The Watch - Steven Soderbergh on 'Command Z' and Making Political Films

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Chris and Andy talk about 'Full Circle,' one of the latest shows from director Steven Soderbergh and his take on the noir genre (1:00). Then Chris is joined by Soderbergh to talk about the making of another one of his new series, 'Command Z' (21:46), and whether he considers himself to be a political filmmaker (39:25). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Steven Soderbergh Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 joining me in the studio. His Jim Tan laundry is actually sex lies and videotape. It's Andy Greenwald! That was a good intro.

Thanks, man. Steven Soderberg is on the podcast today. It's pretty exciting. I wanted to spend a few minutes today on Monday. This is when this is going up. Talking about Full Circle, which concluded, I believe, by the time people hear this about two weeks ago,

it finished its six-episode run on Max. And I thought it was remarkable. I wanted to chat with you a little bit about that. And Stoderberg also has another series that he did in between Magic Mike and Full Circle. He shot an eight-episode web series that's up on his website, extension75.com, called CommandZ, and it stars Michael Serra and Roy Wood and Chloe Radcliffe. And I highly recommend people check it out. We talked a little bit about that. It's a sci-fi comedy, and we talked about Full Circle.

And we also talked about his career, especially his career, Andy, since Che. since he made Che and you know that he had dabbled or had a dalliance with the idea of retiring at a very some point in there he said that he was he said that he was retiring from movies but since Che I wanted to just sort of throw this up against the wall I kind of threw it to him and he more or less agreed that he is one of the most explicitly political filmmakers we've had in our lifetime that almost all of his genre work that has come out you know, over the last 12, 15 years has had incredibly probing sociopolitical analysis or storytelling at the heart of it, even if it's dressed up in a comedy or if it's dressed up in a 1950s

film noir or if it's dressed up in a musical about a guy, you know, trying to make furniture who has to become a stripper to make ends meet. Whatever it is, he's like so aware of and focused on capitalism and the crushing weight of capitalism on individuals. And I thought that that definitely came through in full circle. I agree. And I think that what's interesting about it is that I, until you suggested that framing, I don't think I think of him as an explicitly political filmmaker, but I think that's kind of naive. Well, I think of him as a formalist usually, you know? Yes, in this willingness to go between genres and styles and take on the challenges. But I think the other constant, and we referred to this when we first talked about full circle the other

week, and it's very relevant to our conversation about the show, is that unlike many of his contemporaries in cinema or as filmmakers, he is resolutely focused on the present. I mean, the Nick was a period piece, but beyond that, he is almost uniquely interested in the world as it is. Yes. And not running from it. And that in and of itself is intensely political, right? because if you turn the camera on something that's happening now, you are showing us something.

That is exactly what he said. My God. So it goes out saying that I regretted my inability to participate in the interview, but now I'm just guessing at it. So talk me through your feelings about Full Circle. I think I have two responses to it. The broad one is, I just love that this was there for us. I love that he made this. I loved having something that was dense, that was a little bit challenging in terms of just keeping up with it.

It had no handholding. I love that it was about this moment, about people and cities and parts of the world and parts of New York City that cameras don't often show us or don't demonstrate interest in. And I love that it was the way it was released two per week for three weeks, I believe. Yeah, I think that was how they did it, yeah. And in the middle of summer, and it is an example of the type of show that I think I'm often worried is going to get squeezed out of not just because the industry is contracting and making less shows, because how do you communicate this? There's no underlying IP. There is no one-star performance.

It's not, in our previous podcast, we talked about hijack and why we liked about it. This is the opposite of that. They're both good. So I celebrate its existence. And then turn the page and get a little bit deeper, this show was fascinating and had really remarkable performances from actors known and unknown.

Also really challenging performances. And I think all of that was, rewarding all the challenges up. We can get more into the specifics of it, if you like. Well, I think there was the entire thing to me was breathtakingly experimental and also breathtakingly

traditional in some ways. You know, it is obviously essentially like a film noir. It's contemporary noir with lots of secrets and lots of betrayals and violence and you know, finding out that people closest to you have been

working against you. all the stuff that really fuels more, which is obviously a genre that he feels incredibly comfortable working in because all this drama is heightened in those genre pieces. And I thought it was really wild how it was essentially marketed.

If you looked at the marketing materials or if you watched the trailer, I think you had an idea of the guy on a plot line, but you probably went into it thinking this is about Timothy Oliphant and Claire Danes have their son kidnapped. And Dennis Quaid is the sort of patriarch of the family

and we're going to get like real acting chops from these great actors. And then it winds up becoming this story of these young kids from Guyana who are trying to negotiate. They're caught between these two kind of forces.

The underworld of Guyana and like this sort of rich Tony Manhattan family who are trying to make their way through this cloudy kidnapping scheme. And the lie of capitalism and the lie of America. that this is something in the beginning when we meet them and they seem relatively innocent,

that they're eager to go. It's going to be fun. It's going to be an adventure. It's going to change their lives. And then what they're presented with when they get there is just, it's horrific. Yeah. It's just greed and violence

and they're desperate to get out. I think it's a good point about the classic trappings of it. Ed Solomon, the screenwriter, who Soderberg has worked with before. And he wrote No Sudden Move, which is, I've rewatched No Sudden Move a bunch recently. Yeah. It's really, really great.

That's a period piece, too. But it is, but he wrote all the episodes here. It is, at least in its inception, it is not, it's not note for note, but it feels deeply indebted to the Kurosawa film High and Low, which is also about a mistake in kidnapping and everything that spirals out from that. But it's just, it's the best, to me, it's the best case scenario where it is not a reboot or retelling or remake. It's like, well, what is the germ of this idea?

Okay, what's interesting to us about it now? And what can we do? And also, that's not exactly like, it's not like remaking, you know, a Disney movie. This is not the most well-known movie at this point, 60 years after it was released. So I love that aspect of it, that they're engaging with very established, like, storytelling structure and filmic language and then doing something very different with it. I feel like when I watch Soderberg's stuff nowadays, it's like listening to a record that has a very unconventional mix. So. Like Metallica Saint Anger?

Well, or even stuff that's like, this would be a reference that maybe not a ton of people get, but like a record made by Steve Albini where like, you know, there's a real emphasis on like live drums and like the way the drums sound in the room. And so that you're almost confronted with the fact that like usually when you hear drums and popular music, like that's not actually how drums sound if you were standing in front of them. I say all this because the way he shoots and the way he edits, which is essentially hand in hand. He'll shoot all day and then he'll edit at night on his laptop.

And the way that they made full circle, which was, I think, supposed to be another experimental story the way Mosaic was, which was their second collab or their first collaboration before no sudden move was this shown that Mosaic that was on HBO a few years ago. And that was sort of like a choose your own adventure

or choose your own protagonist mystery story. This was going to be something similar to that where there was going to be like a linear story, but then there was going to be these character dependent episodes that were like the same action but through this person's perspective. And I think they scrapped that and scrapped a fair amount of what they had shot and then reshot some stuff. Of this.

This is how this went. I think you can feel that when watching it. I think that there are parts of this show that, you know, like the casino aspect and seemingly like a mob subplot that don't really like get resolved or fully explained. But I like being treated like a grown up and trying to figure this stuff out. I found that when the final two episodes got to me, there was almost this symphonic kind of buildup and release, and even the music itself becomes this sort of like romantic, you know, 1950s noir score.

It's also an example of what I think works best in this type of storytelling and also just it's a sign of, it's kind of a sign of confidence and maturity, because the nature of this story demands that there is going to be a series of almost remarkable coincidences, or secrets and everybody's not telling the whole truth and everything is connected. This show leans into that. It's called Full Circle.

It's about people bound together. It's about the past resonating in the future. So it's explicitly saying that that is what we're dealing with. But also the way Soderberg shoots it, he accepts the world that the show is going to be set in. And he's not that interested in hiding the ball. That there's a, oh, well, the postal inspector actually was involved in the original thing. And he's going to be.

Who cares? There's that feeling that he always brings, probably both because of who he is intellectually and creatively, but also because he shoots these things himself with his rapacious style. The feeling I always get is curiosity. The camera is barreling forward, looking at what's interesting to it, within the world that you've agreed upon. Yeah. And it's not trying to change your mind about the world or make excuses for it or try to hide the plot, you know, which could feel a little bit. It's just, it's never that. It doesn't stay still for you to be like, well, wait.

How did they get to there? He does a bunch of shots in this show where he's just sitting in the passenger seat, literally of the car that somebody is driving around New York. Somebody else is driving, the two people are in the back seat, which is not normally how people sit in cars. And it's also not normally how they shoot stuff.

I mean, like, there are moments in the last two episodes where I'm like, oh, we're just, the running gun nature of this is just really building to something special. I thought that, and we could talk a little bit about what this show is about and what it meant, but I thought that the moment where it becomes a parent that sort of, and I've seen it be critiqued a little bit, like, you know,

are the Browns let off too easy, or is there, like, is the class critique not exactly like watertight at a certain point? But I thought that the two sides, these two families who are sort of almost up until the moment that Ms. Mahabir finds out that Aka has been killed, like they're under the impression that they have kind of righted the scales,

you know, that like that they have paid back this circle that that things are things are now like effectively like rounded out and then avier becomes the the sort of new sacrifice like he is in fact the child to get sacrifice that they had intended to sacrifice in this whole process and i just thought that was such a gut punch because he is left to this life where he's standing in the marshes off this river in new york as they fly back to guyana and he's killed a guy with a machete I mean, it's dark. It's dark.

And it's also, though, like, what was so striking about it was these two kids show up and one is cut out for it. I don't, you know, that that's almost a value neutral statement. But he is wired to survive in a way that Louis is not. Yeah. And continues to, you know, and again, like, that's a testament to the script and the plotting and the pacing that, like, we believe that Javier can like, a couple things happen where you're like, how is he still alive? But this show... Javier, sorry, I've said Javier, yeah. Which, by the way is the coolest way ever to say Xavier.

Yeah. Like, when Kevin Feige reboot the X-Men with Professor Javier, I'm into it. Yeah, like that fundamental difference that he can do it and then understands what he is capable of and who he is and what he's willing to do for his... For people who aren't. Yes. You know, is...

It's cutting. But I just love the depiction of this, like, these two families who have a transactional relationship to... their morality. You know, it's like Claire Dane's, Sam gives the painting to Louis and is like, this is my reparation. You know what I mean? Just take this. I recognize the scale is in balance and this is, I will now balance it. And Savitra's like, all I have to do is this ceremony and like have one child to replace another child and I'm out and I get away Scott free. But also the idea that you can, that peace or forgiveness can be, can be handed down from on high. You think about

Louis's entrance into the 1 5th Avenue building. Yeah. And then his exit where he has to sneak in by having Natalia. Natalia scream. And then when he leaves with this $250,000 He's just like, hey, how's it going? They're like, sir, like you're Louis, right? Like have a nice night, sir. Yeah, as he's carrying a painting out. He's been given

permission. Where did you wind up with the melody harmony character, the played by Zazzy beats? So I've been thinking about this. I was having conversations about it, off pod, even. I think that one of the opportunities that it draws actors to Soderberg is the opportunity to do things, to try things, to commit to things that they might not otherwise get to do. And I love Zizhi Beats.

I think she's a great performer. I think she's charismatic. I always look forward to watching her. This was a prickly part. And one that kind of at times, I know there was the running subplot of her mental wellness. But at times it beggared belief that she could run roughshod over everything the way that she does

and approach people and talk the way that she does. But I also was like, this is an opportunity for her, too. She has made a choice. And Soderberg, the way he works with actors, he's not, you know, speaking of Steve Albini and record producers, he's not twiddling knobs. No. He's like, that's your frequency?

Okay. Yeah. I'm going to shoot around it and you're going to be like an act of God or force of nature. But the part as written is actually a difficult part because she is walking into these rooms where it's nothing but secrets and is immediately intuiting what the truth is. Yeah. And in that, one of the things that was interesting about us that she felt like,

a CBS procedural hero. She's house. She's the mentalist or all these other shows that I don't watch, but I presume knowledge of. Like that, she has a superpower. It's very Soderberg to let an archetype like that loose in something that were moments ago were describing as realistic. Yeah. Yeah.

There was some points in the middle where I was starting to be like, I'm not sure if this is working for me. By the end, it kind of was. Just because of the, because her path, there were, until the, it was. I mean, there were different circles rotating at different speeds, right? Like Claire Daines goes to see William Sadler, her uncle, and we have that scene. And then Mel shows up for an echo of that scene at a different speed. So I think ultimately it did work for me.

Did you feel different? No, I thought it's like the way you put it is exactly right. Like once you get on her frequency and you sort of like adjust your brain to the fact that this is in fact a character that you have watched hundreds of times is the intuitive detective who somehow divines that when people are lying or telling the truth or what they're lying about. And in every crime novel we've ever read, that detective shows up at the very end and is like, here is the conspiracy. I figured it out, much to my own personal expense. That's exactly what Mel is doing. You know, it's just that she also was doing it with a personality

disorder. And I thought that was an incredibly kind of brave role in performance. And, and, and to have somebody be like, you think that you like these anti-hero detectives, do you like it in this package? I think that everyone uniformly was really good in the show, but everyone was using it. Everybody's using the opportunity differently. Oh, yeah, definitely.

So, like, we mentioned Javier. Like, that's a kid named Shea Kohl, who I'm not familiar with. I think he's British. It's a brilliant performance. It's an exciting performance because you've never seen him before. Similarly, Paul Dut Sharma played Garmin, Henry. Yeah.

Kind of the MVP of the entire series. just an incredibly riveting, finely drawn portrait of someone who I have not seen on television before. Another British guy doing incredible work. But then, like, there's the Claire Dane's performance, which we've texted about. Like, Claire Dains is never not good. I am a Claire Dane's fan. Yes. I would say that I'm ready for a different Claire Dane's.

I think that you got it in this show. Performance. Yeah. But we can agree to disagree. That's what's amazing about this podcast. I feel like the thing about, Kai, I thought podcasts were about people agreeing on things all the time and saying they're good. Have I been doing this wrong for years? It's not that I want to say that she's not good.

It's that her being high-strung, higher society person. I mean, this was Fleischman. This was, in some ways, homeland. I would just be into seeing her playing a different part. I think that if she had been double-crossed by her husband and her father, or her uncle Jean, and this was all about her finding out the ways in which she was wronged. But the fact of the matter was that she was the sort of conductor

of a lot of this and the orchestrator of a lot of this. And she played the turn in the last episode was well played and went to a different place. But she did have like her Fleischman haircut. She was just, she does a kind of upper class severity

that she's better at than anybody. But that wasn't why she was, I think she can do other things. Sure. But you know, you got to let the game come to you. You got to play, you can't change that.

So I get that. But it was also cool to see like Timothy Allofand not to be in New York. We don't usually see him. We don't usually see Dennis Quaid being a goofball with a ponytail, Jim Gaffigan is a good actor

and got an action scene. I really enjoyed that casting. There's sometimes there's surprise casting that feels stunty, and then there's surprise casting that is the best type of casting, which is purely surprised, and you're happy to see it. Everything about it was so offbeat and yet so

rewarding in that, like, I want my mystery crime show dopamine hit, and I think I got both. And I thought it was just classic Silverberg in a lot of ways and also like in some ways where you could see the seams and you could see him moving some of the pieces around to try and like make sense of it for himself.

I'm so enamored with him as a filmmaker I think partially because process is so important to him and process becomes like a lot of what he talks about. So it was interesting in this conversation you're about to hear that I had with him to hear him be pretty explicitly like here are some of my like ideas about the world itself. We talked about Command Z and Command Z is essentially

born out of a desire for him to talk about the ways in which people can make a difference in small ways on an everyday level. And like you mentioned, the proceeds from Command Z are going to charity. So it was a really cool conversation to have with him after making full circle in Command C. One last thing. Like the great filmmakers are the ones who are so focused on and know just innately like the story they want to tell that there's almost always a byproduct where all the potential stories that they move past in the pursuit of what they're telling. It's almost like

the reverse Marvel where like the MCU is like, oh, remember that stone that Shang Chi kicked in the first act? Well, Wade to hear the origin story of that. Like, wouldn't you sign up right now for an Ed Solomon scripted show about the relationship

between different immigrant crime families in the outer boroughs of New York? Yeah. Like the scene where Natalia and Louis go to the Chinese Mr. Chung, Mr. Chung to escape. And he tries to sell them back

to the Garmine. That's a whole show I would watch. And that wasn't this one. But it just kind of part of the excitement of a program like this is like, oh man, there's still a lot of stuff out there for us, or for writers when they get back to work.

So Andy and I will be back on Thursday with a mailbag episode. Stay tuned for my interview with Steven Soderberg. Is he going to come back? Did you end of the interview being like come back to talk to us about all, the other things that we want to talk to you about. I did not end.

It didn't end with that. Hi, did he say that? He said to be continued, but I don't know if he meant like his filmmaker and career or a podcast and relationship. Well, when I have him on my podcast, yeah, maybe I'll cover some of that stuff. Your podcast throwing,

running mind. We'll be back on Thursday. Please check out my interview with Steven Silver coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? like a last minute beach day, a spontaneous hike, or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for,

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be a 2%er. Learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms apply. Stephen, thanks so much for joining me. You're one of my favorite filmmakers. So this is an absolute thrill to talk to you about Command Z, which is your new series, that's up on your site. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about the origin story of this project to start with. So you read Kurt Anderson's book,

Evil Geniuses. I know that you're this voracious reader. I follow your year-end diaries pre-religiously when they come out. When you're reading as throughout the year, are you always reading with an eye towards maybe this is adaptable? Maybe this is interesting

for something down the line? And is this somebody I would like to collaborate with if they are, like, in Kurt's case, available to do so? No, not really. I'm reading mostly for pleasure. Sometimes as homework, you know, I'm trying to get additional information about a subject that I'm exploring. But more often than not, reading for me functions as a real palette cleanser. And I want to kind of separate myself from the day-to-day work. In this case, though, I've known Kurt for a while. I think I've read everything that he's published. I hope I have.

But this book in particular spoke to me in the sense of filling in the last part of a sentence that I felt was on the tip of my tongue about how we got to where we are currently. And he just did such a great job in this book of sort of braiding all of these strands in a way that was smart and as Kurt's voice, which is a, you know, he has a great writing voice. It's very entertaining. It's very approachable. And so I reached out to him and I just said, I don't know what I want to do with. this, but I think something should be done with it or more to the point, something should be done about it. And we just started talking and agreed that on any project, you sort of start by eliminating everything that it shouldn't be. So what we determined that it shouldn't be was obviously a kind of documentary or mockumentary or something that was not scripted. And once we decided, okay, we don't want to do that, it needs to exist in a kind of fictional

or dramatic space. What should that be? And as you may or may not have heard, we ended up going down this road of short videos that were kind of leaflets from the future on some sort of platform that still exists in 2036. So these were minute, two minute things, characters sort of giving you blimpses of two versions of a world. It was interesting. We had half of the the little clips were from a world in which things were not fixed. And then half of the clips were from a world in which things did get fixed. And we worked on that. We wrote scripts. We hired passed. We shot them. And then we looked at them. And we said, this doesn't work at all. We literally have to start over. So we threw those out. Some of them still appear in little

pieces on the video wall in Command C. You can see little clips that are from that iteration. But we just started over again and agreed. We need to work in a format that's more familiar to us and that we have more of a field for and work, especially for me where I feel more comfortable in saying, no, it should be like this. And so we started over. We got some fun, new people involved, and it ended up, you know, resulting pretty much in what you watched. But, you know, we were trying to find this line of making sure that we were self-aware

in our targeting of issues. and that we ourselves were not sort of immune from being targeted at a certain point late in the show when Michael Sarah is talking to the youngest of the three team members, you know, encouraging her to get involved and to do things. And she really kind of goes off on him and says, I don't need you to tell me how to fix things. and this is, you know, you always think, you rich people always think you have the answers to everything. And she just kind of tells them to fuck off. And so, and that was because I felt, well, if I was that person's age and somebody my age said the things that Michael Serra was saying, I'd get up in their grill too and go, why should I be listening to you? You're the one who fucked all this up.

So we tried to make sure that it was a good version of a circular firing squad. And so there was a lot of back and forth in discussion about, you know, being an equal opportunity fender. Can you tell me a little bit about the actual production? Because this got shot between Magic Mike and Full Circle. Am I right? Yeah. So that was a squeeze.

Yeah. The room that they work in is actually this photo studio in my office about 30 feet from here. And then, you know, we tried to, when we were going outside, we tried to kind of keep it in the neighborhood. And it was, I think we shot for 14 days, 14 or 15 days. And it might have come out a lot earlier if I'd been, aware of how many visual effects are in the show. For some reason, I just wasn't grocking that every time Michael spoke, it was going to involve some sort of visual effect.

So when we had an assembly of the whole thing, the editor said, you know, there's like 270 visual effects shots in this show. which is more than anything, like all the things I've ever made combined. And the problem was showing it to people, it kind of didn't work without that effect. Like that, the Oz-like floating head thing really was important. So it took a while, even to get it in a state where I could start showing it to friends and getting feedback.

And as a result, that kind of pushed the release down. And I was, you know, running right up against the July 17th, you know, target that's in the show. So it was a bit of a scramble at the end. And it also, as you said, while we were shooting, I was trying to prep full circle and location scout and work on the script with Ed. So, and finished Magic Mike. So it was, there was a lot going on. do you like that feeling of i suppose it's multitasking to your use your word squeezed does that create like a kind of beating the deadline old journalist almost feeling or like

you know you're you're racing in a bunch of different places is that a comfortable place for you it's not uncomfortable only because i am happy to delegate i work with really good people and I give them a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility. And so it just means I have to be very, very smart about how much real estate I give each project even over the course of a day. But a lot of that means having conversations with other people that I'm collaborating with and explaining to them, I need you to take a run at this. I need you to make sure X happens.

But it was, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was a busy time, but it wasn't, I didn't feel overwhelmed. It just ended up that way, you know, the timing of it. If, if we hadn't thrown away the first iteration of command Z, that wouldn't have happened. So it was kind of my fault. In a sense, it was, it was hard for me to. be upset because I was the one that said, let's throw out all that other stuff and start over

while I was getting ready to start shooting Magic Mike. So, you know, you have to, you have to be aware of who's, who was changing the water in the fishbowl, so to speak. One of the things I love about Command Z is that while it is at times psychedelic and at times, you know, this almost speculative sci-fi that is also very much rooted in the real world, it has the beats of like a really good sitcom at points. Like, you know, like, I was curious. I know that Roy Wood and Chloe Radcliffe both worked on scripts for the series. And I was curious about how much, you know, debate or turning over kind of the mechanics of like of the joke and the joke is going to come back 10 minutes later when we end the episode or there's going to be these recurring gags with

Chloe Radcliffe being late or Roy and wanting to get over the seawall to meet his date. How did the sort of comedy aspects of it manifest through those two leads? Well, it was, you know, I think largely that's where Kurt and I were sort of leading this thing. When we rebuilt it, Kurt brought Larry Doyle in, who's very experienced in this world. Larry brought some people in that he liked that were really talented and funny. And so everybody was really rowing in the same direction and looking for that kind of rhythm. You didn't want it to become metronomic in a way that a sort of a sitcom, which sometimes is used as a pejorative. Like you didn't want it to fall into that set up, set up gag rhythm.

But at the same time, it was designed to be a comedy. And the good news was, you know, we had really smart people working. I mean, certain people were responsible for certain episodes, but the bottom line is, you know, everybody at a certain point got eyes on everything and was able to weigh in and make suggestions. And then when you have a cast that's this smart, you're incorporating ideas from them on the fly. So it was it was very fluid and a lot of fun. it went really fast. I mean, the funny thing is, you know, Michael,

who's one of the lead characters in the show, as the way we shot it, you know, we did all of his stuff very quickly. I was wondering how you did the Oz sequences, yeah. Yeah, so the key to that was making sure that we had people in the room with him to interact so that he wasn't just doing lines into a voice. So I had a couple of cameras on him, although I only ended up using one.

But he was able to, you know, perform with actors in the room so that the rhythms all felt right. I mean, he worked for two days, and yet he's all over the show. So it was, you know, it was one of those. You know, at the end of each episode, you have these cards that recommend and other films to watch if you're interested in, sort of like for more on, you know, nuclear power or climate change or whatever, you suggest people watch additional films.

I was curious how that came about as an idea to throw on at the end of each episode. That was kind of a late-breaking thing. I was looking at the show and felt that each episode was missing a button. Like just they needed a button. There needed to be something that really told you, you know, that's the end of the episode. But it needed to be something that was kind of serious and half not serious.

And so, yeah, we just came up with that at the last minute. And as joking as some of those ideas may seem, I would argue, particularly, you know, for more information about dogs. You know, if you like dogs, I think those are three good movies. Turner and Hitch is a great, yeah, it's a great recommendation. So you know what I mean? So it's kind of doing two things at once. It's supposed to be funny, but also, yeah, I mean, if you like dogs, why wouldn't you

want to watch those movies? Yeah, it had me wondering whether or not, you know, you feel in your experience as a viewer, that you have your point of view or your political point of you, maybe, yeah, I think your political point of view changed by films and how often that happens for you? It's a good question. I mean, I typically look to people, real people, and real world experiences to drive me toward some sort of new way of thinking. I guess I don't expect art to teach me. I expect it to show me something, but I guess my expectation is not that it's going to teach me something, apart from me watching a movie and trying to learn how to direct that

different. But there's no question that it can be an influence because it's such a powerful medium. And I wish, you know, the last few years, you know, with what's going on in not only this country, but in the world, has really made me question whether the dichotomy that we all seem to adhere to without question of, you know, good guy, bad guy, good character, bad character. If that's a kind of false dichotomy, because you see leaders around the world acting almost in every particular like bond villains, essentially, except in some cases even more, even more lethal.

And my point is, supposedly, when we go see a Bond movie and you say, oh, that's the bad guy. we're rooting for the good guy. We're rooting for James Bond because he's supposed to be the good guy. We're not rooting for the bad guy. And then you look at a country in which the bad guy wins. You begin to wonder, is that really what people are extracting from these movie experiences? Or are there a lot of people in that room actually not rooting for James Bond, but rooting for for blue felt. Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

Like is there, I just wonder if there's some sort of disconnect between our kind of inherited ideas about villains and heroes that's that in the real world, in people's, you know, private lives, just that dichotomy doesn't exist.

I mean, that's a fascinating, yeah, that's a fascinating response. I was, I guess, if we're always rooting for quote, the good guy, why do they lose so often in the real world when we have the opportunity to influence the outcome? I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. Well, I think part of it is also that maybe people save their idealism for the movie theater and then in their political lives are deeply cynical or deeply self-serving. I don't know. Okay, so let's say, let's say in the event of, let's talk about sportsmanship.

And let's talk about, let's talk about how the former president looks down on any sort of behavior that we would consider a sportsman-like as regards anybody that he's in the arena with. Like, he is the opposite of that. He thinks that's weak. he thinks that real men don't do that. So for somebody who ascribes to his belief system, when they watch a basketball game or a football game or a soccer match or a tennis match, when the players at the end of the game go up to each other, embrace, talk, say, hey, good game, you know, tough one, see you next week.

that makes me feel good when I see that. I like seeing that kind of connection between the people that are battling it out. If you're somebody who supports the opposite of that, does that make you angry? When you see that kind of footage at the end of the game, you go, why are they doing that? Why don't they hate them? Why aren't they calling them terrible names? Why are they hugging? Why are they exchanging jerseys?

They shouldn't be doing that. You're fighting them. They're the enemy. like how do you put these two things together in one human being? You watch, you know, sportsman-like behavior on TV and you're like, that's okay. And then when you see this other person acting in complete opposition to that on a public stage, you go, oh, I'm down with that too. I don't understand.

As somebody from Philadelphia and is a city that's not always known for its sportsmanship, you know, I appreciate a rivalry and I appreciate, when sports fandom kind of transcends a level of, oh, I'm just watching something for entertainment or I'm watching something to support my team and goes into this almost like identity and like what this city means versus what Dallas means as a city or what these two franchises represent.

But at the end of the day, I want these guys then to be crying in each other's arms and saying, hey, we really left it all out there. And that was great. Yeah, exactly. You're like, yeah, I want to beat them. but I respect them. I think that's what I'm talking about,

is why, why in this one context, is that form of respect good and make you feel good and you support that? And then in this other context, you're completely against it. You're completely, you subscribe to this idea

that no opponent is worthy of your respect ever. I'm baffled. You know, the reason why I was asking you about whether or not you ever felt, changed or that your political outlook was changed by a film, I have an attitude towards your movies where I think for a long time, even as I've been completely immersed in your filmography for decades now, of looking at you as this kind of formalist.

And I think a lot of that might have something to do with your public persona where you talk a lot about films and the problem solving that goes into films and then what happens when you take the piece of content that you've made and distribute it into the world. And obviously you have a lot of really thoughtful things to say about the state of the industry. And then I think sometimes, like, the overt political messages of the films get, they're just left on the screen for the viewer to take in. Like, you're not walking around doing a, you know, a whistle stop tour,

bringing people's attention to agribusiness for the informant or pharma with side effects or whatever. But you're an overtly political filmmaker. And that's, it's so interesting that you, uh, you're not Oliver Stone. You know what I mean? You're not making, you know, these, you're not making speeches about the issues that are in the films. You let the films and the stories tell themselves. And I think what happens then is that when you watch a movie, even like no sudden move or something like that where it gets delivered through genre, it's not necessarily that you now are politically activated. It's just that you have a different way of thinking about everything when you see a movie

like that. So I don't even know if I have a question as much as it's a curiosity about how you see yourself as a political filmmaker. Well, I think you could make an argument if you present the world on screen in a way that's accurate at all. You're probably making a political film. That being said, you know, a movie or anything to show, but let's say a movie is a an act of seduction. And so I'm trying to work in a way that I would want to be seduced. And that is not somebody getting up in my face that I don't know very well and sort of spouting rhetoric. That doesn't

work for me when I'm watching a movie and it doesn't work for me in life. So if I'm, to your point, If I'm working on a project that addresses the issue of how the pharmaceutical industry works and what the result is on the people that take the drugs that are produced, I feel genre is a great way to seduce an audience into thinking about that. because if they don't want to think about that, they can just watch a, you know, a psychological thriller. And they don't have to, they can be satisfied and not have an opinion about the pharmaceutical industry at all.

And so that's why I think in the last 15 years or so, since Che really, I would argue everything I've made has been a variation on a genre film. Even contagion was a horror film to me. Yeah, it certainly was. We did a podcast about Contagion the week, I think, before Rudy Gobert and the NBA shut down. Like, it was as it was sort of emerging that this was happening, but we were kind of still maybe it was going to be two weeks kind of thing. And we did, and we talked about Contagent as this horror movie. And we were all starting to wash our hands.

I'm sure a thousand people have come up to you and told you like, yeah, you know, Contagion was pretty pressing. it, you know? Well, I mean, you know, here's an example. Just just working on that movie, anybody that worked on that movie, forget about if somebody saw it. It was like being inoculated. You could, from that point forward, you couldn't not think about that. You all, everybody involved suddenly in the nine years between that movie and COVID taking over the world. I can assure you very, very conscious of washing their hands, of germs, of being in crowds, like you couldn't not think about it having been involved in that production. And so now it's one of the things that made COVID, has made COVID such a huge part of our lives is you realize,

while there are a lot of things that happen in the world, it's rare that everybody in the world, the world experiences something simultaneously. And this was one of those. It had been arguably 70 years, I mean, since World War II, where the entire globe was essentially wrapped up in a sequence of events that were happening to everybody at the same time. It has a different psychological effect, I think. One that is going to play out.

over generations, just like that war did. Yeah, I often think about, I mean, it's hardly important, but I think a lot about the knock on effect from, you know, this memories I have of every time I would have a Zoom with friends, every time my wife and I would like kind of look out the window or go out on our porch and we would kind of look at our neighbors and see that they were going through the very similar experience or if not the exact same experience that we were.

And then in the aftermath of, that or in the sort of post-COVID era, how everything feels a lot more siloed, especially culturally. You know, I think that one of the reasons why people are responding so much to Barbie and Oppenheimer is there is almost this feeling of everybody going and seeing something and experiencing something together. Do you find that to be the case as well? Yeah, I think so. And I think the success, the outsized success of both speaks to that, of wanting that, of our need for that, our need to have something positive that we're all experiencing at the same time, because it's been a while. So apart from the quality of those movies, I think you're right that there was this kind of, you know, unspoken need for all of us to feel good together.

because it just feels like it's been a long time. Is it strange to be making things and frankly making things in such a prolific fashion at a time when not only can you see that people's, I think, brains have changed over the last couple of years, but certainly the distribution models and the platforms have changed so much? Yeah, well, look, it's the artist's job to adapt.

Like that's, you can't, the genie is not going back in the bottle. And so I'm, I'm always looking forward and trying to gauge which path has the most potential there is as it happens. So if there's something that interests me and that I want to do, the first question is, well, what is it? Is it a show or is it a movie? And then once you've determined that, well, where is the best home for this? No sudden move, again, is absolutely a movie and not a show and was paid for by what was then HBO Max, what is now Max Warner, as a movie for the platform. that's not a movie that in the current environment is going to succeed theatrically.

Like no sudden moves. Not going to make $100 million. It's just not. Luckily, somebody still wanted to make it and we got to make it. And I'm glad that we did. But I'm never going to be the kind of person as much as I love seeing movies in a theater and would like my movies to be seen. seen in the theater, I'm not going to not make that movie because it's for a platform.

I don't have the luxury of doing that, and I don't want to do that. I still want to make it. But, you know, I hope there's real momentum now. People have shown that they will go out if it's something that they really are excited about. So the question is, can we keep that ball in the air? With No Sudden Move specifically, I rewatched it again last night. It's really one of my recent favorites of yours. And I can feel the context around that film getting memory hold a little bit from myself,

where I'm no longer thinking of it as the movie that you did with Kimmy and Let Them All Talk. And I'm no longer thinking of it as something that was essentially put straight onto the platform. It's just a movie that happens to be on Max that I was looking for. and then when you start it and the Warner Brothers logo comes up, you're just like, this is just a movie. You know what I mean? Well, exactly. 10 years down the road, exactly.

And so the point is making sure that it's good. So that you want to watch it 10 years from now. But I think you're right. Ultimately, everything will end up there. So your job is to make sure it's good enough to stand out. But, you know, I've got a couple, they've got two projects in front of me. that sure seem like movies that could show in theaters.

And the market will tell me if I'm right or wrong when they're finished. I was curious how you wound up arriving at the place, not only of let's put Command Z up on the site and charge a fee for that, but also what about the content or the story or the script or whatever was like okay

some of these are going to be seven or eight minutes or nine minutes some of these are going to be 21 minutes was that something that had been decided early on because I know obviously it went through these different iterations but how did you arrive at this kind of made me remember

fondly like the days of watching like high maintenance on Vimeo and you know just a kind of wild west feeling of storytelling on the internet Well, that was, that freedom was important, I think, to this project, to not feel that you had to be boxed in by a certain length, certain number of episodes. We started out with more episodes and ended up, I think we had 10 or 11, and then it ended up at 8. and the freedom of that was really, was really nice of knowing, look, this is, this is the point of this episode and the point can be made in this amount of time. And once the point is made, we can move on.

And not really having to worry about that. I mean, certainly there was, you know, basic storytelling, telling paradigms would indicate even in this sort of unusual structure that the first episode and the last episode are probably going to be longer than some of the other episodes, because on the left, you're setting it up. And then the episode on the right, you're paying it off. You know, those are probably going to be the goalposts and everything else is going to be in the middle. But it seemed one of the reasons to put it up

extension was the fact that it didn't, it really, from a traditional platform point of view, this thing falls between two stools because it's not, it's not really fitting, you know, a traditional idea of what a series is on a platform. Like you were saying, it feels more like what we've seen out of pure web series. So are you continuing for the rest of the and I'll let you go in just a second, but I was just curious, you know, you're on this real run

where you've got full circle, which I adored, by the way. And Magic Mike earlier this year, you've got Command Z. Are you throwing yourself into project after project continuously? Or are you taking any time off? Yeah, I'm hoping I've got a, like I said, I've got a really small film

that we're hoping to do in September. if we can get our waiver. It's an independent movie. And then I have something more, you know, medium-level budget for next spring. That's also a movie. So that's the plan. Things are happening,

but as compared to, you know, where I was 12 months ago, it's a lot calmer. and then we'll see those are the two things I've got in front of me and I'm not I'm trying to get too many things out in front because you change yeah you make when you make something you come out the other end of it a little different and I'm aware that it's one thing for me to go oh I think I'm still going to be super excited about the thing I'm doing in March of next year because that's not that far off but to think

about something two years from now, I don't know what my frame of mind will be. And like, I may, I may, I'm out of these two projects feeling like I want to go in a completely different direction. And this thing that I had teed up is no longer interesting. You just don't know until you get there. So I'm trying to be, I'm trying to learn, you know, from what's happened to me in the past and not get too many planes stacked up on the runway. Well, I can't wait to see what comes next. Stephen, thank you so much for talking to me today. And thanks for sharing your thoughts on Comanche.

My pleasure to be continued.