For decades, the Vietnam War has been a Hollywood obsession. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, First Blood, these were blockbuster films, embraced by audiences and critics alike. And for decades, they've helped us understand a painful war, and understand each other. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Rafter, and this is the Week at the Wind This Time, how Hollywood made the Vietnam War.
Listen, on the big picture feed. I need support to have to play the room. Stand up and walk now! Hello and welcome to the Watch.
My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com, and joining me in the studio, his Jim Tan laundry is actually a sex-alizing video tape. It's Andy Green World! That was a good intro.
Thanks, man. Steven Soderbergh is on the podcast today. It's pretty exciting. I wanted to spend a few minutes today on Monday.
This is when this is going up, talking about Full Circle, which concluded I believe by the time people here this about two weeks ago. It finished its six episode run on Max, and I thought it was remarkable. I wanted to chat with you a little bit about that. And then Soderbergh also has another series that he did in between Magic Mike.
This guy. And Full Circle, he shot a episode web series that's up on his website, extension75.com called Command Z, and it stars Michael Sarah, and Roy Wood, and Chloe Radcliffe. And I highly recommend people check it out. We talked a little bit about that.
It's a sci-fi comedy, and we talked about Full Circle, and we also talked about his career, especially his career, Andy, since Che. Since he made Che. And he had dabbled or had a dalien with the idea of retiring at some point in there. He said that he was retiring from movies.
But since Che, I wanted to just throw this up against the law, kind of for it to him. And he more or less agreed that he is one of the most explicitly political filmmakers we've had in our lifetime. That almost all of his genre work that has come out over the last 12, 15 years has had incredibly probing socio-political analysis or storytelling at the heart of it, even if it's dressed up in a comedy or if it's dressed up in a 1950s film or if it's dressed up in a musical about a guy trying to make furniture who has to become a stripper to make ends meet. Whatever it is, he's so aware of and focused on capitalism and the crushing weight of capitalism on individuals.
And I thought that that definitely came through in Full Circle. I agree. And I think that what's interesting about it is that I, until you suggested that framing, I don't think I think of him as an explicitly political filmmaker, but I think that's kind of naive. Why do you think he's a formalist usually?
Yes, in this willingness to go between genres and styles and take on the challenges. But I think the other constant, and we refer to this when we first talked about Full Circle the other week, and it's very relevant to our conversation about the show, is that unlike many of his contemporaries in cinema, or his filmmakers, he is resolutely focused on the present. I mean, the neck was a puree piece, but beyond that, he is almost uniquely interested in the world as it is. Yes.
And not running from it. And that in and of itself is intensely political, right? Because if you turn the camera on something that's happening now, you are showing us that. That is exactly what he said.
My gosh. So it goes out saying that I regretted my inability to participate in you, but now I'm just guessing at it. So talk me through your feelings about Full Circle. I think I have two responses to it.
The broad one is, I just love that this was there for us. I love that he made this. I loved having something that was dense, that was a little bit challenging in terms of just keeping up with it. No hand holding.
I love that it was about this moment, about people in cities and parts of the world and parts of New York City that cameras don't often show us or don't demonstrate interest in. And I love that it was the way it was released two per week for three weeks, I believe. Yeah, I think that was how they did it. And in the middle of summer, and it is an example of the type of show that I think I'm often worried is going to get squeezed out of not just because the industry is contracting and making less shows, but because how do you communicate this?
There's no underlying IP. There is no one-star performance. It's not in our previous podcast. We talked about hijack and why we liked about it.
This is the opposite of that. They're both good. So I celebrate its existence and then turn the page and get a little bit deeper. This show was fascinating and had really remarkable performances from actors known and unknown.
Also really challenging performances. And I think all of that was rewarding to all the challenges. We can get more into the specifics of it if you like. Well, I think the entire thing to me was breathtakingly experimental and also breathtakingly traditional in some ways.
It is obviously essentially like a film art. It's contemporary noir with lots of secrets and lots of betrayals and violence and finding out that people closest to you have been working against you. All the stuff that really fuels more, which is obviously a genre that he feels incredibly comfortable working in because all this drama is heightened in those genre pieces. And I thought it was really wild how it was essentially marketed.
If you looked at the marketing materials or if you watched the trailer, I think you had an idea of the Guyana plot line, but you probably went into it thinking this is about Timothy Olafont and Claire Danes have their son kidnapped. And Dennis Quaid is the sort of patriarch of the family and we're going to get real acting chops from these great actors. And it winds up becoming the story of these young kids from Guyana who are trying to negotiate their caught between these two kind of forces, the underworld of Guyana and this sort of rich Tony Manhattan family who are trying to make their way through this cloudy kidnapping scheme. And the lie of capitalism and the lie of America, that this is something in the beginning, we meet them and they seem relatively innocent, that they're eager.
They're dying in the mirror. It's going to be fun. It's going to be adventurous and change their lives. And then what they're presented with when they get there is just horrific.
It's just greed and violence and they're desperate to get out. I think it's a good point about the classic trappings of it. Ed Solomon, the screenwriter who worked with before, who worked with before, who worked with this. I've re-watched No Sun Moveable Bunch recently.
It's really, really great. That's a period piece. But he wrote all the episodes here. It is, at least in its inception, it is not, it's not for no, but it feels deeply indebted to the Curacao film High and Low, which is also about a mistake and kidnapping and everything that spirals out from that.
But it's just, it's the best, to me, it's the best case scenario where it is not a reboot or retelling or remake. It's like, well, what is the germ of this idea? Okay, what's interesting to us about it now? And what can we do?
And also, that's not exactly like, it's not like remaking a Disney movie. Sure. It's not the most well-known movie at this point, 60 years after it was released. So I love that aspect of it, that they're engaging with very established storytelling structure and filmic language and then doing something very different with it.
I feel like when I watch Soderbergh's stuff now, it is it's like listening to a record that has a very unconventional mix. So... Like Metallica, St. Anger?
Well, or even stuff that's like, this will be a reference that maybe not a ton of people get, but like a record made by Steve Albee. Where like, you know, there's a real emphasis on live drums and the way the drums sound in the room. And so that you're almost confronted with the fact that usually when you hear drums and popular music, that's not actually how drums sound if you were standing in front of them. I say all this because the way he shoots and the way he edits, which is essentially hand in hand, like he'll shoot all day and then he'll edit at night on his laptop and the way that they made full circle, which was, I think, supposed to be another experimental story the way Mosaic was, which was their second collab or their first collaboration before.
No one was shown in Mosaic, that was on HBO. And that was sort of like a choose your own adventure or choose your own protagonist mystery story. This was going to be something similar to that where there was going to be like a linear story, but then there was going to be these character dependent episodes that were like the same action, but through this person's perspective. And I think they scrapped that and scrapped a fair amount of what they had shot and then reshot some stuff.
And of this, this is how this went. I think you can feel that when watching it. I think that there are parts of this show that, you know, like the casino aspect and seemingly like a mob supply that don't really like get resolved or fully explained. But I like being treated like a grown up and trying to figure this stuff out.
And I found that when the final two episodes got to me, there was almost this like symphonic kind of build up and release. And even the music itself becomes this sort of like romantic, you know, 1950s, more score. It's also an example of what I think works best in this type of storytelling. And also just it's a sign of it's kind of a sign of confidence and maturity because the nature of the story demands that there's going to be a series of almost remarkable coincidences or secrets and everybody's not telling the whole truth and everything is connected.
This show leans into that. It's called full circle. It's about people bound together. It's about the past resonating in the future.
So it's explicitly saying that that is what we're dealing with. But also the way Soto Burch shoots it, he under like he accepts the world that the show is going to be set in. And he's not that interested in like hiding the ball that like there's a, oh, the police and the postal inspector actually was involved in the original thing. And he's going to be, who cares?
And there's that feeling that he always brings probably both because of who he is intellectually and creatively, but also because he shoots these things himself with his rapacious style. Like he, the feeling I always get is curiosity. The camera is barreling forward, looking at what's interesting to it within the world that you've agreed upon. And it's not trying to change your mind about the world or make excuses for it or try to hide the plot, you know, which could feel a little bit, it's just, it's never that.
It doesn't stay still for you to be like, wait, how did they get to that? He does a bunch of shots in this, in this show where he's just sitting in the passenger seat, literally of the car that somebody is driving around New York. Somebody else is driving with two people in the back seat. He's just not normally how people sit in cars.
And it's also not normally how they shoot stuff. I mean, like he is, there are moments in the last two episodes where I'm like, oh, we're just, the running-gun nature of this is just really building to something special. I thought that, and we could talk a little bit about what this show is about and what it meant, but I thought that the moment where it becomes apparent that sort of, and I've seen a bit critiqued a little bit, like, you know, are the Browns let off too easy or is there, like, is the class critiqued not exactly like watertight at a certain point, but I thought that the two sides, these two families who are sort of almost up until the moment that Ms. Mahibir finds out that Akid's been killed, like they're under the impression that they have kind of rited the scales, you know, that like, that they have paid back this circle, that things are now like effectively like rounded out.
And then Aviir becomes the sort of new sacrifice. Like he is in fact a child to get sacrificed that they had intended to sacrifice in this whole process. And I just thought that was such a gut punch because he is left to this life where he's standing in the marshes off this river in New York as they fly back to Guyana and he's killed a guy with a machete. Yes.
It's dark. It's dark. And it's also though like what was so striking about it was these two kids show up and one is cut out for it. I don't know, that's almost a value neutral statement, but he is wired to survive in a way that Louis is not.
And continues to, you know, and again, like that's a testament to the script and the plotting and the pacing that like we believe that Jevir can like a couple of things happen where you're like, how is he still alive? Yeah, but the show, Jevir, sorry, I said how you're, yeah. Which by the way is the coolest way ever to say Xavier. Yeah.
Like when Kevin Feige reboot the X-Men with Professor Jevir, I'm into it. Yeah, like that fundamental difference that he can do it and then understands what he is capable of and who he is and what he's willing to do for his, for people who aren't, you know, is it's cutting. And so the depiction of this, like these two families who have a transactional relationship to their morality, you know, it's like Claire Danes, Sam gives the painting to Louis and is like, this is my reparation. You know, I just take this.
I recognize the scale is imbalanced and this is I will now balance it. And so features like all I have to do is this ceremony and like have one child to replace another child and I'm out and I get always got for you. But also the idea that you can, that peace or forgiveness can be handed down from on high. You think about Louis entrance into the one-fifth avenue building and then his exit where he has to sneak in by having the tile you scream.
And then when he leaves with this $250,000 like, hey, how's it going? They're like, sir, like you're Louis, right? Have a nice night, sir. Yeah, as he's carrying a painting out, he's been given permission.
Where did you wind up with the melody harmony character? The play by Shazibee? So I was thinking about this. I was having some conversations about it off pod even.
I think that one of the opportunities that draws actors to Soderberg is the opportunity to do things, to try things, to commit to things that they might not otherwise get to do. And I love this, he beats. I think she's a great performer. She's charismatic.
I always look forward to watching her. This was a crickly part. And one that kind of at times, I know there was the running subplot of her mental wellness. But it's times it beggared belief that she could run rough shot over everything the way that she does and approach people and talk the way that she does.
But I also was like, this is an opportunity for her too. She has made a choice. And Soderberg, the way he works with actors, he's not speaking of Steve Albanian record producers. He's not twiddling knobs.
He's like, that's your frequency? Okay. Yeah. I'm going to shoot around it and you're going to be like an active god or a major.
But the part as written is actually a difficult part because she is walking into these rooms where it's nothing but secrets and is immediately intuiting what the truth is. Yeah. And that one of the things that was interesting about is that she felt like a CBS procedural hero. She's a house.
And she's like, I'm not sure if she's going to be a journalist or all these other shows that I don't watch, but I presume knowledge of like that. She has a superpower. It's very Soderberg to let an archetype like that loose in something that we're moments ago or just driving. It's realistic.
Yeah. Yeah. There were some points in the middle where I was starting to be like, I'm not sure if this is working for me. But by the end, it kind of was just because of the, because the her path, there were, there were, there were, I mean, there were different circles rotating at different speeds, right?
Like Claire Danes goes to see William Sather, her uncle, and we have that scene and then Mel Shosa for an echo of that scene at a different speed. So I think it ultimately did work for me. Did you feel different? It's like the way you put it exactly right.
Like once you get on her frequency and you sort of like adjust your brain to the fact that this is in fact a character that you've watched hundreds of times is the intuitive detective who somehow defines that when people are lying or telling the truth or what they're lying about and in every crime novel we've ever read, that detective shows up at the very end and is like, here's the conspiracy, I figured it out, much to my own personal expense. That's exactly what Mel was doing. You know, it's just that she also was doing it with a personality disorder. And I thought that was an incredibly kind of brave role in performance and to have somebody be like, you think that you like these anti-hero detectives, do you like it in this package?
I think that everyone uniformly was really good in the show, but everyone was using it in everybody's using the opportunity differently. So we mentioned Jevier, like that's a kid named Shae Yeko who I'm not familiar with. I think he's British. It's a brilliant performance.
It's an exciting performance because you've never seen him before. Similarly, Paul de Charma played Garmin Henry, kind of the MVP of the entire series, just an incredibly riveting finely drawn portrait of someone who I have not seen on television before. Another British guy doing incredible work. But then there's the Claire Danes performance, which we've texted about.
Like Claire Danes is never not good. I am a Claire Danes fan. I would say that I'm ready for a different Claire Danes. I think that you got it in the show.
Performance? Yeah. But we can agree to disagree. That's what's amazing about this podcast.
I feel like the thing about... I thought podcasts were about people agreeing on things all the time and saying they're good. Have I been doing this wrong for years? It's not that I want to say that she's not good.
It's that her being high strung, higher society person, I mean, this was Fleishman. This was in some ways, Homeland. I would just be into seeing her playing a different part. I think that if she had been double crossed by her husband and her father or her uncle Jean and this was all about her finding out the ways in which she was wronged.
But the fact of the matter was that she was the conductor of a lot of this and the orchestrator of a lot of this. And she played the turn at the end of the last episode was well played and went to a different place. But she did have her Fleishman haircut. She does a kind of upper class severity that she's better at than anybody.
But that wasn't why she was... I think she can do other things. Sure. But you got to let the game come to you.
You got to play. You can't change that. So I get that. But it was also cool to see Timothy Oliveant not to be in New York.
We don't usually see him. We don't usually see Dennis Quaid being a goofball with a ponytail. Jim Gaffigan is a good actor and got an action scene. I really enjoyed that casting.
There's sometimes there's surprise casting that feels stunty and then there's surprise casting that is the best type of casting which is purely surprised and you're happy to see it. Everything about it was so offbeat and yet so rewarding in that I want my mystery crime show dopamine hit. I think I got both. I thought it was just classics over a lot of ways.
And also in some ways where you could see the seams and you could see him moving some of the pieces around to try and make sense of it for himself. I'm so enamored with him as a filmmaker because partially because process is so important to him and process becomes a lot of what he talks about. So it was interesting in this conversation you're about to hear that I had with him. To hear me pretty explicitly like here's some of my ideas about the world itself.
We talked about Command Z and Command Z is essentially born out of a desire for him to talk about the ways in which people can make a difference on very small and small ways on an everyday level. And like you mentioned the proceeds from Command Z are going to charity. So it was a really cool conversation to have with him after making full circle and Command Z. One last thing like the great filmmakers are the ones who are so focused on and know just innately like the story they want to tell that there's almost always a byproduct where all the potential stories that they move past and the pursuit of what they're telling.
It's almost like the reverse Marvel where MCU is like oh remember that stone that the Shang-Chi kicked in the first act? Well, wait until you hear the origin story of that. Like wouldn't you sign up right now for an Ed Sullivan script to show about the relationship between different immigrant crime families in the outer boroughs of New York? Yeah.
Like the scene where Natalia and Louis go to the Chinese. Mr. Chang to escape. And he sells the triceps all them back to the cinema area.
That's a whole show I watch and that wasn't this one. But it just kind of one of the excitement of a program like this is like oh man there's a lot of stuff out there for us for writers and make it back to work. So Andy and I will be back on Thursday with a mailbag episode. Stay tuned for my interview with Steven Serberg.
Is he going to come back? Did you end up being like come back to talk to us about all the other things that we want to talk to you about? I did not end. He said to be continued but I don't know if he meant like his filmmaker career or a podcast or relationship.
Well when I have him on my podcast. Yeah. Maybe I'll cover some of that stuff. Your podcast throwing running mind.
We'll be back on Thursday. Please check out my interview with Steven Serberg coming up next. Steven, thanks so much for joining me. You're one of my favorite filmmakers.
So this is an absolute thrill to talk to you about Command Z which is your new series that's up on the origin story of this project to start with. So you read Kurt Anderson's book Evil Geniuses. I know that you're this voracious reader. I follow your year end diaries pre-religiously when they come out.
When you're reading as throughout the year, are you always reading with an eye towards maybe this is adaptable, maybe this is interesting for something down the line and is this somebody I would like to collaborate with if they are like in Kurt's case available to do so? No, not really. I'm reading mostly for pleasure. Sometimes as homework, you know, in trying to get additional information about a subject that I'm exploring, but more often than not, reading from me functions as a real palate cleanser.
And I want to kind of separate myself from the day to day work. In this case, I've known Kurt for a while. I think I've read everything that he's published. I hope I have.
But this book in particular spoke to me in the sense of filling in the last part of a sentence that I felt was on the tip of my tongue about how we got to where we are currently. And he just did such a great job in this book of sort of braiding all of these strands in a way that was smart and as Kurt's voice, which is a great writing voice. It's very entertaining. It's very approachable.
And so I reached out to him and I just said, I don't know what I want to do with this, but I think something should be done with it or more to the point, something should be done about it. And we just started talking and agreed that on any project, you sort of start by eliminating everything that it shouldn't be. So what we determined that it shouldn't be was obviously a kind of documentary or mock documentary or something that was not scripted. And once we decided, okay, we don't want to do that, it needs to exist in a kind of fictional dramatic space.
What should that be? As you may or may not have heard, we ended up going down this road of short videos that were kind of leaflets from the future on some sort of platform that still exists in 2036. So these were minute to minute things, characters sort of giving you glimpses of two versions of a world. It was interesting.
We had half of the little clips were from a world in which things were not fixed. And then half of the clips were from a world in which things did get fixed. And we worked on that. We had scripts, we had past, we shot them, and then we looked at them and we said, this doesn't work at all.
We literally have to start over. So we threw those out. Some of them still appear in little pieces on the video wall in command C. You can see little clips that are from that iteration.
But we just started over again and agreed. We need to work in a format that's more familiar to us and that we have more of a field for and we're, especially for me, we're actually more comfortable in saying no, it should be like this. So we started over, we got some fun new people involved and it ended up, you know, resulting pretty much in what you watched. But you know, we were trying to find this line of making sure that we were self aware in our targeting of issues and that we ourselves were not sort of immune from being targeted at a certain point late in the show when Michael Sarah is talking to the youngest of the three team members, you know, encouraging her to get involved and to do things and she really kind of goes off on him and says, I don't need you to tell me how to fix things.
And this is, you know, you always think you, rich people always think you have the answers to everything. And she just kind of tells them to fuck off. And so, and that was because I felt well, if I was that person's age and somebody my age said the things that Michael Sarah was saying, I'd get up in there grilled too and go, why should I be listening to you? You're the one who fucked all this up.
So we tried to make sure it was that it was a good version of a circular firing squad. And so there was a lot of back and forth and discussion about, you know, being an equal opportunity fender. Can you tell me a little bit about the actual production because this got shot between Magic Mike and Full Circle? Am I right?
Yeah. So that was a squeeze. The room that they work in is actually this photo studio in my office about 30 feet from here. And then, you know, we tried to, when we were going outside, we tried to kind of keep it in the neighborhood.
And it was, I think we shot for 14 days, 14 or 15 days. And it might have come out a lot earlier if I'd been aware of how many visual effects are in the show. For some reason, I just wasn't groking that every time Michael spoke, it was going to involve some sort of visual effect. So when we had an assembly of the whole thing, the editor said, you know, there's like 270 visual effects shots in this show, which is more than anything I've ever made combined.
And the problem was showing it to people, it kind of, it kind of didn't work without that effect. Like the Oz, like floating head thing really was important. So it took a while even to get it in a state where I can start showing it to friends and getting feedbacks. And as a result, I kind of pushed the release down and I was running right up against the July 17th, you know, target that's in the show.
So it was a bit of a scramble at the end. And it also, as you said, while we were shooting, I was trying to prep full circle and location scout and work on the script with Ed. So and finished magic Mike. So it was, it was, there was a lot going on.
Do you like that feeling of, I suppose it's multitasking it to your user word squeeze? Like, does that create like a kind of beating the deadline old journalist almost feeling or like, you know, you're racing in a bunch of different places? Is that a comfortable place for you? It's not uncomfortable.
Only because I am happy to delegate. I work with really good people. I give them a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility. And so it just means I have to be very, very smart about how much real estate I give each project even over the course of a day.
But if a lot of that means having conversations with other people that I'm collaborating with and explaining to them, I need you to take a run at this. I need you to make sure X happens. But it was, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was a busy time, but it wasn't, I didn't feel overwhelmed. It just ended up that way, you know, the timing of it.
If we hadn't thrown away the first iteration of command Z, that wouldn't have happened. So it was kind of my fault in this asset. It was hard for me to be upset because I was the one that said, let's throw out all that other stuff and start over while I was getting ready to start shooting magic Mike. So, you know, you have to, you have to be aware of who's, who was changing the water and the fishbowl.
So to speak. One of the things I love about command Z is that while it is a time psychedelic and at times, you know, this almost speculative sci-fi that is also very much rooted in the real world, it has the beats of like a really good sitcom. And that points like, you know, like, I was curious, I know that Roy Wood and Clay Radcliffe both worked on scripts for the series. And I was curious about how much, you know, debate or turning over kind of the mechanics of like, of the joke and the joke is going to come back 10 minutes later when we end the episode or there's going to be these recurring gags with Clay Radcliffe being late or Roy and wanting to get over the sea wall to meet his date.
How did the sort of comedy aspects of it manifest through those two leads? Well, it was, you know, I think largely that's where Kurt and I were sort of leading this thing when we rebuilt it Kurt, Larry Doyle, who's very experienced in this world. Larry brought some people in that he liked that were really talented and funny. And so everybody was really rowing in the same direction and looking for that kind of rhythm.
He didn't want it to become metronomic in a way that sort of a sitcom which sometimes is used as a majority of, like, he didn't want it to fall into that set up gag rhythm. But at the same time, it was designed to be a comedy. And the good news was, you know, we had really smart people working. And I mean, certain people were responsible for certain episodes, but the bottom line is, you know, everybody at a certain point got eyes on everything and was able to weigh in and make suggestions.
And then when you have a cast that's this smart, you're incorporating ideas from them on the fly. So it was, it was very fluid and a lot of fun. It went really fast. I mean, the funny thing is, you know, Michael, who's one of the lead characters in the show is the way we shot it.
We did all of his stuff very quickly. I was wondering how you did the odd sequences. Yeah. So the key to that was making sure that we had people in the room with him to interact so that he wasn't just doing lines into a void.
So I had a couple of cameras on him, although I only ended up using one, but he was able to perform with actors in the room so that the rhythms all felt right. But I mean, he worked for two dates and yet he's all over the show. So it was, you know, it was one of those. You know, at the end of each episode, you have these cards that recommend other films to watch if you're interested in sort of like for more on, you know, nuclear power or climate change or whatever.
You suggest people watch additional films. I was curious how that came about as an idea to throw on at the end of each episode. That was kind of a late breaking thing. I was looking at the show and felt that each episode was missing a button.
Like, just they needed a button. There needed to be something that really told you, you know, that's the end of the episode. But it needed to be something that was kind of serious and not serious. And so, yeah, we just came up with that at the last minute.
And as Joki as some of those ideas may seem, I would argue, particularly, you know, for more information about dogs, you know, if you like dogs, I think those are three good movies. Turned out. Which is a great, yeah, it's a great recommendation. So you know what I mean?
So it's kind of doing two things at once. It's supposed to be funny, but also, yeah, I mean, if you like dogs, why wouldn't you want to watch those movies? And I'd be wondering whether or not, you know, you feel in your experience as a viewer that you have your point of view or your political point of view, maybe, yeah, I think your political point of view changed by films and how often that happens for you. That's a good question.
I mean, I typically look to people, real people and real world experiences to drive me toward some sort of new way of thinking. I guess I don't expect art to teach me. I expect it to show me something, but I guess my expectation is not that it's going to teach me something apart from you watching a movie and trying to learn how to direct that. But there's no question that it can be an influence because it's such a powerful medium.
And I wish, you know, the last few years with what's going on in not only this country, but in the world has really made me question whether the dichotomy that we all seem to adhere to without question of, you know, good guy, bad guy, good character, bad character. If that's a kind of false dichotomy because you see leaders around the world acting almost in every particular or like bond villains, essentially, except in some cases, even more, even more lethal. And my point is, supposedly, when we go see a bond movie and you say, oh, that's the bad guy and we're rooting for the good guy. We're rooting for James Bond because he's supposed to be the good guy.
We're not rooting for the bad guy. And then you look at a country in which the bad guy wins. You begin to wonder, is that really what people are extracting from these movie experiences? Or are there a lot of people in that room actually not rooting for James Bond, rooting for the villains?
You're saying like, is there, I just wonder if there's some sort of disconnect between our kind of inherited ideas about villains and heroes that in the real world, in people's you know, private lives, just that dichotomy doesn't exist? That's a fascinating response. I guess. If we're always rooting for a good guy, why do they lose so often in the real world when we have the opportunity to influence the outcome?
I'm trying to wrap my mind around this. Well, I think part of it is also that maybe people save their idealism for the movie theater and then their political lives are deeply cynical or deeply self-serving. I don't know. Okay.
So let's say in the event of let's talk about sportsmanship and let's talk about how the former president looks down on any sort of behavior that we would consider sportsman like as regards anybody that he's in the arena with. Like he is the opposite of that. He thinks that's weak. He thinks that real men don't do that.
So for somebody who ascribes to his belief system, when they watch a basketball game or a football game or a soccer match or a tennis match, when the players at the end of the game go up with each other, embrace, talk, say, hey, good game, tough one, see you next week. That makes me feel good when I see that. I like seeing that kind of connection between the people that are battling it out. If you're somebody who supports the opposite of that, does that make you angry?
When you see that kind of footage at the end of the game, you go, why are they doing that? Why don't they hate them? Why aren't they calling them terrible names? Why are they hugging?
Why are they exchanging jerseys? They shouldn't be doing that. You're fighting them. They're the enemy.
Like, how do you put these two things together in one human being? You watch, you know, sportsman like behavior on TV and you're like, that's okay. And then when you see this other person acting in complete opposition to that in a public stage, you go on down with that too. Yeah.
I don't know. I think as somebody from Philadelphia and is a city that's not always known for its sportsmanship, you know, I appreciate a rivalry and I appreciate when sports fandom kind of transcends a level of, oh, I'm just watching something for entertainment or I'm watching something to support my team and goes into this almost like identity and like what this city means versus what Dallas means as like city or what these two franchises represent. But at the end of the day, I want these guys to be crying in each other's arms and say, hey, we really left it all out there and that was great. Yeah, exactly.
You're like, yeah, I want to beat them. But by respect, I think that's what I'm talking about is why why in this one context is that form of respect good and make you feel good and you support that. And then in this other context, you're completely against it. You're completely, you subscribe to this idea that no opponent is worthy of your respect ever.
I'm baffled. You know, the reason why I was asking you about whether or not you ever felt changed or that your political outlook was changed by a film. I have a attitude towards your movies where I think for a long time, even as like I was just, I'm as I've been completely immersed in your filmography for decades now of looking at you as this kind of formalist. And I think a lot of that might have something to do with your public persona where you talk a lot about films and the problem solving that goes into films and then what happens when you take the piece of content that you've made and distributed it into the world and obviously you have a lot of really thoughtful things to say about the state of the industry.
And then I think sometimes like the over political messages of the films get, they're just left on the screen for the viewer to take in. Like they're not, you're not walking around doing a, you know, a whistle stop tour, bringing people's attention to agribusiness for the informant or pharma with side effects or whatever. But you're an overtly political filmmaker. And that's, it's so interesting that you, you're not all over stone.
You know what I mean? You're not making, you know, these, you're not making speeches about the issues that are in the films. You let the films and the stories tell themselves. And I think what happens then is that when you watch a movie, even like no sun move or something like that where it gets delivered through genre, it's not necessarily that you now are politically activated.
It's just that you have a different way of thinking about everything when you see a movie like that. So I don't even know if I have a question as much as a curiosity about how you see yourself as a political filmmaker. Well, I think you can make an argument if you present the world on screen in a way that's accurate at all. You're probably making a political film.
That being said, you know, a movie or anything to show, but let's say a movie. It's an act of seduction. And so I'm trying to work in a way that I would want to be used to do. And that is not somebody getting up in my face that I don't know very well and sort of spouting rhetoric.
That doesn't work for me when I'm watching a movie and it doesn't work for me in life. So if I'm, to your point, if I'm working on a project that addresses the issue of how the pharmaceutical industry works and what the result is on the people that take the drugs that are produced, I feel genre is a great way to seduce an audience into thinking about that. Because if they don't want to think about that, they can just watch a psychological thriller and they don't have to, they can be satisfied and not have an opinion about the pharmaceutical industry at all. And so that's why I think in the last 15 years or so, since Che, really, I would argue everything I've made has been a variation on a genre film.
Even contagion was a heart though to me. Yeah, it certainly was. We did a podcast about contagion the week, I think before Rudy Gobearer and the NBA shut down. It was sort of emerging that this was happening, but we were kind of still maybe it was going to be two weeks kind of thing.
And we talked about contagion as this heart. And we were all starting to watch our heads. I'm sure a thousand people have come up to you and told you, contagion was pretty pressing. Here's an example.
Just working on that movie, anybody that worked on that movie, forget about if somebody saw it, it was like being inoculated. You could, from that point forward, you couldn't not think about that. Everybody involved suddenly in the nine years between that movie and COVID taking over the world, I can assure you very, very conscious of watching their hands of terms, of being in crowds. You couldn't not think about it having been involved in that production.
And so now it's one of the things that made COVID, it has made COVID such a huge part of our lives is you realize while there are a lot of things that happen in the world, it's rare that everybody in the world experiences something simultaneously. And this was one of those. It had been arguably 70 years, I mean, since World War II, where the entire globe was essentially wrapped up in a sequence of events that were happening to everybody at the same time. It has a different psychological effect, I think.
One that is going to play out over generations just like that war did. Yeah, I often think about, I mean, it's hardly important, but I think a lot about the knock on effect from, you know, this memories I have of every time I would have a Zoom with friends, every time my wife and I would like kind of look out the window or go out on our porch and we would kind of look at the neighbors and see that they were going through the very similar experience or if not the exact same experience that we were. And then in the aftermath of that, or in the post COVID era, how everything feels a lot more siloed, especially culturally. You know, I think that one of the reasons why people are responding so much to Barbie and Oppenheimer is there is almost this feeling of everybody going and seeing something and experiencing something together.
Do you find that to be the case as well? Yeah, I think so. And I think the success, the outsized success of both speaks to that. Of one thing that, of our need for that, our need to have something positive that we're all experiencing at the same time because it's been a while.
So apart from the quality of those movies, I think you're right that there was this kind of, you know, unspoken need for all of us to feel good together because it just feels like it's been a long time. Is it strange to be making things and frankly making things in such a prolific fashion at a time when not only can you see that people's, I think, brains have changed over the last couple of years, but certainly the distribution models and the platforms have changed so much? Yeah, well, look, it's the artist's job to adapt. Like that's, you can't, the genie is not going back in the bottle.
And so I'm always looking forward and trying to gauge which path has the most potential. There is it happens. So if there's something that interests me and that I want to do, the first question is, well, what is it? Is it a show or is it a movie?
And then once you've determined that, well, where is the best home for this? No sudden move. Again, is absolutely a movie and not a show and was paid for by what was NHPMS, was now Matt S Warner as a movie for the platform. That's not a movie that in the current environment is going to succeed theatrically.
Like no sudden move is not going to make $100 million. It's just not. Luckily, somebody still wanted to make it and we got to make it and I'm glad that we did. Yeah.
Right. That's I'm never going to be the kind of person as much as I love seeing movies in a theater and would like my movies to be seen in a theater. I'm not going to not make that movie because it's for a platform. I don't have the luxury of doing that.
And I don't want to do that. I just don't want to make it. But I hope there's real momentum now. People have shown that they will go out if it's something that they really are excited about.
So the question is, can we keep that ball in the air? With no sudden move specifically, I rewatched it again last night. It's really one of my recent favorites of yours. And I can feel the context around that film getting memory hold a little bit from myself, where I'm no longer thinking of it as the movie that you did with Kimmy and let them all talk.
I'm no longer thinking of it as something that was essentially put straight onto the platform. It's just a movie that happens to be on Max that I was looking for. And then when you start it and the Warner Brothers logo comes up, you're just like, this is just a movie. You know what I mean?
Well, exactly. Ten years down the road, exactly. And so the point is making sure that it's good so that you want to watch it ten years from out. But I think you're right.
Ultimately, everything will end up there. So your job is to make sure it's good enough to stand out. But I've got a couple of two projects in front of me that sure seem like movies that could show in theaters. And the market will tell me if I'm right or wrong when they're finished.
I was curious how you wound up arriving at the place, not only have let's put Command Z up on the site and charge a fee for that, but also what about the content or the story or the script or whatever. It was like, okay, some of these are going to be seven or eight minutes or nine minutes. Some of these are going to be 21 minutes. Is that something that had been decided early on?
Because I know obviously it went through these different iterations. But how did you arrive at this kind of made me remember like fondly like the days of watching the Kine maintenance on Vimeo and just a kind of wild west feeling of storytelling on the internet? Well, that was that freedom was important, I think, to this project to not feel that you had to be boxed in by a certain length, certain number of episodes. We started out with more episodes and ended up, I think we had 10 or 11 and then it ended up at eight.
The freedom of that was really nice of knowing, look, this is the point of this episode and the point can be made in this amount of time. And once the point is made, we can move on and not really having to worry about that. I mean, certainly there was basic storytelling paradigms would indicate even in this sort of unusual structure that the first episode and the last episode are probably going to be longer than some of the other episodes because in one on the left, you're setting it up and then the episode on the right, you're paying it off. Those are probably going to be the goal posts and everything else is going to be in the middle.
But it seemed one of the reasons to put it on extension was the fact that it really from a traditional platform point of view, this thing falls between two stools because it's not really fitting a traditional idea of what a series is on a platform. But you were saying it feels more like what we've seen out of pure web series. So are you continuing for the rest of the year? I'll let you go in just a second, but I was just curious.
You're on this real run where you've got full circle, which I adored, by the way. And Magic Mike earlier this year, you've got command Z, are you throwing yourself into Project After Project continuously? Or are you taking any time off? Yeah, I'm hoping I've got a really small film that we're hoping to do in September.
If we can get our waiver, it's an independent movie. And then I have something more medium level budget for next spring that's also a movie. So that's the plan. Things are happening.
But as compared to where I was 12 months ago, it's a lot calmer. And then we'll see those two things have got in front of me. And I'm not trying to get too many things out in front because you change. When you make something, you come out the other end of it a little different.
And I'm aware that it's one thing for me to go, I think I'm still going to be super excited about the thing I'm doing in March of next year because that's not that far off. But to think about something two years from now, I don't know what my frame of mind will be. And I may, I may, I'm out of these two projects feeling like I want to go in a completely different direction. And this thing that I had teed up is no longer interesting.
You just don't know until you get there. So I'm trying to be, I'm trying to learn, you know, from what's happened to me in the past and not get too many planes stacked up on the runway. Well, I can't wait to see what comes next. Steven, thank you so much for talking to me today and thanks for sharing your thoughts on Command Z.
My pleasure to be continued.