‘Civil War’ With Alex Garland! Plus: The 10 Most Anticipated Movies Out of CinemaCon.

Every true football fan knows that the NFL season truly begins after the Super Bowl champion has been crowned, and the Ringer NFL feed will keep you on top of all the news still happening around the league and heading into the 2024-25 season. I'm Sheila Kapadia, and every Monday and Friday, Ben Solak and I deliver sharp takes the debates on the draft, free agency, training camp, and beyond on Extra Point Day. And every Wednesday, we'll have dual threat, where Steve Ruiz and yours truly, Norbert Diotti, dive deep into all the big off-season developments, with Ringer favorites Austin Gale and Lindsay Jones stopping by occasionally to share their expert football analysis. Subscribe to the Ringer NFL show on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to follow the Ringer NFL on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, at Ringer NFL. I'm John Pennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the McPicture, a conversation show about Civil War.

CR, Chris Ryan, is here with us to talk about one of the most anticipated movies of the year. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Alex Garland, writer-director of Civil War. This is Alex's fourth time appearing on the show. Is there a five-time club?

Well, Alex Ross-Perry is like an OLED fan of the club. Um, no, James Gray up there? Technically, you? Well, I mean, I think I dabble with third chair.

You hold up with third chair? I'm just going to get there. I'm like John Calipari. Let's see what the boosters can do.

Yeah, yeah, might be time to send you to Arkansas. The Tyson family went over. Anyhow, Alex is one of my favorite filmmakers, and I have really enjoyed it since I've been doing this show, having him come on any time he does something new. It's very interesting that he has made a movie that, you know, he was making smaller films for A24.

He made a TV series for FX. This movie is now a big movie. It's a big movie for A24. It's a big movie for movies in 2024.

It's a big movie for CRSF and AD. It is. It's a big movie for the discourse as well. So we'll get into all of our discussion about the film in this episode.

We'll probably have a deep spoiler conversation about it. But then afterwards, there's a long chat with Alex that I hope people stick around for. He was a great guest as always, and I love chatting with him. Let's start with my journeys, because I've just returned.

Before we talk about the state of cinema, let's talk about me. Let's set the scene. Okay. Can you just try to do it with a solo cadence?

Do you need to travel on? Yeah. Yeah. This is my Iceland.

Yeah. This is me journeying overseas. Well, I love Las Vegas. You guys know that.

And I haven't been to Las Vegas in five years. In fact, the last time I went to Las Vegas was for CineCon 2019, because I never went there in COVID. And I went two to three times a year since I moved to Los Angeles in 2012. I have a close friend who lives there.

I, of course, love to play poker. I love to golf. You like to not go outside? Or see sunlight?

And in fact, I did not go outside for the last 48 hours, which we can discuss. And that was weird getting to me. No, I just let me bring people in. 30 seconds before we started recording, you threw out your back again.

You had to take a walk because you didn't go outside and then you drove from there. I was stuck in a movie theater chair for like two straight days. But I do think people need to understand about you and your relationship to Vegas is that you drive only. I do.

At odd hours of the time. You're not hopping that Burbank, Southwest, like to Vegas. I don't. I don't.

I met a few people. So I went for CineCon, which is this trade show in which the studios present their upcoming film slate to the exhibitors, the movie theater owners. There's also a lot of vendors there, the various technology companies and concessions companies. It's a big, it's like a big insurance company.

Yeah, there's a lot about that. We can talk about it when you get a conversation. Are they aerating? What happened to the Raisinets?

I didn't get into it with the concessionaires. That's not really my area of interest. AMC is now peddling instead of Raisinets some like chocolate covered cherries, like cherries. They're trying to be like, we're Alasins now, but it's not.

I didn't get into all that, I promise. I'm there for the movies. Oh yeah. And increasingly I'm there for the people.

You know, there's a lot of people that I know. You don't want us to interject. This is what we're curious about. I don't see concessions bits for you.

There were a lot, actually if you look at some of the people coming, there were like long blogs about all the new candies that you'll find. There's also, you know, the June popcorn bucket I think has set off. A big trend that's coming. Like for example, there will be an alien Romulus bucket.

So imagine, imagine digging your hand into, who knows what it'll be. Do you think it will like explode cherry Coke flavoring all over your face like blood? It might be real blood. They might put real alien blood.

That would be awesome. People from studios, producers, people from the press. No, I'm mad that you fucking, like you're the king of like, it's one in the morning. I know.

I'm going downstairs, I'm taking my contacts out, I'm putting headphones on, I'm putting, it was written on my AirPods. Yeah. I'm going to take down. You are in Vegas.

I crashed out on Monday night watching Ripley. Yeah. I'm in the dad era. It's not the same.

I can't stay up till four o'clock in the morning. You're giving parents a bad name right now. We can still hang. You've never been to Vegas.

I encourage you to see what it's like when you try to stay up past midnight. It's very hard. Nevertheless, I regret not playing cards. I'm going to find a way to go back again soon.

I think that was my take. It takes place to Caesar's Palace CinemaCon. Just don't lose the essential qualities that make you you, you know? Well, I had to drive.

I still drove. I still did the psycho thing. I left late last night and drove all the way through the night, which was good. Anyway, the reason to go is not to schmooze, it's not to play cards even.

It's to see movies and trailers. That's really what it is. It's for 80-year-old movie theater owners and 40-year-old dorks like me who love trailers and are like, is this movie coming out in three months? I can't fucking wait.

It's going to be on YouTube in $12. And in some cases, they are in some cases. No, I know. You have a lot of stuff here.

It's presented a lot. I also left early. Today, Paramount and Disney were presenting. Apparently, they're showing 20 minutes of Deadpool vs.

Wolverine. I'm not seeing it. I came back to be with you guys. I know that you really wanted to go into that with just like an absolutely like Oh, yeah.

It's like Dune Asayo. Don't tell me anything about it. I want to experience it as a cinematic feature. It's very dorky and I'm okay with its dorkiness.

What do you wear to CinemaCon? What's your outfit? Same thing I wear every day. Button-down, white shirt, green pants.

I'm fitted head to toe in Florida. I have a question. Would you consider CinemaCon to be a kind of State of the Union for the movie-going experience and business? And if so, is the State of the Union strong?

I mean, it is that, but heavily propagandized. Of course. Just like our State of the Union is the president. Right, guys?

Well, we'll see about that. Scarlet and Civil War in cinemas. I think it's a good question. I mean, it is really more of a pep rally than it is an honest look at what's going on.

When you go to the schmooze sessions afterwards, everyone's really honest. I mean, everyone's really afraid. There's a lot of concern in the business. Obviously, post-pandemic, but even pre-pandemic, there was just a significant downturn.

And a lot has changed in even being there. I was texting Amanda nonstop while I was there because I had so many ideas for shows that we could do, thinking about the way that all these people are thinking about what movie-going is. But everybody's really, really nervous between the stripes and the much smaller slate this year, which frankly trickles down even to us. It makes it harder for us to do the show, so there's just not as many movies.

Hour three, baby. I mean, it'll be fun when we talk about the weather and food and maybe more of our national politics on this podcast. But we start doing that. And some people are more excited than others.

If you work at Universal or Warner Brothers, things are not that bad. Warner Brothers is having a great year. Universal had an amazing 2023. If you work at Lionsgate, it's probably pretty scary.

If you work at Paramount, it's even scarier maybe because you're about to be sold. Not when my guy Dave comes through and pays a premium, you're all in on Skydive. He merges Ethan Hunt and Pete Mitchell together in Top Gun and Impossible. Rank your top ten favorite Skydive movies in non-Ton Cruise division.

What are they? It's hard to choose. It's like choosing your favorite child. So anyway, you go to these things, each studio has a presentation.

So in most cases, really famous people will come out and talk about the movies that they made for the studio and they'll try to appeal to a little bit of the press but mostly just these exhibitors to get them excited about the project because what they want is they want the most screens, they want the longest run time for the movies to run in theaters and they want to feel loved. They want their asses kissed and it's understandable. It's a very weird, sacred, mafia-like agreement between studios and exhibitors and it's still going for now. You want to hear about any of the movies?

Yeah. What is the movie that you were most like, oh, cool, based on people tweeting about it? I want to know two things. I want to know based on people tweeting.

I want to know if Furiosa is him. Yeah, so let's start by. You've not seen the film Furiosa that you just saw. It's an extended eight-minute teaser.

And who was there in Las Vegas to present Furiosa? The Chris George Miller who said that he locked the movie just days prior. Chris Hemsworth and Amy Teller-Joy were the stars of the movie. I've been keeping my faith on this based on the concern about the trailer and I just thought it was amazing.

I knew it was going to be great but there was the same concern around Fury Road. It's clearly going to be a different kind of movie. Fury Road takes place over three days. Apparently this movie takes place basically over 20 years.

I think the reason Saga is in the title is because it is a long-spanning kind of epic film, not just a road movie. There's a lot of road movie stuff. I don't really want to spoil anything else for anybody but I think everybody in the room was like, phew, this is going to be good. So that was exciting.

Mickey 17, why January? What's going on? I don't know. So they showed the trailer for this Bong Joon-ho film which we've been hearing about for basically immediately after he won Best Picture and we hadn't really seen anything but one image of Robert Pattinson for the longest time.

The date shifted a couple of times and moved into this dead zone like a true Dumpy Road date which is very strange. I saw the trailer. I will say the movie looked good. It's definitely more Okja than Snowpiercer or Parasite and there's like a goofiness to the high level sci-fi.

I wonder if you won't like this. I don't know, man. I like Okja. So, you know, there's a zaniness to Okja that felt very evident in this movie.

Robert Pattinson is doing a voice. He's made a real choice in the voice he's doing. Robert Pattinson was there. Congratulations to him.

He's a new dad. He also probably went to bed before midnight. I guess he probably just jumped on the jet and immediately left Simiton. To get him back on his Batman workout, Glenn.

He looked svelte when I saw him. Maybe Batman like Bobby was cutting. Could be. I mean, he was cutting for the first Batman film.

No, he had the bulk for that. He was more built in the Batman than he was in like Twilight. But he's got to be the skinniest Batman of all time. Also, I think I should be the suit.

Don't you think? Skinniest ever suit for sure. Skinniest Batman ever. Mickey 17, I don't know why I put it on that date.

Most of the people I talked to after they showed the movie were like, why not just put this on November 17th? I just feel like it'll do better business. People want the beekeeper in January. They don't want a Bond movie.

So, it was a bit of a head-scratcher. But the movie itself, it's like Steven Yeun's in it, Mark Ruffalo's in it. It's a futuristic sci-fi romp from Bon Joon. Is it going to be a festival debut and then slow rollout?

Maybe they didn't talk about anything like that. That's a good question. Which is a hard not for awards. It doesn't look like it.

It really doesn't look like it. I saw it when people were talking about Robert Eggers' Nosferatu. The vibe from Focus Features or the announcements around it were way more like Dracula back in Lovin' It than it was from the great art house auteur Robert Eggers. I think they want to make it really commercial.

They tried that with Northman too. Okay, so the stories that I've heard about this is that Northman did okay at the box office and then was the biggest PVOD movie of the year that came out. in part because it was still kind of a COVID time and the reason that Eggers is making another movie for Focus Features is they're like he's a commercial director. He's a genre director who knows how to get asses in seats or asses on PVOD screens.

The movie looks very big in scale but it's definitely a Robert Eggers movie. It's like fast zooms and creeping dread and ornate costumes and set design. The trailer did not show Nosferatu. You don't see Bill Starr as Nosferatu but they literally seven or eight characters say he's coming.

He's coming and it's cut very aggressively and excitingly. It was probably the best looking thing I saw. I'm obviously in the bag for Robert Eggers so maybe not to be totally trusted but I felt great. There's a movie I can't tell if it was part of CinemaCon or if it was just the trailer came out parallel to CinemaCon but it is the only thing I care about in life anymore and that's Maxine.

Oh yeah. So A24 was not at CinemaCon. I don't think they've ever gone to CinemaCon. Neon was not there.

Notably Sony also didn't present this year. A lot of the studios have smaller slates so they have fewer things to show. I think there's something like a little concern when your pick ticket items are crazy. Maybe if Sony had Spider-Man into the universe.

But A24 I don't think is ever gone. Maxine looks sick though. That looks great. Pretty excited.

My girl Mia, Ty Westback, the trilogy. Should we all revisit the trilogy of Ty West and I got movies? Should we do a live rewatch of all three of Pearl? Yeah, that sounds great.

Quite a loaded cast in Maxine as well. Monaghan's back. Oh man. As a cop?

Not since Gone Baby Gone as Michelle Monaghan been a cool cop. I love that. She's actually a private investigator in that. Oh sorry.

Well, close enough. The noisiest movie was probably Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. No, it wasn't. At CinemaCon.

At CinemaCon because the whole cast was there. Yeah, sure. This was like peak, I think it was like 445. Like I'm on like a Tuesday.

I'm on the playground. I'm just like trying to get through and this was like peak CinemaCon filled as you just texted me and Chris. Everyone thinks Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is going to be massive. Does that track for you guys?

I was like, I have a fucking no shot. You're both movie podcasters. I think we both shared telepathically the sense of like I haven't really given Beetlejuice any thought in 20 years. Yeah, and you're just like deep inside the propaganda brain and you're just like and also they seem surprised by how good it actually turned out.

That's great. Jenna Ortega, I get it. I think what I'm responding to is other people that don't work at Warner Brothers being like fuck, this movie is going to take over for a month. And also journalists I think just reacting to it because it looks like there's no CGI.

It looks like it's the same way they made the original movie. It was just all practical effects. They showed a short feature out of the movie. It wasn't a trailer.

And it looks cool. I mean, it looked like an old school Tim Burton movie. I mean, he hasn't made a good movie in my opinion in 30 years. But the movies he made between 1984 and 1995 I fucking loved.

Like, reformed it for me. So whether or not this is good, I don't know. But everyone's back. I'm going to write Have you been practicing your Duolingo French?

So you can understand that. No, I just realized I got charged $80 for Duolingo the other day because I was like a renewing subscription because I was even learning German. I was trying to build up my French last year. And I got to France and they were like we don't have to speak French.

And so I was like this was a complete waste of time. Well, you knew that. I didn't. That has changed so much in the last 10 years.

I feel like when I first went to France in 2009 and everybody was like you stupid American get away from me and not communicating with me. And now I feel like you go there and they're like welcome to France. I'm Steve. Why don't you tell me what wine you like?

You speak in a foreign language on the podcast you can just expense that, man. So every once in a while just toss out a phrase. 80 bucks that's back in your pocket. Oh yeah, no.

You started. I'm a guy who flew in Japan at Japanese. Did you see Joker? Yeah.

We talked together. I went together in a hard way. No, it was a dog. We were sitting there and we were like this is a dark end for what might happen to us.

I know Amanda didn't like it. Did you like it? I liked the ending which is a weird thing to say. Yeah, yeah.

You related to that part. I liked it. I think Todd Phillips is actually a really good filmmaker. I think this is a little bit of a waste of time but it's still fine.

I think the money was just too big for them. I think he talked about it. He was there and he talked to Michael and Pam the studio chief of Warner Brothers who hosted their presentation and so they were interviewing the filmmakers and the actors and he in a very polite way was basically like me and Joaquin couldn't say no to making another $500 million and I suspect it'll do very well in this movie. He kind of elided whether or not it was a musical.

He said music was essential to it but the trailer doesn't show us any singing from a movie. It was like a huge musical sequence at least. Yes. I thought it looked fine.

I really liked the first one and I got what he was doing. I didn't think it was problematic or annoying or weird. I thought it was a fun break from what comic book movies had been up to that point. The second one I don't really have a strong feeling about either way.

We'll cover it. Maybe it'll be good. I tend to think that Todd Phillips is a little underrated as a filmmaker but I do also wish he would just make another comedy or anything. Yeah.

I don't know if I need another War Dogs. I'm not a big War Dogs guy. Actually War Dogs has had a little bit of like I know I'm not in that. That's a zillennial thing.

That's a Bobby. Bobby like War Dogs? Not at all. I've never seen it.

Oh, Bobby Rising. Right, so Costner was there. I mean, I can't wait. I actually can wait for the film by the summer of Costner and just watching this all happen and watching this all happen in tandem with Megalopolis and Coppola and just everybody's last fans.

That was really the talk of Vegas. everything that the people who were at the Megalopolis screenings, you know, all the studio chiefs were there, a lot of studio people were there, and then all the press around it, where it was, like, that first piece by Mike Fleming, which we talked about earlier this week on the show, which was, like, a bold and audacious film, many people are talking, Eisenstein, yeah, and then five days later, King Master's comes in and is just, like, studio chiefs are like, fuck this, I'm out of here, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, and people who like movies, I'm sure, will think it's an interesting film, but everybody who worked at the studio that talked to Megalopolis was like, nope, no way, like, never gonna happen, they're gonna have to figure out something weird, I thought. Right, we gotta put our money on Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, you know? Yeah, yeah, um, whether or not they have any wisdom with those things is always available.

He used to set up FrancisWordCopola.com and charge, like, five bucks for people to, like, stream it on his site. If he crowdfunded the release of the film, it probably would work, because there's just a million dollars. No, no, I think he must have gone into this, no, he wasn't gonna make back a massive profit. I don't know whether he did, but that's okay.

The movie itself, as much as I heard, you know, like, that's, I, even by his standards, though, and I wonder if your husband, Zach, like, knows more about this, having spent some time with him talking about it, but the movie does sound crazy, not just in a, like, rather than being on screen. Do you wish that that's what it was like making this show? If there's a pre-recorded version of me that you could respond to however you chose, and I wouldn't react negatively? That would be fun for you.

Horizon! Yeah. I mean, it looks like a streaming TV series to me. Like, it's a digitally shot Western.

Like, what? Maybe it is shot on film, but it looks digital, and every set looks like it was built the day before, and sure, there's moments where Kevin Costner is, like, you know, quick-drawing a pistol and shooting a guy, and I'm like, fucking A, that's cool. I guess only part one. I thought Costner, in his remarks to the exhibitors, really, like, kind of red-stated, blue-stated it.

He was like, the thing about America is it's amazing because people went west and they took things. Did they take things from people who were there for thousands of years? They did. Is that good?

I think the Costner experience, I really could give or take another like, eight-hour Western from him in two parts, but like, him just talking in public for the next three to five months. He's gonna have to, I think, to convince people to see this movie. It's a really, it's only if I would go back to Yellowstone to end the story properly. He's saying that?

Yeah. I think it'll be really fun for us to talk about his movies, and fun to re-watch some Westerns, and think about what he's contributed to movies. I just think this is a very strange gamble by him. Maybe I'll be wrong.

Maybe it'll be good. The one thing that I saw that was a surprise, which I didn't know anything about, was that Aziz Ansari has a movie coming out called Good Fortune? It got dropped by one studio and picked up by another. Is it the same movie, though?

Because this feels like a new movie. Is it the one that he was shooting with Bill Murray, or is it a different movie? Oh, you're right. That was the Kiki Palmer movie, right?

It must be the same one. I can't remember. I don't know if this is the same one, but Lionsgate has it now, and it's Aziz and Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen, and Seth Rogen plays a very wealthy guy, and Aziz plays a very down-on-his-locked guy who's living in his car. Keanu Reeves plays the angel Gabriel.

It's very Heaven Can Wait. Very, like, comedy with a kind of heavenly, supernatural element, very light touch, though, very grounded. Does it have a master of non-visual sensibility? It looked good, yeah.

It looked good. I mean, it's possible it didn't work. Aziz was there, he was, like, on fire. He was so funny, and it was the first time that, like, an actually good live entertainer spoke to the audience over four days, and he just took over the Lionsgate presentation, and was brilliant.

You know, sitting through, like, soda fountain presentations. Oh, my God. So, it could be really boring there, but he was great. He kicked ass.

Maybe the movie won't work, but that was the one thing where I was like, oh, no, that this was actually going to come out this year. So, that was interesting. Twister's looks like a rock. Like, there's not really much to say.

So, here's clearly what happened with Ballerina. They basically restarted it. So, I think they made the movie, Len Wiseman directed it, John Wick 4 went bananas, and they were like, we can't fuck this up. So, I think, because Chad Stahelski, the director of the John Wick movies, got this new job at Lionsgate overseeing all the WIC stuff, he basically was like, we're doing five new action sequences for this movie, so it's now not coming out until 2025.

But I still look good. And also, Keanu was in the trailer. So, he's like, it takes place between John Wick 3 and John Wick 4. But his arm is kicking people in the throat, you know?

Is she doing ballet? Oh, yeah. There's lots of ballet in the trailer. I'm excited.

It takes place between WIC 3 and WIC. What did you learn about the film Wicked, part 1? I just don't get it. I don't either, but it's funny to make you talk about it.

I mean, they showed a really, really long clip, like an extended feature clip from it. It's the adaptation of the very famous musical that none of us have seen. Are you any closer to understanding the premise of Wicked? I think that we should never read the Wikipedia page and just...

Do we know Wicked or the Jurassic? Well, I was thinking about this this morning. I mean, it's very Harry Potter. It's very like, there's like a kind of wizarding school.

It's about this dispersioning relationship between Belinda and, what is Cynthia Eribo's The Green Evil Witch? I don't even remember her name. Ethelma? Yeah, that sounds right.

And how it all comes together. Wizard of Oz is one of those things to me where it's like anything that is ancillary to the original movie or a spin-off, I think stinks. I think the Sam Raimi movie stinks. I don't really care for the dark 80s Disney movie that there was a bulk was in.

Anything animated I'm not interested in. The original movie is a critical piece of culture to me in my life. I don't really want anything else about it. I think John Chu's a good director.

I didn't think the movie looked very good. But people, they did a whole night show and presentation. People are nuts about this. Everyone who has any familiarity with Wicked, the musical, or any affinity for it is just like, wow, this is the best thing that's ever going to happen.

I find it deeply puzzling. It was discussed in the same vein as Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, where it was just like being deep in the Moana hive now. I can't believe you skipped Moana presentation. Moana 2 today.

You didn't know spoilers, right? Moana rocks. It is really good. But the new one doesn't have Lin-Manuel Miranda songs, right?

Is that true? Oh, that's true. The songs in Moana are excellent. I know I sound like a fucking weirdo.

What's Lin-Manuel Miranda doing? If not Moana 2? You tell me. I don't know.

I'm not sure. There's something weird about this too because they're making a live-action Moana, which got pushed all the way to 2026, but it's being directed by Tom Cale, who directed a live-action Moana starring The Rock. What? That was singing Volcanoes?

I don't know. Why is that live-action? How is that possible? I don't know, but that was supposed to come out I think this fall.

What? And then they moved it because the story is that they were making a Moana TV series and they were like, oh, this TV series is too good. We have to make it a movie. So we're going to take this Disney Plus thing and put it in a movie.

So now we have to push the live-action version of the movie we're making to two years from now. Also, the Disney live-action movies aren't really working anymore too. So, you know, like Mufasa's coming out and the Moana movie. The Rock is not really working?

Why? Because he went to WrestleMania and didn't endorse Biden? Yeah. Well, before that movie, right?

He was great at WrestleMania. Remember he got fire from, you know, and then he got Henry Cavill Fire? Oh, from Fast and Furious? Yeah, no, from the DC Universe.

What were they doing? Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, James Gunn was also with us. Oh, great.

Where is it? He did a video? Did he give you an update on what the tone of the new Superman movie will be? He didn't.

I'll tell you, this is important. I thought of Chris during this. Hi. I'll tell you.

So, Damon Cornswett and Rachel Brosnan are Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the film, and Damon Cornswett was wearing an Eagle sweatshirt during his movie. All right, that's cool. That's a person. If Superman wears an Eagle sweatshirt, I'll see it 500 times.

I literally see it 500 times every day. I will go to Superman. They didn't show anything. That's the thing, too.

A lot of the presentations are like, coming to you July 2025. I'm like, what the fuck? That's like 14 months from now. Well, I did mention to you guys that I left early, so I missed the Paramount and Disney presentations, and while we were recording, it was just announced that Damien Chazelle, my guy, my homie, little Damien, has a chip on his shoulder, Chris.

Many people are saying it might be because of the Babylon Hive rewatch that Damien has a new movie. He has a new movie. Paramount did not say goodbye to him after the struggles of Babylon, but we held strong. Paramount held strong.

And his new movie, which is a 2025 film, all we know about it is that it's going to be set in prison. What's the other movie that he's producing that David Ayer or somebody's directing? Not sure. David Ayer.

That is really, that is my personal duality in many ways. You excited for Chazelle's chocolate? Yeah. If it's a fucking musical, I'm not happy, but like, yeah, I'm up for your...

Sounds pretty great. I'm interested. I loved, loved, loved the trailer for Trap, the new M.I.S. John Blunt movie.

M.I.S. John Blunt movie's Warner Brothers. Can I tell you the premise for it? I think this is...

I don't know if the trailer gave away too much, but it's a great idea for... I'm going to watch the trailer. I'm going to watch the trailer. You really don't want to hear it?

Well, it's a podcast, so I have to, but go ahead. Everybody else, if you don't want... If you're worried that they told you too much, skip ahead. This movie's in your way.

I'm going to see it. It's Josh Hartnett and a 10-year-old girl. I'm so excited. I mean, I love nice movies, but it's Josh Hartnett and a 10-year-old girl and it's a beautiful father-daughter moment.

We're halfway through the concert and Josh Hartnett's character stands up and he's like, I really have to go to the bathroom. Are you going to be okay by yourself? And she's like, yeah, so you think it's going to be that movie. And it really sets you up for what terrible thing is going to happen to this little girl.

So we follow Josh Hartnett's character out. He goes to the bathroom and he comes back and he's looking around in the terrarium outside the concert and he's seeing more cop cars pull up. He's seeing what looks like additional security and maybe even federal agents. And he turns to one of the merchandisers and he's like, hey man, what's going on here?

And the merchandiser leans over and he's like, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but you know the butcher? That serial killer who's chopping people up? The fed's got a tip that he's going to be here tonight and this whole concert is a trap to make sure he doesn't get out alive. And so you're like, okay, so this is just a thriller about how there's a killer at a concert.

It's all in a two-minute trailer. It's all in a two-minute trailer. And then we see a flash in Josh Hartnett's mind of him in the bathroom stall and he's holding his phone and he's pulled up a security app and it's live footage of someone that presumably he has tied up in his basement at home and he's the killer. So he is the killer who has a 10-year-old daughter at this concert and he is being trapped inside of the show.

And then hard cut after we realize that it's him who's the killer. Wow, they told us way too much. But maybe they didn't. Maybe that's only the first 30 minutes.

I don't know. But I was like, hold on, this is a great idea for a movie. Obviously, he's known for having great ideas for movies and then not always delivering. But I was really drawn in.

And also, we whined about what movies we don't get anymore. No, this sounds great. This is a straight-up original career. This is a cool idea.

I wish I didn't know. I felt similarly. I'll say the same thing about Speak No Evil, which they remade Speak No Evil, that crazy horror movie that Chris and I love. It would never happen to me because I don't make vacation friends.

Right, exactly. You may recall it's way too Sundance that movie played. It's on Shutter right now. It's been remade with James McAvoy and your boy, Scoot McNary and Mackenzie Davis.

About two couples who meet on a vacation, and one of them invites the other to come visit them in their beautiful, lavish home overseas. And then crazy shit starts happening. I don't mind that they remade it. I think sometimes in English language, it can be good.

I thought the trailer gave away every single thing about the movie. And that was a huge mistake. Unless there's some other twist that we don't know about. If they change the ending, then maybe it's fine.

But they gave away a ton in this trailer, which I think is already out, right? Yes, I will not be watching it. Even though they gave it away, even though I've already seen it. Important movie for you, Conclave.

I'm into papal elections. It's literally a movie about papal elections. It's the only one person on this call who's had a papal conclave blog. Was it a blog spot or a Tumblr?

Blog spot, okay. What was it called? White Smoke, I think. I thought it was Conclave So Real.

I think it was Conclave So Real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it a horror movie? It's a thriller.

It's like a pure thriller. Everything takes place inside the walls of Conclave. And it's Edward Berger who made it up by the Western Front. It looked beautiful.

It looked kind of lavish. It was very ornately costumed and designed. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and an international cast. Just like an adult, kind of like a prestigi thriller.

They looked really good. Did you see what Edward Berger's next movie is? No, what is it? It's a movie with Colin Farrell about a gambler who has to lay low in Macau.

Sean Fennessey's right, yeah. Okay, one more really big one is Michael, which is the Michael Jackson movie from Lionsgate. So Graham King is the producer of this movie. He produced Bohemian Rhapsody and Argo.

And he came out and talked about it for like 10 minutes and then they showed an extended preview of the movie. It's directed by Anson Foucault and by John Logan, who wrote Gladiator and The Aviator and a bunch of other stuff. It stars Michael's nephew Jafar as Michael, Coleman Domingo as his dad, Joe Jackson, Nia Long as his mom, Miles Tellers in it, although he wasn't in the preview that I saw. He's the lawyer.

He's the lawyer. And I hate movies like this. And it's compounded by the just absolute, like, impossible to discuss controversies of Michael Jackson. And I got the sense that everybody there was like, thank God, this movie's going to make a billion dollars.

Genuinely. Which made me just ill. People almost stood up and applauded at the end of the preview. When is it coming out?

April 25th. Okay, so I need to resign by, like, March 31st, 2025. I thought it was going to be before the next Daniels movie, but it's actually going to be before this. Yeah, so, brace yourself, I would say.

I was thinking just independent of Michael Jackson's biography, how it's so funny because, like, every time, like, one of these jukeboxes, I know it's not jukebox musical or bio, it's bio. It's so clearly leaning on, I think it's 25 Michael Jackson's up here in the film. Every time one of these things comes out, I'm just like, wow, what a fucking stupid idea. And now it's like, when this Jeremy Allen White, Bruce Springsteen movie comes out, I feel like, brother, it's all into my soul!

Why are you, like, crying? It's not just that it's Jeremy Allen White, it's Bruce Springsteen, it's the difficulty of making Nebraska. It's like, it's the difficulty of making Nebraska. In the movie theater, I think I'm just going to stand and scream saluting at Jeremy Allen White.

I was just like, that's a great t-shirt, man. Gut check, is he a good Bruce? I actually think yes. You think he is?

I mean, yeah, I think it. It's also just like, Scott Cooper making a movie about the making of Nebraska with Jeremy Allen White is like, something that happens in the last eight seconds of a dream of mine. And then I wake up, I'm like, wait, I have an amazing idea. You know what I mean?

The problem I'm going to think about is like, you guys have stuff like Jeremy Allen White will be Bruce Springsteen, so we can't talk about it immediately. But it's like, it is the funny thing where it's just like, everyone of these, someone out there was like, so fired up for Queen, obviously, they made $800 million. I'm just like, man, just wake me when the boss is here. I mean, the Michael Jackson movie is going to be a massive hit.

The Bruce movie feels a little more artistic, which is, I think I will help power its podcast. That's pretty much it. Okay. I had a nice time.

I forgot about being around cigarette smoke. I hadn't. I was offered cigarettes not once, twice, three times, but four times. Right, because you definitely give off a casual smoker.

No, I don't give that off. Why? Because I'm so physically decrepit? And a hypochondriac.

No, I just don't think, you seem like you are a very conscientious and clean liver at this point, and so I don't think everybody would want an American spirit. Well, the one night that I was there was the first night that I had more than one alcoholic beverage in a row. That was a mistake. I had four or five beverages.

What's worse, someone offering you a cigarette or someone offering you a dairy? Oh, dairy. Dairy is just disgusting. Just like a glass of milk.

No, whole milk is bad now. I never left. Some of us knew. Some of us knew.

Some of us knew. Big dairy took down big nuts and big stars. We have to have a long conversation about civil war. We can't start here.

We have to do it. I'm like, what if I forget everything that happens? Can you pick? Okay, so the other thing that happens in the world of movies is that the Cannes Film Festival lineup has announced today.

We're not going to do an entire analysis of the lineup. It's an unusually non-American lineup, I would say, in part because there just haven't been as many American films that have gone into production because of the strikes. There's a few significant ones. We've talked about Megalopolis, that's there.

The New Paul Trader movie. Oh, Canada is there. Can I try to take out here? I'm not sure I believe it.

I just want to workshop it. I just want to throw it against the wall and see if it's dicks. Hey, Yorgos, man, just maybe let somebody else eat for a minute. Oh, you're mad about this?

Question, have you seen more? I didn't watch the new so Kinds of Kindness is the new Yorgos movie which is coming out in June I'm premiering at Cannes I only saw the teaser I didn't watch the new trailer but in the teaser I was like Yorgos is back this is the Yorgos I've come to know and love where people just do absolutely awful things to each other for two hours not that I didn't like more things which I did but I'm more of a Dugtooth guy I love Dugtooth anthologies though I know I don't like those but really good stars I like everyone and you know Lord knows Joe Allen is going to need some rehabilitation this summer I'm just wishing him well this poor guy is not going to be able to make a single promotion there's many well-known international filmmakers Giacanque, Jacques Odiard Yorgos, Kareem Manous a lot of Pablo Santino very well-known filmmakers you always see them at festivals like this I think it's important to talk about because Cannes birthed three Best Picture nominees last year The Anatomy of a Fall Zone of Interest and Killers of the Flower Moon I imagine it's going to have a few more here this year in part because of the way the production went for movies is there anything when you guys look at this that you're like earmarked that or I'm interested that is outside of the Furiosa, Horizon, stuff we already know about on this list here I mean there's the Andrew Arnold there's a new Sean Baker movie there is the Paul Strater with Jacob Lorre which is suddenly gets my interest in a Paul Strater it should be a good episode for us Richard Gere and Jacob Lorre oh yeah that's right I mean it's going to be really twisted but that's okay Yorgos is in competition Megalopolis is in competition which will be interesting I guess I don't know how I feel about The Apprentice and it might segue into our next segment pretty well so The Apprentice is a movie that I actually mentioned to you and Joanna when we were talking about 25 Oscars it's Ali Abassi's new film structure of Holy Spider and a few others it is a film about Donald Trump set in the 1980s and Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump and who plays Royce Jeremy Strong well I love Jeremy Strong I really appreciate his secondary in the Broadway article that was great he's in character for Ibsen he is I think that was why he wrote that way what do you think about this idea anything can be a good movie I'm not against something just because it's about Trump but I think he may be a character who is beyond cinematic pitching at this point what do you think his tweet review of the film will be Trump's? repeal FISA? okay I want to see the Jacques Odiard me too I think the Sean Baker movie is very anticipated I would say and Cronenberg has a new movie that's always exciting for me The Shrouds let's take a quick break and when we come back we'll talk about Civil War okay we're back Civil War written and directed by Alex Carlin starring Amanda's best friend Kirsten Dunst starring Wagner Mora Kaylee Spaney Stephen McKinley Henderson Jesse Plemons Nick Offerman it's a movie about America falling into Civil War and it's sort of about that it's not about the falling it has fallen yes just like London just like Olympus America has fallen and when Gerard Butler shows up at the end that's really weird great scene incredible cameo we're going to have a brief general conversation about this movie before spoiling it because I think it's important to talk through all of the creative and formal decisions made around it Amanda I'll start with you what did you think of the movie Civil War no no no you guys go first you talked together no we didn't oh you didn't this is three people all separately having this experience and I don't know really I mean I don't know anything about what you yeah I went last so I went on the night when 824 was doing like advanced screenings that were open to the populace as well so early access it was like a very like a packed very excited screening I saw Friends Bars I saw Alice Natalie over there our awesome babysitter Izzy went to a separate screening like a separate location I met some big picture listeners there so people were out it was very exciting and I saw it in IMAX and I thought I mean it was really exciting to see with a lot of people because it is very energetic visceral exciting I thought the filmmaking was amazing I was frightened I was very locked into it so I thought it was a pretty amazing experience of a movie with basically no characters or ideas and that's pretty interesting and I've thought a lot about it and I've tried to figure out some of the ideas I don't know whether I have I have some ideas about the lack of ideas I guess it's been interesting to watch people talk about it this is going to be the most controversial movie of the year this is going to be the most provocative movie of the year I've been trying to locate what's provocative about it besides its absence of provocation and I guess it was interesting to see it through in a room full of people who were so excited for it and they were excited to be provoked in the way that they responded to it was noticeable but kind of more like a horror movie than a prestige thinky drama which is also revealing and the more I think about an experience and a film about immediacy I think that part of it is really effective and it's really effective I just think it also might be kind of empty I loved it I think it's my favorite film of the year exactly the way Amanda was saying it's like I was completely locked in so I'm giving a ton of credence to just my visceral reaction to the movie which was like similar to Oppenheimer forgot to breathe first stretches noticed that I was gripping my armrest it's also an incredible film because I came out of it had a conversation with somebody who was just like that was terrible it was like I think the divisiveness you're right it's going to be based somewhat on the philosophy or the ideas of the film or the lack of the ideas of the film or what the movie is or isn't staying but they're also just that come out of it and have some people be like that's for dudes who live in Brooklyn or whatever that's a hilarious and interesting reaction to the film that I've already encountered and it's been really fascinating but for me it was if you I guess is this movie are you able to disentangle it from a contemporary political moment and if you do is it just like filmmaking on an incredibly high level that you really love and is that enough right I was really thinking a lot about when I was I don't know how old I was when I first saw this but I saw Platoon before I saw Apocalypse Now I remember Platoon and I think I was pretty too young to see Platoon in any kind of contemporary way but once I finally saw it I was like Platoon is obviously a way better Vietnam movie so Platoon is explicitly about the class and race issues that went into who got drafted to go to the war it's about how these guys were abandoned and the horrors that they also visited upon the Vietnamese people and all this stuff everything is explicit in the text of Platoon even though it has some obviously incredible storytelling and then as I got older I was like Apocalypse Now is actually a Vietnam movie because Apocalypse Now is an almost spiritual experience of this thing I have no way of comparing Civil War to Apocalypse now but I am very actually I am but it has happened before and Garland has talked a lot about Apocalypse Now I almost preferred it I almost preferred there being this sort of vague setup where it's like we're not really going to be explicit about why the political chess board or the military chess board has been aligned the way it has we're keeping the POV to these limited characters who are really only interested in one thing and we'll talk a lot about what they're interested in and I just thought it was kind of the zenith of a certain kind of filmmaking that's been building up over the last 15 years which for lack of a better term is A24 Corp you know I don't know if you can do it better than that yeah I think probably worth putting that in context too as we talk about the movie which is that this is a $50 million budgeted movie it's the biggest movie Garland's made it's the biggest movie A24's made we talked a bit about how A24's trying to scale up now and make bigger movies this is also an IMAX movie I saw it in IMAX with an incredible sound system I would encourage people to try to see it that way because of the immersiveness that Amanda was talking about at a minimum from a formal technical perspective it's the best movie that Alex Garland's made it is so loud and so enveloping that you kind of have to tip your cap it's interesting that he's been like I'm kind of actually set back a little bit from filmmaking for a little while because he clearly is like in control of the medium in an interesting way I have seen some people say that his scripts are getting less sophisticated or less interesting as time goes by but his filmmaking is getting better and better and better I think it's very difficult to draw distinction and even separation from our expectations of our own personal politics how that is communicated in art and then what an artist is actually trying to say and where that middle ground is in a movie like this which he started writing in 2018 but that when you see the title and you see Nick Offerman as a corrupt fascist president you can't help but flash on I didn't know that he was going to do that when I sat down to watch it I didn't know that he was going to have this kind of political remove and I think if you're uncharitable to it you can be like this is really both sides being what could happen in a civil war in some ways by using the journalist as the POV I like it for the same reasons that you're talking about though Chris which is that I don't really I don't need my politics like gratified in a movie like this and I feel like some of the anxiety that I sense is people being like why don't I have this communicated to me clearly like how terrible Nick Offerman is and why the right needs to know that they can't act this way otherwise we will fall into a civil war I'm sure there will be an MSNBC mom reading of that as well but I'm not offended by his politics at all because he has no politics but you were saying it's hard to separate your personal politics from what a filmmaker is trying to say what is he trying to say I genuinely don't know like tell me I watch it I don't know it's like is it about like moral ambivalence in photojournalism like what are we doing like seriously I think it's too trapped I think one it's literally about what is the role of a journalist and what is the psychology of a journalist like that's something that's clearly very interesting his father was a newspaper curtis he grew up around journalists his whole life he's clearly interested in I thought one of the most interesting dynamics of the movie which I thought was rendered well and I thought that they were characters because I know a lot of journalists and a lot of journalists are like very matter of fact very kind of burnt out some of them are like thrill seekers and some of them are these real pragmatists like I've drank 3,000 cups of coffee in my life and them approaching their work in a fairly standard way in the midst of the craziest thing that's happened in the country in 300 years is a storytelling choice that made sense to me and made me better understand his interest in what it means to get the story or get the photo and what you're willing to sacrifice in order to get that is a dynamic idea unto itself the other thing and this is very obvious and maybe not insightful and if you don't think it's worthwhile I get it but just that we are in a more extremist mode in our country than we have been in the last 80 years 100 years it depends on how you feel about it but he clearly is completely distraught by the level of separation like the inability for people to communicate with each other anymore and he's like this is at the doorstep if we keep going in this direction and he's like I'm not trying to say that it's this person or this senator or this mode of political thought it's just that no one is really talking to each other anymore unless they feel the person they're talking to fully agrees with them and if we continue down this path this is what happens you think that's in the text definitely look at the conversation with the Jesse Plemans character like that sequence is an evocation of how quickly it can tip over into a genocidal thought that it's rendered in the movie because one of the things that's been fascinating and I can't wait to listen to him on this show is that I feel like I've done myself a little bit of a disservice reading interviews with Alex Garland about this movie because it's taking away from what I kind of read into the movie so there's a reading of this film that's really about the importance of journalism and the heroism of journalists and then there's a much more interesting reading of the film that I kind of had when I walked out of it which was that this movie is quite critical of journalists and also they're the moths to flame attraction that they have to conflict and whether maybe they exacerbate their conflict the conflict whether or not they prize their in the case of photojournalist the aesthetic beauty of capturing something tragic happening and the value of objectivity and even to some extent the value of being a witness and to the extent that this movie had ideas I thought it was extrapolating not just photojournalism but any sort of a record of being a filmmaker an image maker in any way which can I suppose be tied back to the filmmaker and to some extent about the limits of that or as I said the moral ambivalence of it I don't know where it lands there was a reason why I kind of started thinking of this I think this is actually this nuance is one of my favorite things about all of his movies it's actually very important to try to innovate in the world but also ego gets in the way of new ideas and then leads to toxicity, danger, violence, misogyny in each of his movies there is a kind of like wouldn't it be interesting if and as soon as you do it and the ego of the journalist the sort of narcissism that comes with getting the story but also the bravery and the craft of photojournalism is something he has a lot of admiration for they're operating in the same space it is a nuanced portrayal of someone in a circumstance like this I think particularly because she's the best actor in the movie and she's amazing in this movie and two I think he is most interested in her experience as a person like her character's experience as a person and even though he doesn't give her words to necessarily communicate that her face kind of tells you everything you need to know and also her fate in the film I think is pretty critical to this too so I like that it's like yeah journalists are brave and they're also huge assholes but the Wagner-Mora character's an asshole he never does any right I think he does very little note-taking he just runs around after this well I mean the mechanics of how these people are actually doing journalism how these photos are ever going to be seen it's another one of the things where it's like we're not fleshing out the reality and we're not doing rewatchable snippets ever but like okay yeah I've seen people point out the fact of why is it photojournalism why wouldn't you be shooting video like video is the thing and you know what's interesting is that both the Kirsten Dunn character and the Kaley Spaney character they have this conversation about how their parents are from middle America and they're sitting around pretending that this isn't happening and so that's opposed to be some sort of contrast I guess by these people who are they're admitting that it's happening but they're not totally getting involved and I guess the movie is you know questioning how one gets involved or doesn't get involved like I just I don't actually none of the arguments are baked enough like I don't actually know what that leads to besides like the actual text of well in photojournalism sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad and I think that's small stakes and I also like frankly don't agree with it and I think like 20 Days of Mary Paul is a recent and incredible example of exactly what these people are doing that is like actually profoundly important and communicates the anti-war sentiment in a real way and you know if you get people to see it which is maybe the problem is like actually does matter so I guess I don't agree with that argument but I'm also like is this what we dress up?

I mean I guess like does it have to matter is a question worth asking you know what I mean like you're asking for a kind of moral imperative for the A24 war movie like it's one thing for Alex Garland to insist upon something as important because he spent a lot of time and it's another thing to say is it enough for this to be an exciting movie that got you thinking because that's really what it is I think that's so unfair well because it's like I was re-watching then last night which I actually like until the end which I'm like I literally don't understand what this means i don't understand what your metaphor about all these men giving birth to each other is supposed to communicate to me i know that it's like an amazing image and like the mood the tone the idea i just like and it's the same thing where it's an endless unbreakable biological cycle of sure like but that like that does not communicate itself in the movie to me and i'm like okay so then all of these you know it's just again all these things in the same way that emerald panel both promising young woman and solburn like visually pretty impressive and memorable and playing with ideas and then not baking them and this is just not baked what's an example of a movie that is baked killers of the flower moon just off the top of my head okay where it's like the way that they're telling the story and what they're doing visually is in line with a larger idea about what's being done i really like this like as an experience but like that's the point okay so then we're just watching a war movie that's i was like very scared like during this movie was scared because it was because it was like visceral effect on you because it was loud and like the way that they the guns sound like the way guns would probably sound going off in that capacity or was there any part of it is like it actually isn't super hard if you especially if you ingest a lot of media yeah it's not super hard to superimpose the images that you're seeing in the movie until like reality well i think it's kind of hard because as soon as you start superimposing it on reality you're like okay so then you start asking the question why is yeah and how do they line and so are these people like are they the genetic people are they not people as soon as you are putting it on your world then you are trying to connect the things and the movie very purposefully like limits and sets it up in a way that you can't because i think it doesn't want you to so i think i was probably scared just because like it is very like viscerally upsetting you know and like many of the horror sequences or you know like the set pieces are startling and the cuts and the and the performances like it's it's a you know weird road trip through like very ghoulish parts of america and and i guess they those moments like the gas station is a great example of it's for ghoulish in this context but it's like it's one of those things where you roll up at you know a place where you maybe like you don't feel as welcome for whatever reason and things like rapidly disintegrate and i don't have to connect that to like okay or did those guys vote for so-and-so and rather things like that's just situationally scary like talking about like kind of is it baked slash does it convey what we need to convey is definitely the most interesting aspect of the takeaway um the the intention to me seems clear which is that it is an anti-war movie and it is also a movie about the difficulty of making an anti-war movie because war movies are really exciting right and the last time he was on the show for men i was like what's the last thing you've seen he was like come and see i went back and looked at come and see because i wanted to see a movie that is similar to something i'm working on that actually works in the way i want it to work because it's really hard because he's like apocalypse now opens with a door song it's fucking cool and you can't help but even though it's this psychotronic journey i would all due respect that this is way more i i agree so it's like but isn't so forget about his definition for your definitions is it a good anti-war movie no i also don't know it's operating i don't know i don't know i think i think i'm sort of on the side of like it's if you film it it's hard to make it yeah i agree unless unless you're doing actual photo you know video journalism you're doing 20 days marital like he's a different thing but can you do like a fictional like a scripted movie where you're trying to but you're creating the thrills and then well it's interesting you call that kills the thought who come and see is this too those are historical films that are based on real events or like at least situated in real times and this is not that this is inherently a kind of dystopian science fiction so can you actually communicate in a movie that is taking place in a genre that is like this should be a thrill ride and it has movie stars in it and it's exciting it's like the sound design is amazing in this movie right and there's like needle drops where when i'm watching the movie i'm like wow that just hit my pleasure center in an interesting way and him thinking about trying to subvert that by using different kinds of needle drops than you would have found in apocalypse now or another movie i i don't i guess i don't really have like a strong personal opinion on whether or not a work of art can't be anti-war and whether or not this one is i think he's obviously quite disturbed by violence um i think you only have to watch the jesse clement sequence to be like this is the worst i've felt in a movie this year you know like i really was scared for what was going to happen characters and that is like a dramatic skill i totally agree but can i tell you so and we gotta go into spoilers i guess spoilers spoiler warning if you fucking at me even once about spoilers um i've started i just mute people on threads yeah has threads started to lose its integrity no it's just like one or two that's but the numbers aren't such that i can't mute people like you know you can't just it's a clean slate um okay spoilers so jesse clemens kills it incredible the whole show me say thing was apparently improv oh great um according to like a kaylee spade interview because she's like him asking me she's from missouri and she's like that's real because i don't know why we say that um so that shit is so terrifying and then it is ultimately resolved or not resolved but the climactic thing is that steven mckinley henderson's character comes in the car and basically just like runs over and everyone in my screen started cheering at that moment because they were watching it like uh you know this is a horror movie or this is like some sort of payoff yeah he saved the day and that is fascinating did he do that on purpose basically because i think to me there's correlation there it's like uh the steven mckinley henderson character dies because i have to see his job while driving the car and you know it's very simple like there's a toll to trying to be heroic in the act of doing journalism you know like they're in the act of trying to get the story which is really what's happening they're getting ensnared in a conflict while trying to do their jobs and it costs lives you know it was exciting yeah it was fucking exciting right also that character was like don't do this this yeah he was like and they were and they basically mocked him and they were like you're too old and you're too slow you should just stand back and this was also the whole scenario was set up because of journalists like the journalists were not taking their job seriously and doing like this weird car switching things yes and you know so it was just like a bunch of like jokers sorry pun not intended um where would the joker fit where would walking he could have been around that ditch with jesse punman yeah he could have been in the ditch um so this steven mckinley henderson character is the only person who's like this is actually serious like don't don't do this yeah one of the things i like about the movie is watching the character who plays this young pop journal photojournalist who really looks up to you have the same name as lee miller incredible exposition um a rare moment of exposition yeah and the dialogue it's like very clear that they went back and be like you're going to need to give people something yeah yeah yeah um although doesn't even know who lee miller is is the other question but nevertheless um the relationship between these two women and this aspiring young photojournalist and kirsten dunn's character is completely hollowed out we see the character get not just braver and braver but like more reckless more reckless over time and dovetailing with an older person who's done a lot of this work who famously captured the antifa massacre um which is something that is alluded to we don't find out whether or not it's antifa doing the massacring or antifa being massacred it's a notable uh bit of religion there um and by the end of the movie she's got this like big grin on her face during the final sequence where there's a raid on the white house which is incredible filmmaking and i know we're not supposed to be fact-checking this in any way but it's like the three journalists are just like along for the ride on bin laden like come on so i really like that because it is that is an accurate representation of what happens when there's a coup in certain countries because usually rebel factions know that getting their message out in the media is really important and so they handpick people who they feel that they can operate that so that they can tell the story i thought that was actually a really smart idea they were just there they showed up but we see that sequence earlier in the film where uh sonoma mizuno's character and another journalist have a kind of yellow stuff right is that who that is but those characters along with the wagon more character and kirsten dunn's are kind of like they have the okay from the rebel forces we see earlier in the shootout sequence where they're working in tandem with the rebel forces right to tell the story and well they do explain that that's because that journalists are shot on site in washington dc by the president and that no one he hasn't given an interview in 14 months and that like no press are allowed so it is a little bit of like the only option they've chosen not to and so i bought that at least that they would be able to yeah you know follow along is it a little bit of an uh like a over-imagination of what that might be like it is but i think that also kind of begs the question of like how seriously are you supposed to take this movie like seriously are you supposed to take the details because while there's so much he's given interviews like people are like he's like i find it fascinating that people are uh so about you know the idea of texas and california uniting do you really think that could happen why is that it's like uh these guys mad about the pack 12 like i'm trying to think of all the reasons why they would get like together and it's like yeah there's some geographical issues that they share and stuff like that but like it is kind of like i guess if you're going to tease it you should maybe follow through with it but that being said i'm so glad jesse levin didn't turn to us and say well ever since texas and california got together over this issue like this has been the way it is and i'm you know do you think okay i completely agree with christ i do think that there is a material it's not just for this movie any movie the film does not have to give us all the answers i do feel like the film needs to at least know the answers for itself or else things aren't yeah and that's kind of what i'm pushing up against what's an example something you don't think they if the film doesn't know the answers of let's see because like time in california i think it's okay to say that's bullshit that alice harland really thinks that this would happen but i think he has an answer i think he's like he's like i have an answer you should ask yourself why you don't have an answer and i'm like all right i do think he's trying to let people that way i genuinely think that that is really more the provocation is it's so hard for you to imagine a world in which this sort of thing could happen and these groups could come together maybe he's an outsider maybe he doesn't really understand the character politics in america there's also a very crucial part of this movie to me is when kirsten dunst and kaylee spainer talking about their families and it turns out that they both have families one lives in colorado one lives in missouri basically you're acting like this isn't happening and that was actually the most one of the more interesting ideas presented in the film is that this could be happening concurrent with everyday life anyway i think that's a huge part of point of the movie yeah and like there are things happening right now the most effective kind of like oh i like that i like the idea that like like over here somebody's just driving their tesla to and from something and over here there are people being hung out i mean he puts the cherry on top of that idea when they visit the town where nothing is going wrong they're like tying on a dress as a form of character development um that was really insightful um they like dresses is it okay like dresses but she doesn't you know because she puts it on she doesn't recognize herself anymore because she's hardened she's she's moved past the point of wearing green wrap sounds like you understood the character development incredible stuff um did you think kiki was good yeah i did i mean she's great and she none of them have very much to work with you know i think they have a lot of like my job in the scene is to get from this point that way i like movies where characters are on the move and and it's like there's gunfire here and i have to like and so i didn't necessarily come out of any single scene being like getting anything other than the jesse character kaylee spain's character will do anything for the shot and as we keep seeing her do this she herself becomes more timid that is a pretty rote kind of like uh dramatic setup but if you're gonna shoot it that way and edit it that way and make it sound that way and put silver apples over it and then have fucking jesse and and who's your boy from carl gussman gussman yeah i'm just like this is just like such a really movie like i i guess i i guess i weigh it way heavier because of that well there's something ironic to me i think this one movie is not uncommon i think a lot of people are gonna feel especially like everyday people who like watch a lot of movies are gonna be like why is this movie saying anything to me and i think there's i don't know i don't even know if i use the right word but to me one of the reasons i love this is the only filmmaker that's trying to say something like most directors now are like i make transformers movies and he is consistently like i'm trying to write original stories or if i adapt a book i'm trying to put my own spin on it and i'm consistently trying to make movies where you walk out of and you're like what does that really mean and it kind of for me personally this stuff sticks with me and i think it's because it's a movie that's ultimately about like american politics and conflict that are our intellectual uh triggers are very different than if it's about an idea like masculinity and femininity or um the way that we have like destroyed the environment and it's coming back to haunt us okay um i'll tell you something to him and i don't know it i don't know if he maybe he didn't know this but i don't know if i had ever been framed quite this way all of his movies though are just these episodic journeys they're every single movie like next machina is just a series of conversations 20 days later same thing so it's like they went from here to here and encountered another group of zombies we learned a little bit more information in annihilation it's like another encounter with a weird transfigured creature from nature in men it's meeting different versions of i mean all of that is amazing i just don't understand how they're like birthing of toxic maximality is supposed to explain what was going on with her personal relationship and her marriage and her guilt but whatever uh uh we never got to talk about that because you were you were on leave when we came out i like really liked three four seven i think it's really good like and again the episodic nature is the scenes that he said that like the working performance the jesse performance is amazing at the end you know it's like a little bit of self-reaching i'm like well okay sure i'm like okay but you're trying to get me to think something okay yeah i don't know i thought that one was super easy to understand maybe too easy to understand yeah i thought it was just like the most self-recriminating like i can't believe like what a fucking asshole dude i've been for 50 years and all guys are like this and they have this very like unbreakable like well i just i mean i understand that but i guess my response was like is that it and my response to this is a little bit like is that it and i think sometimes you know we talked about solpern and it's like definitely stupider in some ways in these movies but we're like okay so like rich people are bad like is that it you know and and i think that that is the comparison i'm trying to make but that's not what solpern that's not what solpern is about yeah i think this one definitely is a little bit i get that like scary bears that eat you are bad but you know like i don't whatever yeah okay all right that's where i am what was your favorite scene um definitely just when they were hanging out in pittsburgh that is so weird though where it's like a refugee camp is like this place of wonder and happiness all of a sudden it's just like all these people together gathered around the fire like without their phones playing cards it's like very funny that that is presented as like this utopia well i thought that was an interesting representation of the fact that if something like this happened it wouldn't be like in 1850 when you could literally on horseback go to the battle place but now it's like the country is so massive and if we've had like public transportation has been destroyed and sometimes there are airstrikes but most people are basically having like a foot soldier war in a lot of ways and there could be huge pockets of the world where they're completely like uninterrupted or not more like you had a certain group of people were living in the intercontinental hotel and enjoying air conditioning and some people were refugees like six blocks away i mean it's not true of the world that we live in i would say that my favorite scene was actually the sniper stop oh the christmas thing yes because a it was just an incredible set piece and just an amazing job of direction and i love the fact and it's basically the movie in a nutshell where they're like who are you shooting at and they're like i don't know yeah that's a really great moment um and those guys are just like they nail those they have so much personality i would say that one of my criticisms is that the people that the group meets along the way are way more interesting in the group so even jesse plemons who is one of the funniest bits i've seen like a little boxes people be like is this guy too good at these words because it's like this and todd and freaking bad he's so good but i do actually think that in that scene the best acting in the whole movie is is kirsten dunst reacting to him i was just watching her the whole time knowing that it's her husband and just being like what are you like can he break you like are you going to show anything and she does it and respect her it's also like that's an incredible scene just because he's somehow well okay i don't know this is another one of those like you can read it a bunch of different ways there's a way i'm just reading that where you're like jesse plemons himself and just like his interrogation of two asian journalists what kind of american is is like the thing that you're focused on but you're also by the way in the back he's sort of mass grave so like that's the there's a war crime behind him and then he's also being like evil but there is like this weird like almost distortion field around that character because he's actually so terrifying just individually they almost separate from the fact that like when they happen upon him he is digging a mass grave and they're like we're gonna get killed because he does not want people to know what he's doing here it also reveals something that probably would happen in the face of a civil war which is that regardless of what size you're on they're kind of like offshoots and individual motivations they get filtered into the conflict this is a weird big fucked up country where people can like kind of disappear i love that again like when you say what is this movie about like it has all these different kinds of ideas like that it might not have that big exclamation point at the end where you're like this is what you think well it does yeah if that's okay okay so to set that up i think the clement scene the quiet town sniper stop yeah the gas station quiet town i mean like it is spooky it's effective it changed the energy of the movie for a moment yeah i guess the quiet town itself the premise is very effective the character development yeah it's a little silly it's a little um the most bracing moment other than the final 20 minutes was the shootout set to the where he was like i'm going to show you just actually how like ugly and scary this is where people who are within 50 feet of each other are firing guns directly at each other they're getting shot and having their bodies torn apart and then when one side quote unquote wins they just drag a prisoner out into the middle of the yard and they kill them and it's that's this incredibly vibrant frothy three feet high rising song that is just amazing or no first record first record anyway uh the ending completely shifts the energy and filmmaking style for me where it was like this is actually now what was once a road movie with these lightly drawn characters is now just a video game movie where you're almost entirely in first person pov or what feels you know you like it's camera on the shoulder basically and you're tracing the actual an actual when a siege on washington would probably be like as close as they can get it for an 824 movie that costs 50 million dollars um and it is incredible filmmaking all the way through you feel very connected to what they're trying to show us and it is it's a you know maze movie it's like you're in a um like you're in doom or something trying to get to the center but then the ending he makes like this very specific choice where uh kirsten dunn's character essentially like has to sacrifice herself doesn't have to she does sacrifice herself for gaily spainy's character which is a very on the nose like one must fall so the other may rise takes a picture of her very much would say you know it's the check-offs photo of someone being shot because they mentioned it earlier in the thing so then in the film they finally make their way to the white house they kill the comms rep they kill some secrets from stages and finally when they kill the comms rep that is very startling yes um it's one one final sign like these rebels are not walking around here um and they get into the oval office and they encounter nick offerman and he pleads for his life three-term president that he is and uh they kill him and then they take a very pie-eyed photo op and the movie ends on a splash what happens before that they walk in they're about to kill the president and brian mora is like i need a quote and he says please don't kill me and brian mora goes that'll do and then they kill him so what do you think that is i think that that is a pretty acerbic portrait of modern media if i have to guess yeah i mean i don't think it's hopeful definitely not um it is very similar to how most of his movies end if you think about this man ending we're talking about we're kind of like this is never going to stop that's kind of the takeaway there yeah at the end of annihilation when you're like oh wait is it inside of natalie portman now and now is the whole world's rude or the end of x machina when elisa vikander's character goes out into the world and essentially like it's gonna become the terminator yeah all these movies he's like we're fucked like that is the takeaway of every movie that he makes yeah it's like i really take your point about maripool and like how i like the contemporary value of the work that is depicted in civil war but i think that the movie ends and it's like does anything that these people do matter no i agree that that is what a movie right is like about right and i'm like i i disagree but like also there are some larger issues going on in it that's like i mean it ends on the president who has disbanded the fbi and ordered air strikes on people so he's like not a good guy but like getting shot while everyone else is just like standing around taking photos you know that's not great would we have applauded that though if that happened like assad you know what i mean like that's the thing is that i mean we applauded it when we did it to bin on it that's what i really think that's what he's trying to say you know the fucking shane gills bit i'm just laughing because of the rock tweeting about the but seriously the shane gills bit where he's recounting the speech is it alawi the the the isis leader who is murdered and then he recounts the trump speech for trump and he's like we got that dog he was a dog it's like it's just saying the speech as a representation of the way that american politicians or even just americans talk about this sort of thing when it happens in another country you know we're just like it's just about the photo op we make jokes about it like oh just isn't that today we're just like hilarious here's a clip from the naked gun meanwhile i probably killed his wife you know it's not that funny that's what i'm saying but we have this it's not even gallows humor it's like a completely empty hollowed out cynical like i guess this is just how it is thing but when we put it in american context everyone's like okay is that okay well hold on so let's see this out so the last shot not ideal for embracing but garland's been like this movie is like about this could happen here right and that's where i'm sort of like this could happen here but also this is not america at all and then like trying to tease out what the movie is trying to frighten you with about like what could happen and how you should and what decisions you should make is it it just it gets a little muddled you're thinking so specifically though like the practical like when this happens i don't i'm not sure that we really have the ability to like figure that out yeah because it's like a very practical movie like wild shit happening and it is trying to make it very immediate and you'd be freaked out about the people hanging from the car wash and then suddenly people getting executed and like you know you're in a you're just shopping for but like people are hanging up on hanging out on the roof and all these sorts of things like i think the specificity of it is what makes this movie very careful but that also does invite you to ask questions about like how you get how like how you get to this place i mean it just does and i understand that it's supposed to you and it like doesn't want to give you the answers but i just can't all make it line up you know i get it i think a lot of people feel the same i guess i'm a little i was a little bit less but like a rap which you know that sentence suggests it's not entirely anti-war well i think it may be unsuccessful at that yes yeah and that's the point of just like when you like i do really and i don't i i was like i really love this movie if you don't have this soundtrack and you're like this is an anti-war film i'm like bro you've been thinking about putting silver apples over a drone shot of a fucking city for five years it's sick live with it you know what i mean like it's not coming to see yeah and i think he thinks it is i think he thinks it's effective at making you think it's not it is like movies are amazing like that's how i feel like i'm playing while bodies are falling out of a truck in goodfellas like i know i'm disgusting for liking this okay that's a good comparison does that scene in goodfellas make you feel that what those guys were doing was disgusting and that this is a horrific era of american crime but it's just like all this style of it just i mean you guys are fucking we're honest we're honest about how the movies are powerful the layla scene though where it's like here's a guy who's been shot in the head sitting in his car with his wife because he bought her a pink cadillac you're like this is awesome she was like jimmy was hiding his instructions lay low okay all right fair enough um i mean it is that central thing and we talk about this like with other movies that are about bad people are bad things and is the film endorsing them like the film is never endorsing it but there is something essential to making a future film and the way we have been conditioned to watching them and appreciating them where you gotta fight extra hard to not have the audience because you're trying to win the audience to the movie at the same time that you're trying to show whatever moral dilemma is being positioned but we've seen it like a million times in every single thing that just like the form of a future film is just sometimes sort of an endorsement even when you're actually trying to not make it an endorsement absolutely it's appealing to you and by doing so it makes it seem exciting he made the decision in this movie clearly very purposefully to try to avoid this conversation we're having about goodfellas by making it about journalists by making it about effectively non-participants or sort of like external participants in the conflict but then he even that they are participants and he juxtaposes that like you know adam namon's review of the film points out like the very labored like people shooting versus photographers shooting just position which is right there but to the film's credit he is interrogating objectivity or even like you know what they're doing or not doing and the usefulness of it like in the entire portrayal so you give it a b minus no i think people should go see it like and i definitely should see it in theaters i'd be amazed at like people watching at home without you know the sound missing everything can we do justice for keeke for a second not for the it's she's very very good like the ending which like when she actually dies i still piss off and this is this is a man's corner though the movie needs a sacrifice no but i was just like it's so kaylee like what's the movie about they kill kiki i actually honestly i have my reverse take yeah go ahead because you're gonna say i well they just it's so labored also like they put they throw kaylee in the center and you know what's coming every one of my theater was like oh no and then you see like that this is a very participatory on my life that's what the movie wants the movie wants you to go oh no i don't understand that but it's just like what does that teach us about that character as it was like that she started to care and so now she has to like die like what is it like what if you do this job you might die like if you literally are putting her back she started to lose her basketball like that was it right like and there's a version of her that's taking her over yeah yeah i don't know that didn't seem that complicated i did think actually it was like i was like he kind of he kind of took a few miles per hour off right there because like i was like the rest of this movie the violence is incredibly yeah basically yeah actually that would have been more aesthetic i agree yeah why do you didn't do that i just thought maybe this is too fucking much i was wondering whether there was supposed to be some sort of like emotional payoff in that that i just like no they fucking just keep going that's what's going on like that being like the conclusion of the movie or her story you know and that character as opposed to like yeah these things are dangerous and you know i thought it was just very clearly like the handoff like this work you can only do it for so long those two people jesse and ragamore's characters in what i forget uh like the names don't matter joel jesse and joel they see lee get shot in the head and they don't stop and say oh no they're like we're so close to the story of a lifetime and the shot of a lifetime we have to keep going that's so fucking dark to consider and also jesse kaylee takes the shot of her and that's how you see her die right i think that i think he really thinks most of the characters in his movies are just huge narcissists yeah and i think these people who do this work are narcissistic they're also very gifted and they do something that is important to our culture but you know we don't like her some narcissists in this room right now are they with us right now uh so i enjoyed yeah i enjoyed that he was willing to be a little more aggressive i think he also might be banking on people's complicated relationship to journalists right now you know that there's a sense that like not just that they're distrusted but a lot of people think this way about journalists you know that there's a kind of puffery to the work that they do even if it is dangerous or if it is important so i don't know i thought that worked the ending i thought was like even for him i was like that's glib that was really glib with the snapshot and that'll do quote uh i got a kick out of it i can't are people gonna walk out and be like so fun guys what a fun night at the movies i'm curious to see like what the reaction this movie is beyond the screenings that we all do i think it's gonna i think it's very cool and good for movies that we just had this conversation it's like incredible that people will walk out and be like i fucking hated that what a glib asshole go back to england versus like that's right like we have lionized maggie haberman too much and now we need to like fucking reset our relationship to the press or something like there's gonna be like a whole right and then there's gonna be people who are like chop out who are like only cucks like this and they're like that too because sometimes i get triggered by that but i'm like no this is great yeah this is great that like there's so many different kind of ways you could look at this movie and be like that sucks and here's why and it's every reason is gonna be different but what you can't say is that this movie does not rock you know like this movie is overwhelming and i think it's better to have it than not happen you think it's gonna be successful absolutely not at all i wonder that's why people don't want to see a movie it was getting hung at yesterday it's supposed to do well this weekend but i do feel like it's one of those things where it's like a 26 million dollars but has a d cinema score you know because i do think you're gonna walk in and go oh god i feel shit yeah also it's only oriented around people's expectation of a movie and this movie doesn't give you anything you want when you're going into a movie yeah when i saw it he did a little presentation beforehand and uh he did folks in 24 like you know alex garland has been one of the central building blocks of this company uh and you know like a cornerstone of this company with uh what was the first one and then he came out and he was just like well i have a cornerstone and now i have your heaven's gate but yeah i think it's probably eventually like if there's gonna be enough like you got you just have to go see it that probably will do pretty well i don't like it'll do okay i think just financially 150 million dollars worldwide probably to be a success um it's gonna play imax green so it's gonna make more money yeah which is something that doesn't usually happen with movies like this i'm interested to see the international reaction are they always gonna be like this is great yeah they always really like very simplistic explanations of what's going on yeah yeah i don't know bobby what's gen z gonna think uh i think they're gonna hate it probably yeah does bobby get to speak on behalf of gen z well we know bobby's not a member of gen z but he's closer to gen z than we are i'd like to firmly keep myself out of gen z like i made that point on the show you know here in this workplace no i think they're gonna hate it because it is not they're gonna hate it for a lot of the reasons that amanda explained which is funny because amanda's obviously gen z presence yeah that's right what's up megaphone for gen z the name you know we didn't spend but children's like camp and a vibe this movie is the exact opposite of that movie has no vibe this movie is vibe crushing and that's why i enjoyed it it like crushes your vibe and crushes your spirit and i'm like that actually made me feel something with the images and the sound and i agree with all that i felt incredibly anxious while watching this movie not really yeah but i think that that is the main provocation you guys are not hit on it's just like quite literally the name you have set yourself up to provoke and if you do not put something in there that is that level of provocation then people are gonna be mad about it but i think that that is honestly partially of your problem because like you should not go into a movie expecting it to have a certain type of politics until you see it movies are not like inherently political they often turn out to be political in the way that they are made in the ideas they're communicating but like it doesn't have to be a certain type of political i think that just because it was named of award because the state's texas and california you you you you you you specifically dropped that's what it turned into i'm like the most political person that i know like i try to read the left to take on everything and i went to this movie i was like i don't really care if this is like this movie is leftist enough for me you know or like this movie agrees with the reality of politics doesn't really matter it's a movie and i think it functions as like an interesting metaphor for the bigger the budget something gets the more able it becomes even if you do have a provocative name on it i think there is i probably should have asked a question about that when i spoke to alex but there is definitely a sense that even though look it's a fascist president who disbanded the fbi that's a direct reference to donald trump's feeling about the fbi there are enough things in the movie where you can get a pretty clear sense of what side is responsible for triggering the civil war but i i do wonder if there is a withholding of a lot of information and the portrayal of the events in attempts to do what chris is saying to do the like both sides thing where some people will love that they think about these people and other people think they'll love the things about these people and that is a there's something kind of crassly commercial about that decision i don't know if i totally buy into that because this guy made men like is he really thinking about like a commercial prospect he did i think in some ways like alex garland i have historically thought of him as the elevator pitch god of all times like yeah tell me the start of alex garland and then as he's gotten into more like a filmmaker as a director i think his movies have become a little bit more like hard to wrap your arms around and even something cool like natalie portman leads a team of team scientists into what might be an alien invasion of the everglades like okay and i read annihilation and i know those books i know what they're about everything but like they've become more and more difficult also natalie portman you know this is a block for you but it's like i i don't know i think that he has i i'm glad that there are provocateur filmmakers even if i don't feel like provoked right yeah yeah okay i mean i think that's exactly what i'm saying which is like i don't think the bait this is a great movie like yeah if you just resist the bait this is an awesome experience i see fucking 200 movies it's amazing it's an amazing movie to watch but i don't know the other version of this movie where he does delineate it that movie sucked totally it was like if amy coney barrett is just going to get this like who gives a shit there's taking the there's taking the bait and there's like thinking you know and being engaged while you're watching it and like i just was sitting there watching being like i am fucking terrified and jumping in my seat and having very strong emotional in the moment reactions to what is truly amazing filmmaking and i also have the brain space like okay i don't so let's go why are they doing this and like what is it and it's like oh but i'll tell you what having talked through this i think this is like ultimately really where he's at i think what he's trying to say is that because of the modern conveniences or inconveniences however you think about them the way that people communicate with each other now as opposed to 20 years ago or 100 years ago we have lost sight of the fact that we're not as different from one another as we think we are and we have used ideas ideas in air quotes to convince ourselves that there are heroes and villains in our lives that we are oppositional by nature and that oppositional nature can very quickly lead to this i think that the california texas thing is a particular provocation inside of that which is that he is insisting from his point of view the california texas are actually not so different that they are western expansion of states that have always had an independent spirit that have always thought a little bit differently about the way they exist inside of america i'm just laughing because i'm imagining gavin newson and greg at it doing the prayer it really takes place in the event where like those people are dead or like overthrown it's like you don't even know whether it's the actual state organization or like two military like you know the insane gun people from each place have joined together and gotten the cash flow like you know but if he had set this movie 100 years in the future or 100 years in the past nobody would give a shit civil war and people would be like this reflects our current moment how would this actually be it's a fucking movie it doesn't matter how it would actually be the only thing that is that that is literally the thing that i think is is unnerving our expectation of the film is that it is set in what looks like 2024 she's just saying i i think if i can speak for you i think you're wrong but you were like i walked in thinking we were gonna get killers of the fire moon and you didn't tell me it was gonna be i am legend you know what i mean or whatever you're like that it was gonna be book of eli but set in the present tense i'm not supposed to worry about how this happened right right right right right this is true of every movie the movie also does give you enough to ask the questions you know and that is provocation and so i guess if the provocation of this movie is to to think and to not think that it makes sense then i consider me provoked i think the movie is intellectually dumb and cinematically smart amen i wouldn't say that i don't think that the two can be separated i yeah i think that they're i think whether or not you ultimately like the ideas i think this movie is saying some things that maybe it doesn't want to put its full chest behind yet oh and so i think it kind of it pulls a punch here and there where it says like we're just gonna make this like a normal movie but like i think some of the things he's saying are actually quite button pushy and yet he doesn't quite come out and say i'm pushing the button yeah i i think one of those things is that like maybe the media is bad like uh dangerous at a minimum um and i think it's also and this movie is dangerous but like but it doesn't go there you know forget about like my endorsement of this idea but i don't mean that like i don't think the movie is like the movie is engaging with the idea of making a war movie and what it means to make a movie and it's like very self-conscious but like but it doesn't put its full chest behind it as well there's one more thing though that is like a little hard for people to wrap their heads around right now i'm not saying i have wrapped my head around it i'm not saying i'm not just like a sad you know neoliberal living on california like of course i am like how pathetic to be 40 and working at a tech company you know like i i fully i'm fully incriminated in this i think he legitimately is like republicans and democrats are not that different and they have convinced themselves that they're in a holy war and if this continues it's gonna be big trouble and he's like i don't think that they're different and i he's kind of on to something there i'm not saying that like it feels a little bit too much like um uh like rk junior junior you know like something like i don't want to i don't want to confuse his political stance but i think that that concept of like we can we have gamified our lives every day by using social media or cable news or all of these inputs that are convincing us that we're in like a death struggle and that actually isn't true and if you consistently think that that is how the world is and i'm not saying i don't i might feel this way but his point of view is if we keep doing this we could go to this would it be exactly in the way that i'm suggesting it plays out no it's not a documentary it's not even a predictive film in that specific way but if you watch x machina and talk about the potential for ai when that movie came out you'd be like this is like 40 years from now this is 50 years now that movie's 10 years old not even 10 years old i know that movie also has a tremendous amount of talking and it's primarily people talking about the ideas so you know and and teasing them out and in really beautiful films with some dancing i think x machina is a more successful movie than civil war i'm not i think that's a great film um i think civil war is a good movie but look at this we haven't had a conversation in a year how long yeah so that's success to me there you go we did it we did it joe it's been a long conversation this is gonna be a three-hour pod could be not quite close no okay should we go in a conversation with alex garland alex garland is back on the show one of my favorite filmmakers hi how are you uh i'm very well i wish i was there in person instead of uh again last time we spoke was over sort of zoom link type thing it was that was in a harried pandemic era we're in a slightly different era you've got a big studio movie coming out now did you ever think you'd be making a big movie like this um well to be honest i've always worked in sort of indie zone pretty much you know uh but i always wanted i sort of would have fancies about you know something bigger scale and how to achieve that and um uh so in a way yes you know the thing about movies is they have this it's a very it's a very sort of big graph from the very small to really dizzyingly massive and um and you can't noticing and being aware of what people are doing at these massive scales and knowing you can't capture that kind of imagery uh so so in a way in a way yeah yeah so i read that you first started writing civil war in 2018 and 2020 okay yeah um i mean sort of i sorry i know what you mean there's a kind of early semi version but structurally very different um but yes kind of 2018 sorry well so because i'm curious was there a particular whether it be a world event or a personal event or do you remember what happened right before this kind of concept started striking you as something you wanted to explore i mean so if i go back to if i go back to 2018 um then then it's like evolution rather than when did i write the script but but that's fair enough because because scripts come out of some organic state so there probably was something that preceded it in some ways i i started writing a it was i planned as a tv show actually uh um based around the idea of civil disobedience um back in 2018 uh and and then you know various things happen some of them are to do with life absolutely some of them to do with the world um and and what what i'm reacting to as a writer i suppose and by the time 2020 rolled around this is this is like june of 2020 uh that idea no longer felt valid to me and the the trace dna of it ended up in civil war which i wrote in june of 2020 every time we talk you talk about how you try to make something that feels somewhat significantly different from the last thing you've done the last one you made man was this kind of confined psychological almost mythic story this is a very grounded war movie with a very kind of practical experience of war but it also feels like just like a very kind of desperate expression anxiety let me be honest with you um i felt very anxious watching the movie i mean is that accurate about how you were feeling when you were putting it together um i guess yes i would say and this is a bit this is semantics probably but anxiety is probably the motivator uh but the feeling in it was closer to anger i would say um but but yeah sure this is what it comes out of then yes anxiety what were you angry about the same stuff i was anxious about um it was it was um it was two sets of things but they're not unrelated and one of them is to do with journalism and the other one is to do with uh a kind of ambient condition um the ambient condition is uh division polarization populist politics where that comes from where that leads what lies behind it and so on and then journalism which has and has done for a while now also has a kind of a blurred crossover into a kind of social journalism that you might find in social media um uh and the form that journalism has found itself in where it exists and stepping back from that so what you have is a divided uh state um by which i mean condition not just nation state but it could be nation state is in your country is in my country is in many countries around the world but also then the great the great limiter the great controller you know being what gets called the fourth state journalists journalism um not having the traction and the power and the trust that it used to have and then perceiving journalism as something good not just good but necessary um uh when i i told a friend of mine who works in film i wanted to write a movie with journalists heroes and they said don't um everyone hates journalists and that really struck me because because we can't hate journalists because we need journalists it's not it's not that it's nice to have them or it's interesting to have them journalism trusted journalism has a societal function which is a really important one it's exactly like the executive or the legislature or the judiciary it's it's like that it's it's a proper serious um requirement can i ask you some questions about that because i you know i used to be a journalist and invariably when people make movies about journalists especially when they're heroes those often get celebrated sometimes over celebrated on the other hand i detect in your movie on the one hand like a huge admiration for the courage and the determination to get the story and to accurately convey what's happening especially in a world like in your world which is crumbling around us but then also maybe a little bit of dismay or skepticism or concern about the kind of egomania and drive and just a weirdness of the urge to get the story that i think emanates in a lot of journalists there's a lot of ego that goes into being a journalist at times is that is that fair characterized that way well it's not exactly what i was shooting for you're right you're right about the aberration um journalists as reporters so that is to say people who who deliberately remove bias from their reporting uh i really do admire yeah and and sometimes just in a very literal way i could admire what they do generally because we need it but also it sometimes requires huge amounts of courage and also intelligence in investigation and thoughtfulness and and passing out why things are the way they are so yeah i absolutely admire that um i separate that from the individual uh so the individual might be conflicted compromised have mixed motivations uh and i grew up around journalists and i grew up in a 53 i grew up in a period where journalism was different to how it is now um and i grew up around journalists my dad was a cartoonist he worked in a newspaper and his friends and so the people around the kitchen table and listening to my dad and i'm sure inheriting my dad's love of his colleagues became my you know five-year-old admiration for these people i'm sure that's true um but some of them were difficult spiky uh abrasive um but under that there was a funny kind of purity they had to do with their role so they could be compromised as individuals but be very very serious about their job sardonic and sarcastic and serious-minded at the same time so it's more to do that that's not that's not a criticism it's more like saying you're allowed to be that um and it was a celebration but i tried in the film to to take from that and make that the method of delivery in the movie itself so so the movie is in some respects non-biased in as much as it just offers up events during a window of time but it's not sticking flags all over the place saying here is the intention here's the opinion here's the all the sort of reassurances that uh audiences sometimes want but also filmmakers sometimes want in order that they reassure themselves about themselves or you know as well as reassuring the audience and so that the choir they're preaching to knows yes we're all in the same choir whatever it is i was i was trying to remove that and be like those older forms of journalists i'd love to talk to you more about that some questions but i was wondering do you think you're a very good interview because you spent your time growing up around journalists you feel comfortable with them i don't feel comfortable with them at all because i know how dangerous they are i know how lethally dangerous they are yeah you're getting a little bit of that this week i feel like oh i mean that's always been the case you know journalists have always been tricky because they're looking for a story and very often they're pretty sharp and pretty smart and they're talking to people like me in this instance who are trying to disguise things about themselves that one um and and present an image which is how they would like to be seen or they're protecting the project that they're promoting or whatever it is and the journalist is is looking for the cracks in the armor that's being so there's always been attention there i think um uh people could get skewered by journalists when i was a kid just as they can now the real thing is more to do with what the dominant tone is within journalism so where these days i would say in the old days large journalistic institutions really saw themselves as having a function that related to systems of checks and balances they had a civic responsibility and i think various things happened some of them external like politicians going out of their way to undermine journalism and journalists and uh for their own reasons and uh the advent of that kind of tabloid journalism and the um there's a crack cocaine type moorishness of tabloid journalism and all that kind of stuff and not to mention social media and the semi-democratization of journalism or semi-fascism of it depending on how you would choose to look at it but i suspect at the core of it there is also there was a deliberate rejection and abandoning of the concept of being unbiased because large journalistic institutions became governed by advertising streams uh they needed to hold an audience they needed to maintain an audience at a particular level uh that became a process of uh reassuring an audience and giving them stories in the way they wanted to receive them and all the sort they wanted to receive so not contradicting the biases of their audience in order to hold on to them and in other words becoming propagandists more than journalists as soon as that happens something all sorts of weird stuff starts to happen propaganda is not a thing the receiver of propaganda can both feel pleased to get the propaganda and also know it's propaganda at the same time um what it starts feeding is not something trustworthy but something emotional and anyone outside the propaganda bubble does not trust that organization and conversely the people within it doesn't trust the other organization and you get a generalized collapse of trust in news and um it is generalized there's great journalists out there doing great work but they don't have the traction they used to have because journalism has become less trusted this correlates closely to the thing i'm most interested to talk to you about with this film so is that too long no no not at all um it's actually very very important i asked about journalism in part because you know almost all of the other films that you've written have had a kind of orientation in science or technology and you're well known for that for science fiction and films like that necessitate a kind of exposition as communication that feels vital to storytelling and i love the way you read about those things i love the way you reveal character in those things and even in a film like men which is that less so you could chalk it up too well as a psychological exploration tapping someone's head yada yada yada this is a film that is the opposite of that in many many ways it is a really like a very down and dirty practical muscular war film that has a lot of ideas in it but so many of the grounding concepts for why we are in the state we are in go unexplained and we live in a time where we expect in part because of that journalism dynamic that you're describing right now we demand answers and we demand a kind of lack of a gray line we want you're either on this side or that side you're either a demagogue or you're a you know a fire for democracy you're either a republican or you're democrat and the movie i can see is already flummoxing people because it's not giving them this binary that they feel so comfortable with now obviously this feels like a very purposeful choice but i wanted to hear you talk about the decision to make the movie this way that's it uh i mean if i gave a rambling answer before that would be as nothing compared to the answer to what you just said i sort of break into bits that was an intention uh i guess um i mean one thing is i just don't really see the world in very binary terms um i do think there's such things as right and wrong but i'm quite careful on a personal level about what i choose to include in those brackets and i also think sometimes there's right and wrong ideas but it doesn't necessarily follow that someone holding that idea is good or bad like if you see what i mean so i i separate sometimes like there can be all sorts of reasons why someone holds a belief and to write them off as good or bad does not follow naturally for me from some of the things they believe i'd also say that's a sliding scale so there would be cases where the two correlate perfectly but the question is at what point down a sliding scale does that correlation stop being gray and start being black and white um uh i began to feel but i don't think i don't it seems silly to say i too much because i think this is generally felt um that there are two concurrent things happening where discourse is concerned one of them is to do with how individuals react to each other on a one-to-one basis and the other is the effect of that same conversation when it's taken into a public discourse space and where that point of decoherence is um between those two and trying to take some of the grammar of the one-to-one discourse and put it into the public space discourse uh it then it extends out into a whole bunch of other things to me to do with definitions um uh what one means by say left or right or uh and what an individual means by that and where one describes those labels and why one describes those labels and what comes with those labels and um so it gets very very broad i'd also just slightly take issue with what is seen as an absence of something i think there is not an absence i think there's a contained thing it's more in the method of delivery it's the absence is the absence of flags the absence is the absence of me as a storyteller or a filmmaker making it very very clear that uh everyone knows what is intended by this that's that's a separate thing to do with the contemporary grammar of cinema um just as an example i could give various examples but one of them would be in the presentation of the president the president is a fascist they've they're attacking the citizens of their own country they dismantled one of the legal institutions that could threaten them uh they smashed the constitution they've shown disregard to the constitution by staying into a third term now then things flow from that that some people find confusing let's say texas and california being on the same side yeah i could stick flags in that i could make it super clear or i could do it by inference and the inference would be presumably the people of those states have felt that their polarized political position is less important than a fascist president and so they've come to agreement over that issue now is that an argument contained or not contained does that exist in the film or not exist in film i'd say it does exist in film because i haven't in order to make the argument i haven't pulled on anything that doesn't actually exist in the narrative it's more to do with whether people feel that an argument is being made now then that becomes a secondary question which is about what what is discourse what is conversation uh if i was going to reduce my hope with this film it would be make something compelling make something engaging and at the end of that compelling and engaging process a conversation exists that's it so so all the decisions okay so we did get into the rambling answer that i was afraid because i have a lot of follow-ups because this is really important as a writer when you're making those decisions to say maybe withhold what could be those flags as you describe them um or maybe they don't even occur to you you could tell me but if you decide to withhold them if you in your mind you have a rationale for why things are the way they are but you're not going to put that in a character's mouth or a newscaster's mouth that conveys information is it do you view that as a provocation for the audience to then drive discussion around film uh yes as long as provocation is not antagonism uh it's the other meaning of provocation which is just if somebody says something to me that makes me consider it for a second um that that's a form of provocation uh i'm being careful about the usage of words because it's it could then be misconstrued as i'm trying to be provocative and antagonistic actually my goal is exactly the opposite i'm a centrist okay i'm a centrist when i talk about things like left and right i'm talking about things like whether you believe in a free market or not you know i'm talking about what you think taxation levels should be at um and uh and i see no reason why with those sorts of definitions people can't freely talk and respect each other and so so underneath all of this yes there's a bit of kind of conversational centrism i suppose yeah i think that's one of the things i responded to was the lack of over explanation around some of the concepts but nevertheless i'm curious like but just to say just what it's worth i also had another principle which is that i think those things did not need to be explained because i don't meet people i meet all sorts of different kinds of people who really need that explained right well i think that's something in reality did you anticipate this this reaction i wonder uh yeah kind of okay but but but then there would be a provocation in that because what i'm not interested in and people i do feel oppositional to me personally i feel oppositional to them is people who happily sit within an accusatory polarized state right and if i'm pissing those people off i'm okay with it because because i'm not comfortable with the way public discourse is happening i i and in some ways i do differentiate between groups because it's correct to differentiate between them in other ways i don't where the polarization is actually inflammatory if if whatever issue it is that you're concerned about if your anger is making that worse then i feel i want to pull back yeah it does it's a complicated topic because the film feels in many ways like a discussion of what hardlining can get you you know that it can lead to a kind of world on the brink civil war um sure but on the other hand in the face of injustice sometimes there's no other answer but to be a hardliner you know it's a complex idea my it's a complex idea it does have quite simple stuff behind it i think one of them is that extremism encourages extremism and extremism is dangerous it's not abstractly dangerous it's not like a sort of fanciful position that sometimes yeah maybe that might be in a really concrete serious way and also in a radiating way it's a serious problem so uh partly because all nations are interrelated and and the position one place takes will in an ecosystem way then affect the position another place takes and uh um i mean this gets very sort of philosophical i suppose but but underneath it all is an extreme distrust and concern of comfort within extremism because on a personal level i think it leads to real world horror so i think one of the reasons why this reaction has come about is because in films that are both apocalyptic and even about civil war we expect a kind of over explained clarity in the storytelling um but i'm curious well do you feel this is a rhetorical question i think it's a rhetorical question do you feel like there isn't enough uh strong assertions being made at the moment like it is there is what we need is an increase in these strong assertions or in the world at large or in your film in the world at large the film is being dropped into the world at large right well unfortunately for me to answer your rhetorical question i'm a podcaster so i have to make strong assertions every day that's just something i do um i do want to ask you about the filmmaking uh because i do think it is incredibly bracing and powerful physical act of movie making too and i felt very viscerally locked into the story and it feels very different from everything that you've done before and it sounds like it was hard um could you tell me maybe about the production it was hard i mean i think in one way or another all films are gonna be difficult to make that you know they're complicated and unwieldy and there's so many different factors um the thing that is often the hardest bit of production is how to get it supported how to how to get it financed and that in this case turned out to be easy um it was 824 financed it uh just immediately on the basis of the script we weren't able to make it for a couple years because of covid restrictions and some of the requirements um uh when it when it then came to uh the shooting of it it it was it was logistically difficult if a film like ex machina you basically have four people in a house i mean there's more people but for the most part there's four people in the house and um you're repeating the same location again again you get to know the location really well you get to realize there's a shot we could have got there it doesn't matter we'll get it tomorrow or we'll get it next week or you you just it's just contained um in a film like uh so the war you are in whatever place you are in for sometimes one day sometimes two rarely more than two and uh so the circus is shifting all the lessons you learned the day before don't apply anymore and um as well as that i'm in some ways outside of my skill set um my skill set would probably be making something really really small and this is a lot bigger so i'm having to which i always do but i'm having to rely heavily on people like a very experienced stunt coordinator uh in order to help me through the construction of the sequence and what is possible what is not possible what is sensible what is not sensible and uh there's a lot of that on this film also some very very brilliant people who then did what you hope which is in the in the sort of delegation take accountability get the tone and deliver in terms of the structure i had a question for you as i was re-watching some of your movies the films seem to have whether this is purposeful or not you can tell me that kind of schematic episodic approach where it's a series of encounters with the ai in um annihilation it's number of days inside the shimmer where you're sort of going through this experience even in devs it's an episodic tv show um this this is a road movie and kind of each episode is a new city a new day a new stop on the tour do you think uh structurally like that or is that just something that comes to developing the story i think probably i do think structurally but actually in truth it comes from something else which is uh something unthought through and just the natural way i tend to write uh certainly the film i most admired last year was anatomy before which is not episodic in the way you've just described and i think all of the things uh you just described things i've written are like that and i i take a point and agree with it one of the reasons i mean i love that film for lots of different reasons but one of them was to do with uh uh simply watching it thinking i don't know how they did that i couldn't do that i wish i could do that um i'm a little bit bound as i guess everybody is but i'm definitely bound by my own limitations and i would love to try to write like that it just is beyond me interesting um so i have to ask you about the music i feel like i was asking about the music music is particularly powerful here you're reuniting with your composers but the song choices um are racing i think that the suicide and even the stertle simpson makes sense like capturing a panorama of collapse i got that the de la soul sequence is my favorite movie scene of the year by far i almost jumped out of my seat um so can you explain the thinking behind that sequence and then why you chose that song to score it the thinking behind the sequence came out of uh something that i try to factor into a schedule which is room for invention or uncertainty so i do not arrive on a day with shot lists um i i know what we're supposed to achieve that day but i haven't got a clear idea in a way about how to achieve it um i do that for all sorts of reasons a little bit actually to do with actors and not wanting to tell them to stand in a particular way wanting to see what they do um in the lunch break that day uh i was sat on a on a slope overlooking the the uh the area where that scene is shot and um a sequence just started to form in my mind which had a relation to where the different journalists were in terms of their own journey in this larger journey and also uh something about uh conflict uh which is to do with executions uh summary executions and it just started piecing itself together and a language started to piece itself together which was a sequence of shots that did not have dialogue basically at that point so i we then go about shooting that finding the angles putting it together and then it leaves an open question which i'm aware on the day but i don't have an answer to which is what this this is going to require music or sound design of some sort otherwise it will just all be silent which i guess is also an option but i don't know what that is then in the edit it's a similar thing which is uh the discovery on the day was here is a sequence that feels right but it's not pre-prescribed but feels right and now what does one put with that then another whole bunch of factors come in what are you trying to convey what do you want people to think uh actually relating to what you said before you said you're a podcaster and you have to be assertive every day i'm not arguing anywhere in this for not being assertive it's more to do with asserting where and how but being assertive is really important actually uh so in this instance one of the assertions is it's a war movie that is to say it's a movie with war and it's a movie and movies have weird superpowers to do with what happens when you put violence and music and careful framing together now if you want it to be an anti-war movie the choice of music becomes incredibly important not just the choice of music but how it comes in what its tempo is uh is it abrasive is it hypnotic is it seductive good counter example would be opening sequence very very brilliant cinema apocalypse now opens with music and images of napalm and palm trees and ceiling fans and so on uh with the end and there that is seductive and darkly romantic um which is clearly intention and executed like sublimely this is different this if if this at this moment was not abrasive and not confrontational and in fact not assertive as as you put it would start to undermine the film's own intention because this cannot inadvertently be a pro-war movie if you see what i mean uh not that the counter to an anti-war movie is pro-war but but i should phrase it differently it should be an anti-war movie so then the music choice and the arrival is the last part of that becomes very important and that was a lot of discussion a lot of different tracks tried a lot of me jeff and then the composers jake the editor testing each other um can we go this far should we go even further that kind of thing it's incredibly effective i mean i love that song so it's weird that that is an attempt to clearly you know clarify it as an anti-war movie but in a way it's because it's absurdity and it works it's the sort of madness of it yeah yeah i get it um so you know a lot of talk about how you're um not making more films i think you might have said this to me last time we spoke that you were already feeling this way uh is it what proportion what's going on it's interesting i think it is like a tiny tiny example of a broader issue to do with the difference between discourse between two people in the same space or virtual same space and something you know something more ambient uh um yeah but i don't i don't quite understand the correlation between a and b because the a statement i made was i'm going to stop directing for the foreseeable future now that is not the same just as a statement it's not the same as retiring it's just a different statement um and there wasn't really any ambiguity in those lines in that interview that that's what i said so so somewhere in that someone else is inserting another piece of meaning which is not contained in the original words that that aside i just dispute the terms because within it i said i'm going to screenwrite i'm going to be writing i see screenwriting as being a fundamental part of filmmaking um likewise being a director of photography or editing or acting or any number of different things uh there is a weird kind of we've spoken before about this i don't put the director in the same deified position that lots of people i think they're just another one of the technicians involving in involved in making a movie um so i don't place the importance on that statement that it might appear to have um bottom line i had had enough of that role for the foreseeable future i had something i wanted to do which is i wanted to write for other people there's a director i used to work with a long time ago danny boyle i wanted to uh write something for him he wanted me to write something for him that was an agreement between the two of us um there's another script i want to write there was a very interesting guy called ray mendoza who i worked with on civil war and who i like very very much and uh respect very much uh he and i decided to work on a film together we both had our own reasons to do it and we're working on that and i personally see my role in that as supportive of ray and trying to facilitate what ray wants to do uh very happy to do that i'm rather honored to do it actually um that's not a rejection of cinema that's just doing a different job within a broad industry is that fair of course it's um i'll be sad if you don't make any more films in the same way but i completely understand uh i have multiple questions for you what has been the most rewarding primary role for you as a creative person novelist screenwriter video game creator tv showrunner or director uh screenwriter so um yeah i i'm a writer i mean that that's my job i um i think directing is a very interesting job and it has it has all sorts of good things about it all sorts of rewards if i in terms of how i conceptualize myself i conceptualize myself as a writer definitely if you only have these four films or maybe the fifth if you're working on the film with ray and that is your filmography as a director are you content with that yeah totally no more than content i i've been incredibly lucky i mean really incredibly lucky if i abstract myself which actually i do i in a funny way i feel very little personal connection to my working life um uh it's it's like someone else does it or i say it's hard to explain um if i look at the films ex machina annihilation men civil war they're quite and devs as a tv show they're quite odd projects to have been permitted to make i i'm i'm lucky very very lucky that i was permitted to make these projects you know ex machina tiny cerebral thoughtful little contained movie then with not me doing it but with this very beautiful and sort of muscular bit of visual effects at the heart of it so the witching bit of visual effects and you know uh the subject matter uh the the means of execution the resources i was given to do it i just feel very lucky actually because of how people thought that the film maybe now feels quite prescient but in a way it's gonna feel dated in five years because of the way we engage with that idea but i'll say that for another day um last question for you um do you feel any pressure about this movie because there's some discourse about the studio and the chance that they're taking this is a big film for them this is of course your biggest film box office and reviews and already the anxiety of the discourse around this movie do you feel any of that stuff yes yeah i do i i definitely do i always do uh i would say i feel it acutely um actually as a counter or not a counter but a sort of uh addenda or something to uh to the thing i just said if i've been lucky within that luck comes obligation and responsibility for the people that have helped this unusual or spiky or difficult project i'm surrounded by people as actors and crew and financiers who are themselves taking a risk i can't stress that enough they as individuals are taking a risk and i need to respect that and uh take that seriously and take on the obligation so do i care about the life of the thing and the way their work is received and treated um in the case of an actor there's this act of faith involved which is will in the edit the editor and i do justice to their hard work and the risks they've taken to the financiers to the director of photography oh just everybody yeah so is there a lot of pressure yeah it's an absolutely massive amount of pressure i wish you well i thought it was uh an exceptional movie and it's kind of heartbreaking imagine you're not going to try to make something even bigger than this next so i'm mad at you for not doing that alice you're very kind you've been kind to me over a period of years of conversation so uh thank you lovely to chat with you thank you again all right okay take out thank you alice darlin thank you chris ryan thank you man of course thanks to our producer bobby wagner for his work on this episode we'll be back next week with probably another long pod are you hiding the fact that i'm on the 99 draft no okay did i hide it i think i got some messages that were like damn are you not on the 99 draft he's on every draft i would never do a draft without you i would never do a draft without either one of you okay um so yeah no you're on it 1999 mega movie draft seven drafters howie roseman and ryan poles of drafting yo movie drafts we almost got in a car wreck on our most recent family vacation because how we traded someone who is definitely reported to be the problem is the problem gosh i want to know what aaron rogers thinks this will work wow coming up next week aaron rogers and i sit down for another three-hour pod coming your way all right we'll see you next week