is a low budget, you know, sequel to a high budget movie. That's right. There's not John Carter, too, in a cage. Okay. Steven Soscoe, Cooper Samuelson. Thank you so much for coming by. Unfriended Dark Web is in theaters this weekend. I very highly recommend you guys check it out.

Thanks again. We have to have you back on for the third time. Thanks, man. Thank you. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by HBO's Sharp Objects from the author of Gone Girl, the producer of Get Out, and the director of Big Little Lies comes the HBO limited series Sharp Objects. Amy Adams stars as Camille, a reporter who returns to her hometown,

to investigate the murders of two young girls. The Grizzly case soon brings Camille's own scars to the surface, hailed as a top-of-the-line detective story by variety. Watch new episodes of Sharp Objects, Sundays at 9 p.m. and catch up now on HBO Now.