‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ Is Here!

What's up, everybody? Are you tuning in to the Challenge USA on CBS? Well, tune in to me, Tyson Apostle, as I break down each and every episode with my co-host, Amelia Wedemeyer. I'm also a contestant on the show, which gives you all the insider scoop.

Amelia, how stoked are you to do this? Tyson, I'm freaking excited. I cannot wait to sit my butt down every single week to watch the show. Then, come here and recap it with you on the Ringer Reality TV podcast.

I'm Sean Fetasy, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about gods and goddesses. Later in today's episode, I have a conversation with the European film deity, Claire Denis, about her career and her new film, Both the Sides of the Blade. Honestly, I was very intimidated to speak with Claire. I hope you'll stick around for my conversation with her.

She is a legend. The Big Movie Event of the Weekend Psycho IT's latest installment in the MCU. Norse God Thor Story is Love and Thunder. Joining me to discuss another all-powerful being is Joanna Robinson.

Hi, Jo. Oh, hi, Sean. What an intro for me. What an expectation to disappoint people.

No, I think you'll be wielding Yulnir with the power of a mighty Thor in this conversation. I gotta say, before we begin, terrible news in the world of movies. Right before we got ready to record this episode, we got word that James Conn passed away. So before we get into Thor, I just want to talk.

I just want to get some feelings off my chest about Jimmy Conn, if you don't mind. And I'm, of course, willing to hear yours as well. Definitely one of my favorite actors of my lifetime, who has been a part of some of my favorite films ever made. He passed away at 82 years old this week.

I actually just got a chance to see him in person a few months ago. I saw The Godfather on the big screen, the restored version, at Paramount on the studio lot, which was one of the best film-going experiences in my life. And before that film started, Francis Ford Coppola, Talia Shire, and James Conn spoke about their experience on the movie. And Conn, even though he was in a wheelchair, was in great spirits and also could not hear well.

And so he didn't really take any questions or follow any of Coppola's lead. He just talked about what he wanted to talk about, and it was delightful. He was charming and funny and a little weird, as he always is, and a little threatening, but in a soft way. He's such a unique actor.

He really reminded me of the New York tough guys from the Bronx in my family. And so I always felt like a kind of personal affinity watching him. He wasn't just Sonny Corleone, though that's the character that he's probably best remembered for. He had a lot of ranges and musicals and comedies and science fiction movies.

And he always had this bearing of an athlete. He was best known for Bryan Songwe. He was in Rollerball. And he was very believable in those movies as professional athletes.

He was a big guy. He wasn't like the Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino diminutive, kind of angsty character actor who became a movie star. He was a real, handsome, strapping movie star in the 1970s who had great taste, who always worked with great filmmakers, Altman and Norman Jewison, Alan Pakula. He worked with John Wayne and Howard Hawks in El Dorado in the 60s.

He worked with Jon Favreau. He worked with Wes Anderson. He's got a six-decade career. He directed movies.

He made this movie called In High and Plain Sight in 1980, which is really, really great. He was in Misery, which was just on the rewatchables. There's Paul Sheldon, who's fantastic. The Gambler.

Freebie and the Bean. I mean, he really had an extraordinary career. He was always so happy to see. And I think he was always, despite being so explosive as a personality, a subtler and more gifted actor than he sometimes got credit for.

What is your relationship to Khan as a performer? You know, obviously, like someone who just cropped up, as you said, in all genres throughout my childhood and adulthood, watching film. I was never in my youth like a diehard Godfather fan. But it's something that, you know, I've watched and revisited and revisited and never disliked, but only grown to love more.

And the most recent time we rewatched it, oddly enough, around the book of Boba Fett, because it was taking some cues from Godfather. Like his performance is the one that stood out to me more than anyone else's. Like you mentioned his physicality. The image of Sonny in his like, you know, white tank top with the like hair on his shoulder, you know, like the big shoulders and the hair in his body.

And just like all of that stuff, that visceral, all of the explosive energy that he brings to that. Obviously, like Sonny isn't a trilogy-long character, but he looms over the whole thing. It's just like beautifully tragic, the whole thing is Shakespearean. But yeah, he's not just Sonny.

But Sonny is so much more important than I think, you know, people with only a surface interaction with Godfather really understand. And I think only Khan himself could have done that. And I think that, to your point, Ball Rocket is such an, like one of the most interesting moves he made because like Wes was nobody when he made Ball Rocket. So for Khan to like lend his muscle to something like that with a cast of, again, nobody, the Wilson brothers, ever heard of them, right?

Like that just, to your point, speaks to his taste and his willingness to step out of a comfort zone, to do an elf, to do something like that. So yeah, a great loss, but a great talent and a lot of opportunity for people to either revisit great movies or check out things they've never seen if they're wanting to spend some time with James Bond this weekend. Yeah, the 70s has a great reservoir of films. I think a lot of people that are our age or younger will know him, obviously, from Elf, as Buddy's dad, or they'll know him from Honeymoon in Vegas or something like that.

Maybe they'll know him from the show Vegas. Wasn't he on that show? Las Vegas? I think he was.

But he made a lot of very unusual films in the 70s starring these really ornery, explosive characters like Slither, T.R. Baskin, Cinderella, Liberty. Like these movies are really a lot harder to see than your standard 80s and 90s fare. Almost all of them are worth seeking out.

They're all made in that very special moment in Hollywood history where odd character studies were basically the most mainstream a movie could be. So look up all of his stuff because he's just such a terrific actor. Let's make an inelegant transition away from James Bond into Thor, Love, and Thunder because it's a big, big movie. This might be the last big movie for a long time.

I was reflecting on this actually with Amanda Dobbins about how it might be kind of a weird summer here on The Big Picture because we don't have a lot of event movies. And there's not really anything until mid-September, late-September in terms of like tentpole style projects for us. So we got to make this one worth it. Thor, Love, and Thunder.

Taika Waititi's back. He, of course, directed Ragnarok a few years back and was a huge success with critically and commercially. He co-wrote this movie as well with Jennifer Cate Robinson. And before we get into Love, and Thunder, can you just remind listeners why Ragnarok was such a phenomenon and how Taika kind of burst onto the scene into the MCU?

Yeah, I mean, Taika was like a—well, wasn't a fairly standard hire for Marvel in terms of like he was an indie darling. You know, he had been nominated for an Oscar for a short film, but he wasn't, you know, a huge muscular force in the directing world. He couldn't command a huge paycheck or, you know, like exactly sort of what Marvel was looking for. But what's different about Taika in that role is that, you know, Hemsworth himself brought Taika on for Ragnarok.

Hemsworth, you know, as the story goes, you know, went to Kevin Feige and was like, I'm drowning. I feel like I'm suffocating in this role. I hate playing this character because he was cast as so humorless. And at that point, Hemsworth had done Ghostbusters, at least.

And we as an audience and those who saw him in the woods knew that, like, he had this playful comedic spark to him that he hadn't gotten to show off. And so they brought Taika in. They kind of threw out what they were going to do with Ragnarok. Because if you look at, like, Age of Ultron, the Ragnarok they were pointing to is not at all what they wound up doing.

And so Taika and Chris together, basically, and, you know, to their—and Stephanie Folsom is the co-writer on that film. But, like, to their credit, Marvel just let them sort of reboot the character in a way that was massively successful. That's a huge, like, party movie. And for people who hadn't spent time with Taika, like, maybe they'd seen What We Do in the Shadows and like that.

But people who hadn't spent a lot of time with Taika, like, got a taste of his sense of humor and, like, also the broader New Zealand sense of humor. And I think it felt like a huge breath of fresh air comedically, stylistically. And, yeah, I mean, people had a great time. And also, this is the ongoing conversation we're having about Marvel.

Both that movie and this one are so disconnected from the larger MCU nonsense, right? Like, Thor—and I say nonsense lovingly, but, like, Thor was not involved in, like, what was going on in some way. You know, it was just sort of like, meanwhile, out in space, here's what's happening. And I think that also felt really fresh and exciting for people.

Yeah, I would say, for the most part, that is the case in Love and Thunder as well. This feels a bit like a side story, more so than a contributory to the broader Phase 4 MCU story, wherever that's at it, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit here in our conversation. Love and Thunder is an interesting movie. I'm very mixed on it.

There are parts of it that I absolutely love. I am fond of Taika's comic style. There are also parts of it that I think, because of that style, can sometimes feel tinny or cheap in this world. And, like, there's a very fine line between that kind of kitsch camp that Taika leans into and something feeling not as developed or as kind of solidified as I want it to.

And this is an issue I'm having increasingly with Marvel films. I was very, very passionate about Phase 3. I really felt like, I'm not sure I've ever seen a gigantic corporation quite land the plane the way that they did. And so I'm going through a little bit of an evolution of my feelings on the brand at the moment.

Well, and that's surprising because the brand is diluting itself so much right now. Because, like, in addition to these movies and however you feel about Black Widow or Eternals or Shang-Chi or Doctor Strange, there's all the TV shows, which, like, with every new installment is another moment for someone to be like, does Marvel exactly know what it's doing still? Or does it have a cohesive vision here? Or are they just, I say this every time I come talk to you about Marvel, are they just bred too thin and trying to spend too many places at once?

I liked this movie better than you did. But I do think that some of that strain, I feel like if there were more time to really refine this movie, it could have been as sort of seamlessly, seamless feeling as Ragnarok. But that balance of tone, which I think is your main ish with the movie, is something that Tyga himself has always done in his filmography, right? Like, all of his stuff is deeply sad and funny at the same time.

And sometimes those combinations work, like, just kiss perfectly. And sometimes you feel a little more, like, controversially, possibly. I think his Oscar-winning Scream Blade, Judge a Rabbit, is, like, a less, you know, functional example of that. But something like Boy or Hunt for the Wilder People, which is far and away my favorite Tyga movie, like, is an expert balance of that.

And if you look back at Ragnarok, it feels like, like, when I saw this movie, Blood and Thunder, I saw it before even a lot of our press colleagues just because I had to do an early interview. And so a lot of them ask me, like, are people going to like this? This is good. And my first thought was tone, which is why I'm so interested that that is, like, what your book song says.

Like, Ragnarok feels uncomplicated as, like, a party movie. And this one is trying to be so many things all at once. And, you know, whether or not it hangs together, your mileage may vary. But when you think a little deeper about Ragnarok, like, it starts with the death of Odin.

These, like, boys lose their father after having lost their mother. And then it ends with the destruction of their homeland. And so there is that sorrow in that film. It's just the mix is a bit, I think, smoother than what you get in this one.

And, again, I think I liked it a little bit better than you, but I can't argue with you that, like, tonally there's a lot of leaps and swings, you know? Yeah, let's dig into that. And it's a scene. We're going to talk about the movie, I think, largely in a non-spoiler fashion for a stretch here.

And then as we get into some spoilers at the end of our conversation, I'll be sure to flag it. But, you know, the premise of the film is Thor, after completing some adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the beginning of this film, is seeking a kind of inner peace. He's feeling unresolved in some ways. And suddenly he's called back to action.

And so he and Cork have to reunite with Valkyrie, King Valkyrie, living now in New Asgard. And they are reunited shortly thereafter with Jane Foster, who is struggling with something and who is bound to be reunited with her ex, Thor. And by way of non-spoilering, I'll just say she finds a way to wield Mjolnir and become a super heroine herself. And they have to do so in order to stop Gorr the God Butcher, who is the character that Christian Bale plays, who is a man who has lost his religion and found a kind of rage and revenge.

And he is seeking a way to kind of reckon with the absence of faith by essentially killing gods. And Thor has to stop Gorr from killing the gods. And so the exploration of the gods and the god system is a big part of the story. It is, as all Thor stories are, an interplanetary adventure story bouncing from place to place across the Bifrost.

Like all Tyga movies, it is kind of neon-tinted and bedazzled and very funny at times and straining for laughs at times. Has a couple of very, very cool set pieces, just like Ragnarok did. The action is typically pretty good in Tyga's movies. The tone clashing, though, like you said, is a little complicated.

I completely agree with the way you described his movies, which is that they're both very sad and very funny at the same time. And there are very few filmmakers who are capable of that balance. The tricky thing is, this isn't just two kinds of movies. It's like six kinds of movies.

It's a really romantic movie. It's a movie about lost love and found love. It's a kind of kids in peril action movie. It's this kind of winking satire about comic book stories and stories about gods.

It is, I thought, a very effective gothic horror movie. My favorite parts of the movie by far were about the Bale character and the Bale character kind of tortures and terrorizes this world of gods. And it's also, it's a cancer drama. I mean, it's a very sincere and straightforward story about what happens when you get sick.

And that's a really tough thing to balance in a one-hour and 59-minute movie. And it is mercifully brief for an MCU movie. I'm very grateful to Tyga for keeping this movie short. But he's stuffing a lot into it.

And the leaping from movie type to movie type, I think, had me a little addled as I was watching it. What did you think about that? Well, what's interesting is that, so I've heard that there was initially like a four and a half hour cut of this movie, which doesn't surprise me. And we've heard about some of the things that were cut out.

Like, I don't think this is spoiler because given these interviews, like Jeff Goldblum was going to be in the movie. Peter Dinklage was going to be in the movie. And there's going to be, I think, more God butchering than we got in the end. But there were other things that were cut out.

And something that Tyga has said is something that he loves to do in order to make sure that he nails that balance. You talk about this a lot around Jojo Rabbit. And again, that balance didn't work well for me, but he won an Oscar, so what am I to say? Is that he loves to test, use test audiences to refine and refine and refine that tone balance.

I don't know if that's available to a Marvel director to get to show your film again and again and again to audiences. Internally, maybe, but I don't know that he has that opportunity to test the loon. The thing to make sure that the genuinely affecting Natalie Portman arc works with the core hijinks. You know what I mean?

And I think sometimes it does, and I think occasionally it doesn't. And I think that's true. And I also, the things that I love best were like Christian Bale and the Gothic core. There's a couple sequences with Christian Bale.

I watched the movie again last night, and again, they were my favorite. And it was the first thing that I wanted to point out. But I was watching, I was like, is this going to work for people? Bale is going so hard.

I think it's one of the best Marvel villain things I've ever seen in my life. But is everyone going to love it? I don't know. Let's talk about that, because that jumped out to me, too.

I remember when you talked about Eternals last fall, we talked about the kind of ever-looming Marvel villain problem in terms of telling its story. This movie dispenses with a lot of BS around the character. We just leap right into Gore's story. His daughter dies in the opening segment of the film.

And his motivations are clear. His pain is clear. What's driving him and the fact that a demonic sword has taken over his soul. Very quickly, we're just like, we're in MacGuffin territory, but it works very well, in part because Bale is just such a committed actor.

He is not fucking around. And the thing is, this is a very winky sub-franchise, and Hemsworth's performance is very self-aware and very self-deprecating, and that works really well. There's none of that in the Gore performance, which is not to say that there's not something kind of like, I guess, kind of comic and antic about what he's doing as a villain, but it is so sinister and so deep that you're almost like, are they in two different movies? There's one moment where Gore is talking to some kids, and he's kind of trying to relate, he's trying to scare them, but he's also kind of trying to relate to them.

It was very Pennywise, I thought. Yeah, but his glowing eyes are very Pennywise. It goes over very poorly, and there's almost this moment of like, you know, Taika loves social awkwardness. That's his favorite thing.

Like, what I love that Taika has done in every single one of his things is like, what if this thing that you think would be cool is actually a loser? Like, what if vampires were like, loser roommates in New Zealand, right? And like, what if Thor got a thunder? Like, especially the Guardian's opening, which we don't need to like spend too much time on, it's I think some of the weaker stuff in the thing, but like, what it puts Thor in position as like, he's the loser on this team.

and so to make Thor like God of Thunder this socially awkward emotionally unnoticed loser is brilliant and there's a flash of that with Christian Bale with Gore when he's trying to talk to these kids and they react in a way that he doesn't make sense and he's like I don't you know and so there was that moment but almost another in two different movies my favorite scene of the whole film involves Christian Bale Tess Thompson and Ali Portman and Chris Hemsworth all together interacting and Hemsworth and Bale is just like do you think that Christian Bale knows that he made some very popular Batman movies but also knows that the long legacy of those movies is Heath Ledger's Joker performance and he's like what if I got to do I don't know insensitive it feels very much inspired by Heath Ledger's Joker the character I mean the look of the character the malevolence that kind of like that kind of like questing like why is this person so villainous as like a curiosity while you're watching him I think very much feels like the Joker and sure maybe Bale was a little jealous it is ten full years since Bale was in a comic book movie and so it's interesting to see him returning to this kind of space at this time too I don't know if it was his name motivation but I felt very much like see what I can do sort of thing which is always what Christian Bale is doing see what I can do but I love that you mentioned Pennywise and I was thinking of the Joker and I love this idea of Gore the Godbutcher it's like scary clown I think also people have made the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang comparison as well so like this because Tyga loves to bring kids into whatever he does that's like a thing he loves to explore we have a lot more actual literal kids as opposed to like the man child that Thor is like in this movie and so to give it a villain that is more of this like scary clown style of villain works in a film with a lot more kids involved I think I don't know it's interesting but do you want to talk about like the visual sequence of I do so at a certain point there is a as there always is a kind of like act two showdown between the villain and the heroes and this sequence is almost exactly what I am often begging these Marvel movies to do which is to take a big stylistic risk in the middle of one of your surefire IP hit franchises and Tyga of course incredibly creative filmmaker it's really exciting they essentially travel to a planet where these children are being held captive and have to save them and then the film flips to this kind of chrome black and white and it's beautiful to look at this is essentially like a dust laden moon that they're crawling across questing to find gore and in addition to being a good battle sequence it just looks amazing you talked to Tyga you'll have an interview with him on the ringer next week what did you learn about this how they make the sequence yeah so my first like when you see this moon that they're going to land on my first thought was the Georges Mellier A Trip to the Moon like you know early early filmmaking just sort of that it looks so and then you get these creatures that are CGI but they look like Ray Harryhausen sort of stop motion creatures you know so you've got this like old school film technique going on but I asked him sort of technically or I was just so struck by it and he said that he was inspired to do it the reason he wanted to do it that way was he's pals with this this lab that has created this new technology satellite lab he's like my friend created this new technology called plate light technology and essentially you're shooting at a high frame rate and you've got points of light constantly points of light hitting the actors at all different angles and so then you can decide in the final take how you want to light the thing because you have all these different options in one take right so you shot it's almost as innovative I think it's bullet time I mean I don't know enough about the Nets of Bullets but it feels that way where like if you go to the satellite lab website and look at some of the example videos they have up there it's kind of astonishing and so what that meant because he shot it that way what that meant is that this is a moon that I guess has a light source constantly moving around it which just meant that the shadows and the light are constantly constantly chipping on these actors and it wasn't done quite digitally it's done in post but it's done practically and I feel like you can feel that if you had just sort of CGI painted this it wouldn't have looked nearly as beautiful as it might have looking you know that's part of why I'm mixed on the movie is you can feel the effort and intentionality in a sequence like this that you cannot feel in some of the Guardian stuff in the beginning in the sort of like the god corridor sequence you know the sort of god planet sequence which feels like you know I'm a little reluctant to use this phrase but like it feels a little Xena warrior princess you know when Taika is attempting to mock the absurdity of a story about gods he sometimes I feel like it goes a little too far and it looks like a kid's play and it takes you out of the fact that this is supposed to be like a really immersive world that you're in and in order to stick in the world and not feel like it's too much of a joke that you're being made fun of stuff can't look kind of cheap you know Zeus is a figure in this film Zeus's lightning bolt is in this film his lightning bolt kind of looks like a prop it doesn't look like an incredible weapon I know I'm picking nits but it's one of those things that like it pulls me out of a movie honestly no you mistake me I would never call you the carpet for picking this I think it's important to do that I think Stormbreaker looks kind of garbagey I've always hated the design of that weapon I think Mjolnir against all odds looks amazing it does look cool yeah I always like Mjolnir yeah Mjolnir looks amazing I always thought that Stormbreaker especially there's actually a moment so I think especially because the way that Chris Hemsworth wields it it looks so light and that's because you know he's so strong but there is a moment where Christian Bale gets his hands on Stormbreaker and he's dragging it and it was the first time that Stormbreaker looked kind of cool to me because it had a heft to it as opposed to like often it looks like it's made of styrofoam because you know Thor with all his muscles is just sort of whipping it around anyway I don't know the Russell Crowe thing like I laughed a lot in terms of Russell Crowe I have some questions the accent sounds to me like John Belushi in the old SNL like hamburger hamburger cheeseburger sketch and I'm like I was watching I was like I don't know man and then when I said again last night a couple people around me were like I don't know man when that accent came out that being said like a lot of I think Crowe is kind of crushing it honestly like comedically performance wise but I take your point about the setting around him honestly if that had been like if they had taken it more seriously and that's what taken it so well is he like finds the humor in the mundane right so if you had made that a more I mean as mundane as the Hall of God could be but a more like literal mundane sort of thing and had Crowe give that performance I think it would have worked even better do you know what I mean I do it's tricky because I understand the intention of what he's trying to do and what the comic beats are with what he's trying to do I think Russell Crowe is really funny but it just felt like it was happening in another movie and that's kind of a constant challenge for me with some of these films let's talk about speaking of in another movie Natalie Portman so Natalie Portman has not been a significant part of the MCU for quite a long time Remind me was she in The Dark World yeah so that's why she hasn't been in the Marvel Universe for a while so like Natalie Portman was in The Dark World she got Patty Jenkins hired on that film and then Patty Jenkins got fired off of that film and Natalie Portman was outraged that that happened and that's why that was the last we saw of Jane Foster for a long time was because Natalie Portman was like and also that film was supposed to have Hela as its villain so all this stuff happened with The Dark World even before it hit theaters it wasn't very popular that pissed Natalie Portman off so it was a minor miracle when she showed up at all in Endgame and I thought she was used sparingly but well in Endgame and it was a huge miracle but I think there's some real highs to her performance here but I'm curious to like what you think doesn't work here well so the Thor it's obviously understood that Taika basically completely shattered the tone of the first two Thor films and in doing so he's trying to bring an actor along for the ride who maybe is not quite as well suited to the tone of performance as Hemsworth as we know was basically dying to do a Thor performance like this and that's why he sought out Taika Tessa Thompson was cast by Taika and is so brilliant as Valkyrie because she gets Taika's tone and knows that comic sensibility of that character obviously Korg is poised by Taika the most significant figures in the story now have all been basically built inside of the Ragnarok world Jane is a very serious character she's a scientist and she's an earnest Natalie Portman figure despite appearing in an MCU movie she has a very specific acting style Natalie Portman can be kind of funny in movies but not really that's not really her thing what I think is funny is that if you go back and rewatch the first Thor she actually is like one of the funnier things about that movie but still being buttressed by Kat Dennings still someone there to kind of land the punchlines instead of her delivering them but in comparison to what like Hemsworth like the Shaker and Garama that everyone else is delivering around her she's kind of this light funny part of the fish out of water storyline like oh my god how hot this North God is sort of thing but you're right that when you then transfer that over to this she's been like the least comically you know I don't know adaptor or armed of all of them there's also this so this thing that they do I don't know if this is too much behind the scenes detail but this thing that they do in Marvel movies in order to mess with the height ratios of people is that they build these little like walkways catwalks around so whenever she's a mighty Thor in order to make her look taller than Tessa Thompson and nearly as tall as Chris Hemsworth they have Natalie Portman walking on like essentially an elevated platform next to Chris Hemsworth and like I honestly knowing that it almost looked to me like she was focusing a little bit on her balance than anything else which I wouldn't blame her for and there's some overtly comedic stuff like her workshop and her catchphrases that lands with a complete thud for me but then there's some like earlier life stuff like when we first see her in the hospital and she's explaining her you know she meets and she's reading her book like that stuff I think is really cute and fun and light and works yeah I think like quirky garden state Natalie Portman is very effective and like broad comic punchline type of ITD dialogue Natalie Portman is just not really a fit and it's nothing against her I'm a huge fan of hers she's my Long Island queen I will rep for Natalie Portman every day of the week but you can really feel you can really feel her and Tessa Thompson having a moment in a hallway before setting off on a mission I was kind of like Tessa's really here for this Natalie Portman's not totally up to it and it's just one more thing where I was like that's gonna pull me out of an otherwise fun space adventure that I would have dug I do want to call out something again we're like trying not to spoil like major beats or whatever but in terms of the there was once a four and a half hour cut of this movie I feel like maybe we would have spent more time with Valkyrie and Jane to find out because when we used to check in with them they seem to have already bonded and formed this friendship we never see them like meet you know and I actually kind of liked that it worked for me like that was a cut that really worked for me where I just thought that they were bonded I liked having them talk to each other Jen Robinson it's no relation but Jen Robinson the co-screenwriter on this is like kind of a pile of mine and like her she worked on this great MTV show Sweet Vicious which is about two young women vigilantes on a college campus and I felt some of that vibe coming out like I would have watched the Valkyrie Jane you know movie or a short film or something like that and maybe that would have given Natalie a bit more room to do the kind of comedy that she is comfortable with as opposed to like having to balance that broad comedy with a lot of the heavier stuff and a lot of the romantic plot that she's carrying with Hemsworth here so yeah one other little gripe that I have you can have as many gripes as you want Sean Fantasy it may have been Chris Ryan pointed this out to me recently but the previously on quality of storytelling in a lot of these films and TV shows where we're either getting massive info dumps and conversations around tables or we have a character delivering soliloquies about moments past as a framing device in this case Korg I guess telling some children I don't even know who Korg is speaking to yeah the first time he does it he's talking to like a group of aliens and then we never see who he's talking to again to me oh sorry go ahead well it's clearly there to basically like hey in case you missed the last couple of movies here's what happened in the Thor story over the last six years and I understand why that's necessary given that this is the 29 MCU film it had six series on television already there's a lot more coming but I really felt like the fattiness of that stuff of like the recappiness of that stuff and there are a handful of times where we see say Thor and Jane's relationship and it's really fun and funny and that's not his original and it feels like it's adding to their story but for the most part it feels like hey last time Thor did this and now he's doing this and that is in addition to a return to the Matt Damon Luke Hemsworth performative and running those characters back and having them recreate a moment from Ragnarok to remind you oh yeah so this is like four times in the movie where we pause to remind you of stuff that had previously happened okay so I take I take both your point and perhaps Chris Ryan's point and like you know so there's as you all as you and Chris and everyone who reads comics knows there's like a grand tradition of the asterisk and like see issue 42 for what happened here right like that's a comic book thing I feel like as the franchise goes on all this stuff feels weightier in terms of the long the deep edge of history and homework you have to do in order to pop into one of these stories and understand the context of it but I will give Tyka credit for trying to do it creatively in both instances the Korg thing things are generally going to be funnier if Tyka says them that's just true and also the Korg thing reminded me a lot of like Into the Spider-Verse where we got the like introduction of all the Peter Parkers and Gwen Stacy and stuff like that and they just repeated the bit throughout that film my favorite superhero film so I was like oh they're doing Into the Spider-Verse okay and then the meta play stuff worked so well in Ragnarok I thought it was so funny mainly because it was surprising slightly diminishing returns here but like I hear what you're saying it's like how do they not do that how can they not do that because if someone comes into this movie and this is the first Marvel movie they've ever seen they need to understand the context of what they're watching but like how do you do this as Marvel with a decade of films and all these TV shows and not have that in there is there an example you could go with like a more successful version of the recap here? Here's the thing what you're asking me to do is come and fight each other and I will not do that job maybe in a future episode when I have the power and creativity that he does to execute the long story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe I will find an effective way to remind people what we have previously done in these films it raises like an existential question which is like does everything have to be interconnected do we have to understand this stuff in this way and then when things are not connected people like me gripe on podcasts about how they're not telling some bigger story that I want to be invested in so they're really they're between a rock and a heart they built this incredibly successful mega franchise and I think it's more just I think a little bit goes a long way as opposed to carving out three four minutes of a film that is less than two hours devoted to remember when this happened in 2015 and I don't have a solution but I know that it didn't really work I think you're right that the Jane and Thor part is the most successful one because that's information we didn't have we know that Jane left and we don't know why and so we get an ABBA banger last summer and we get a relationship montage and it's pretty definitely done I think we all feel especially again with the massive rapid expansion of the TV side of things the weight of the MCU and I really am of the mind that like you know something like Moon Knight whether or not it was wholly successful whether or not anyone listening to a film podcast even watched Moon Knight a refreshing thing about it is that it was completely 100% disconnected from everything else going on what's wild to me is you know you talk about the landing of the plane with Endgame and we all agree that was hugely successful but in order to tell that story they had to break their world and their ability to put their world back together has been you know here and there like Falcon which is a soldier that TV series had to carry the entire burden it seems now of explaining the socio-political geopolitical ramifications of you know half the population of the planet going away for several years a big cool swing that they did in a movie but when you then have to tell the story after it and so again we said this already but a great thing about this movie is that Thanos is not even like an issue really the specter of Gamora is maybe like slightly floating over the beginning but other than that no the other thing that's interesting totally and sort of connected tissue wise is this is the first horror movie without Loki in it it's a great point you know and so the Tom Hiddleston whatever is going on with like shuffling the cards on Tom Hiddleston in the MCU and I think most people agree that Loki is one of the more successful Marvel TV shows if not the most successful it's interesting to me to see the Thor character not through the lens of Loki which is interesting is how we've experienced him this whole time and Taika I remember when Ragnarok came out Taika would give interviews talking about in order to make sure that Thor is actually the star of a Thor movie as opposed to what has happened with the first two Thor movies where I would argue Loki is maybe the star of those movies they had to bring him low he's constantly being beat up electrocuted diminished all this other stuff in that movie they had to pommel Loki in order to raise Thor up and so even more so now they've shuffled Loki off they're like okay Tom you can rule the Marvel TV world Chris gets to have his franchise that he is essentially the star of so I just think that's an interesting element to all of this I don't know that I miss him I always miss Loki honestly but like I don't know that he would have added to this movie until you made the point it hadn't even occurred to me that Loki was not at this even though he's an essential part of the first part of the story maybe it's just because I feel like his character is now off on a different kind of quest and so he doesn't really fit into the story I would have been shoehorning it anyway the way that some other things are shoehorned one other thing before we spoil a couple of things about this movie whereas Led Zeppelin was the soundtrack of the first Taika Thor film Guns and Roses is the soundtrack of this film even more so than Led Zeppelin I think there was only one Led Zeppelin song used and his immigrant song was the only song used twice in Ragnarok I think three Guns and Roses songs are used in this film also pretty cool effect I wish that they had not been featured I wish Paradise City had not been featured in the trailer because then I think I wouldn't have felt like a fun reveal had been given away but I will say that the needle drop that is used in the big climax battle sequence I thought was magnificent and as a 40 year old man in America I have a very soft place in my heart for the song that they use there he also did this thing where the Guns and Roses chatter comes from a kid character and something that I find all the time when I'm podcasting about these things is I'll have people say would a kid really be interested in that and so he put a poster on that kid as well and he had the kid explain why he liked Guns and Roses and I kind of liked that I don't know yeah the Guns and Roses worked really well for me in this and when we get again this is in the trailer so when we get the reveal of an early Thor outfit where he's wearing the red leather vest and then like you know just it's a pretty Guns and Roses moment yeah it's pretty hair metal I'm not a huge hair metal person I will say as a counterpoint to myself and the raw emotionality that Guns and Roses brings out in me Led Zeppelin Guns and Roses is some pretty basic raw stuff so for Taika who is this incredibly progressive, creative risk-taking writer and director this is two movies in a row where I'm like okay you're a 13-year-old boy I mean he is in a lot of ways I've literally watched any interview with him but I think there's a sequence at the end of Boy where they do Thriller I feel like Taika has always had a really basic pop rock sense and that's part of his charm is that he is a pop he's interested in pop along with I don't just mean pop art he's interested in mainstream blockbuster culture and all this other stuff he doesn't look down knows that even when he makes his artier films and so I think that's all part of the seemingly contradictory Taika package where sometimes the strong way if I get off of Taika is a wildly immature sort of man-child sort of vibe and then he is capable of deeply profoundly emotionally empathetic art at the same time both of those things are true in this one person and again that speaks to I think the tone balance sometimes it comes together in this perfect exquisite mix and sometimes you're sort of like the ingredients are separate the salad dressing is separating out a little bit and I can see the oil on top of everything else it's a great metaphor for it let's do a couple of spoilery things if you don't want to have anything spoiled for you we haven't seen this film yet just this will be 5-10 minutes this will be a short chat but there are of course singers in this there are of course some pretty big reveals so let's hit on those we did mention Russell Crowe and Zeus and what seemed to be a death blow to Zeus by Thor but of course it's not and Zeus has survived and I guess it seems like they're trending the future of the Thor story in a direction of Thor versus the gods and Thor versus Hercules who was revealed in the post-post-credit sequence as portrayed by Brett Goldstein who people may know from Ted Lasso because it's a long rumor that he would play Hercules and of course I guess it's happening now is that right? is it going to be it's so funny okay so I knew no spoilers for this movie going in and I actually hadn't even seen I'm like I've been changed my tenure at the ringer I'm like unhooking from the spoiler machine but the one rumor the one thing I had seen was sort of like a blind not a spoiler where it was like a recent Emmy winner will play like a character that you know from a highly beloved show will play a major character going forward in the MCU and my favorite the main guest that I thought people were making that I loved was like they were like oh the guest people were making were like oh Jason Sudeikis is going to lead the Fantastic Four movie everyone's like yes he's going to be playing Mr. Fantastic is going to happen and so when the movie ended and in my screen the crowd went wild for Brett Goldstein as Hercules I was like oh they were so close those guests were so close but so far let me talk to you a second about let me eat pics of this about Marvel for a second with you these promised stingers are starting to really get on my nerves because as excited as I am to see Brett Goldstein as Hercules which I am when are we getting that is it going to be 10 years from now I don't know because do you remember that Guardians of the Galaxy 2 ends with like the reveal of Adam Warlock and that was like 1 million years ago when if ever are we ever going to see Harry Styles as Eros again like we're not when are we going to find out what's going on with the Ten Rings and Shang-Chi we're not ending these movies with a stinger that leads us into the next movie now we're ending these movies with a stinger that leads us to a movie that may or may not happen at some point maybe in the future somewhere and I to your point about recapping it's my job to hold all these threads and that's fine but like for the average film goer like it's starting to be a lot of things to hold do you know what I mean yeah when I saw the news about the Jon Snow series potentially coming down Game of Thrones Pike I thought of Black Knight and Kit Harington and I was like oh yeah is he getting his own Marvel movie or did Eternals not land and so they're like sorry Kate you're not getting your big like Marvel thing and he's like well I guess I'll go back up north you know like is that I don't know yeah I don't know it's a very good question I don't need like a slack update from Kevin Feige about what decisions he's made and obviously like Marvel's going to Comic Con there's going to be a D23 we're going to get more information about where a lot of this stuff is headed I don't know why I have anxiety about where all this stuff is headed I need to grow up and not worry about this stuff but I have a similar feeling of like what you showed me how much is Sylvester Stallone going to matter to Guardians 3 I need to know you know what I mean like that sort of like that just had five or six things that I really really dug where I'm like this is kind of like reading a comic book there are going to be jokes that you like or splash pages that you love there's going to be a fun conclusion and then you go to the next issue and I think getting my head around that a little bit more and knowing that there are always unresolved or uncompleted threads in comic book stories as well is basically just what this is for as long as this is this dominant thing where side stories are as eventized as the core story yeah first of all can you imagine getting an issue that's like Thor and Valkyrie and Jane go to the Shadow Realm like that's just a solid issue like start to finish that adventure is like Jeff is perfect and she's like are you Valkyrie seniors of Marvel University have graduated Thor is now like the most famous OG superhero with apologies to like Dr.

Strange who's still like a junior or sophomore maybe you know what I mean and like maybe you can say Mark Ruffalo's Hulk but like Thor like he's you know he carries so much more weight so it feels odd to put him in like a side side adventure you know you know you just remind me of a point I failed to make while we were in non-spoiler but I'm going to float here too which is that given that I thought the horror aspects of this most recent Thor movie were the most effective I wonder if Taika and Sam Raimi had traded jobs what if that would have worked because I think totally Dr. Strange needed a little bit more of a sure hand in mocking Dr. Strange and I think that I wanted more horror in my Thor movie and I couldn't it just crossed my mind that I was watching it it's such an interesting thought I think Raimi could do Love and Thunder I don't know that Taika could do Strange because I think Taika's tolerance for bullshit would not hang with and the only thing I didn't say about Taika being hired is that like he Ragnarok came out Black Panther came out and those two really seem like this answer to will Marvel let a director actually be themselves in a movie right at the post I'd be writing everyone was like directors aren't allowed to be themselves and be creative and Ragnarok really felt like a Taika movie and Ragnarok really felt like you got to do something with Black Panther if you put Taika on in Dr. Strange which holds so many threads in so many other movies and is so beholden to what it has to do to set things up Taika I feel like he'd be like I'm not doing that no you're right I just think that that vanishing moment in Multiverse of Madness where America Chavez and Dr.

Strange are jumping through the multiverses I was like let Taika unleash Taika on 20 minutes of that that would be so fun he'd be so deft at that and I wanted more than that movie anyway so I don't know just something across my mind a couple other spoiler-y things no more gore I guess bummer but also it feels like the same with Hela it feels like a Kate Blanchett or a Christian Bale is going to be like I'll come have fun and do one movie with you similarly possibly Natalie Portman I mean we get this post-credit time doll and Jane and Valhalla so they could come back if we wanted them two to do something but also Jane Foster you're in Spider-Man so Jane Foster dying at the end of this movie really feels to me like Natalie Portman being like okay Marvel I'll come back and we'll say goodbye to Jane Foster in a way that isn't just me being like fuck you Marvel not coming back to do your movies after you fired my director sort of thing and so we'll give Jane this beautiful send-off and I actually found that stuff really emotional really profound I thought her like the moments where Jane is making the decision to go back in Thor's face when he like realizes what she's decided there goodbye all of that really worked very good very good for me but it does feel like Natalie's like okay I don't want to come back and like be in the MCU forever but I'll come back and do this movie that sounds fun yeah it's interesting to kind of close the loop on two pretty significant actors in the whole franchise one other thing this is the first time we've seen eternity in an MCU film we've seen I believe the temple vault on Morag shows us the four entities that made the stones entropy infinity death and eternity now death is a figure a character a thing that has been much teased over the years and much debated about whether or not it could be introduced whether Galactus is going to be introduced whether Mephisto is going to be introduced all of these big intergalactic spiritual figures that Marvel really tangled with in the 70s as it was getting more and more experimental and more psychedelic I thought that the sort of like wordless representation of eternity was interesting it reminded me a little bit of Eternals where it was like how much this doesn't matter if we don't explore it really in a significant way but there's a part of me that wants this kind of genuinely intergalactic psychedelic version of Marvel storytelling what did you make of just featuring that figure that idea in this movie I liked that it was you sparingly and not explaining that much and then it's just sort of like they call it a wishing well at one point because getting bogged down and Eternals gets so bogged down in that sort of big picture and once you interrogate how the universe is made things start to feel like they fall apart whereas you're just sort of like here's the thing and it's a wishing well and don't think too much about it and your main thing you need to worry about is Gore the God Butcher is just a dad who was devastated that his child died and that is always in terms of the Marvel villain problem like Helen is a daughter who feels burned by her father and so like Gore is a father who has lost his daughter works so much better than like I don't know Lee Pace's Ronin who's just like a genocidal maniac you know like stuff like that so I like that they kept as small stakes as someone called the God Butcher could feel I like that they kept those stakes feeling kind of small do you know what I mean or it's not small to lose your child obviously but it felt human if that makes sense Speaking of that child that child that is revived at the end of the film we're sort of reimagined by Eternity's power I guess it's a little unclear what the science is on how Eternity works but I gotta say I'm getting a lot of dad content these days Thor as surrogate father just very moving to me is that Hemsworth's real child? I believe it is and I also read that the wolf woman who in the beginning of the film was by Elsa Pataki who was Chris Hemsworth's real life partner and mother of that child making her return to the MCU after she doubled for Natalie Portman that's how Natalie Portman was that Chris Hemsworth's real wife had to come in to do like the kiss at the end of the dark world is that true? Did that happen? Yeah it's her in like a way anyway the yeah I love kids and like as I said earlier Tiger loves the kids stuff and so you could like Thor and his daughter in the space Winnebago making pancakes and getting their boots on I have such an appetite for that entire movie you know what I mean and so it's just it's hunt for the wilder people but make it Thor and like Hercules is also there I guess like happily that would be really fun but I just you have to assume Taika's not coming back to the story right given all the opportunities he has and all the stories he wants to tell do you think he'll be back for a third film?

I think if he is it would be a while from now and that's my question like when are we going to see Bryce Goldstein how long does Bryce Goldstein have to stay in Hercules shape like you know like when are we going to come back to that so the other challenge of even doing another Thor movie is if it's not Taika can you do another big tone shift and if not can you replicate a comic actor a comic director who can hate on what Taika does he's so singular it's a tall task I wonder if you're right that we may never see some of these other stories maybe they'll have to find a way to kind of like soft retire Thor in a way also this movie is not getting the best reviews ever I'll be fascinated to know if it succeeds beyond I noticed it was 70% on Rotten Tomatoes this morning that's not great I don't know we'll see they hit us the old Thor will return at the end so you know we'll see I can see anything because Taika's going to make a whole entire Star Wars film right that's what he says Lucasfilm wants to take a ball to the end zone anytime soon but like the that's a such a long process making a Star Wars movie and he's got this other movie that he made and all this other stuff so like if there's a Thor 5 directed and written by Taika I feel like we're not getting it for like another five years I was just going to say 2028 that feels right let's talk a little bit more about Taika before we wrap because we don't have some sort of superstructure here I think we want to put a spotlight on some of his work that is really interesting there was a New York Times profile originally by Davis Coff the premise of the piece was effectively boy this guy's doing a lot of stuff he seems really busy and he is relentlessly pursuing new opportunities and perhaps at the expense of himself and I wonder if that's also something that may have plagued this movie just a little bit that he's got so much going on right now because when I look back at his very contained very focused early films you see a guy who's got total command of the unusual tone that he's in pursuit of the first three movies are Evil vs. Shark Boy and What We Do in the Shadows all very clever all very emotional all very kind of twee but not in a way that I find offensive and as the world get bigger and the opportunity gets bigger I feel those things getting pulled apart in various ways of those first three if you're a Taika novice listening to this episode should you start the beginning and parallel through what's the best place to start with Taika I feel like it's not hard to do a complete Taika you know watch through there's not that many movies so if you want to do Evil vs. Shark you can 2007 I would go see Evil vs. Shark not because I knew who Taika was but because I was a Fly to the Concords fan even though he was involved in Fly to the Concords but I was a huge Fly to the Concords fan so if you like Jemaine Clement maybe it's his but it is essentially just Jemaine and Taika doing Napoleon Dynamite which was a very popular independent sort of thing this film got bought in 2006 out of Miramax Miramax bought it based off of a single trailer so that's how everyone was chasing that Napoleon Dynamite sure maybe start with Evil vs.

Shark but if you want to do kids only I do think Boy is Worth Watching it's very shaggy but I think it's Taika's most personal film it tells similar-ish stories in real life Taika's mom met his dad when she was doing a literary project in jail so it's about a boy his like convict father and like his visions of who his father is versus who his father actually is and uh taika plays the father plays his own father essentially it's not biographical but it kind of is and there's a lot of flights of fancy a lot of really fun like early watching a creative person with a low budget and what they can do i think that's always um interesting and i think a lot of people see what we do in the shadows so i don't really need to sum for it what do you think of those stories well i wonder if at a certain point the television show has sort of subsumed the film in a way you know taika is obviously a star of um what we do in the shadows one of the stars and he's not the star of the tv series but um i i probably would start with boy just because i feel like it's kind of the skeleton key to a lot of the sincerity that you find in his movies i'm not as big in the eagle versus shark i find it to be a little too like wes anderson slash like i don't know like they might be giants on the wrong side of tweed yeah but there's a lot of like there's animation and like stop motion and there's very early odds like indie yeah i think shell gondry you can feel in there a couple of other stylistic leaps i feel like you really kind of you know it's you already mentioned it a hundred other people i think many people believe this is his best movie um his most fully conceived most emotional movie great performance from sam neill in this movie um that might be one of my favorite movies of all time i've rewatched it so many times i thought randomly at a south by screening and not even like a main like a random afternoon south by screening and uh i didn't know i didn't know anything about going into it and it just absolutely blew me away and every time i watch it i love it more and that elusive tone balance i think is most perfected in that in that movie i agree it's funny to watch julian dennison become more and more of a star in like deadpool 2 and godzilla versus kong because it'll always be the kid from will the people yeah um and raggar me very just discussed it and i think you and i are very aligned on dodo rabbit which i i'm still a bit mystified by it as it's like a success uh it does make me very curious about next full wins which is next movie which i think has been completed but it's not gonna be released until next year starring michael fassbender about a is it it's a soccer team but where's the soccer team located is it hawaii is a native new zealand i can't recall where the team is but this has been like pegged as an awards movie but it may not be coming till next year so who knows if it's gonna be an awards film i think elizabeth moss is also in it i look forward to it and then he's got this great side hustle as a tv writer director and producer well here like having called taika something of a man child earlier in the podcast let me let me give him some laurels and say something that he's done with his rising star and my theory around that jojo rabbit win is that it is much about like people loving thor ragnarok and also taika being a really fun interview yeah he's a cool guy yeah he's really fun to be around as anything else like honestly that's that's i think why jojo rabbit uh won an oscar but uh i don't regret it i just pretend it's for a lot of people and i'm zero percent mad about it but um the uh what he's done with his power is he's used it to like lift up other creators um one uh project that comes to mind is like a breaker uppers which was this like cute little new zealand uh film made by like a couple of women that he has like you know so it's like taika ytt brings you the breaker but like he didn't really have anything to do with making that film he just like splashed his name on it similarly with like reservation dogs the fx show fantastic fx show but like it's certainly hard show he's a great creator but like people didn't know who he was so people are like oh taika ytt's reservation dogs even though taika again really had very little to do with that or what we do the shadows like jemaine is the driving force on that tv show it's not taika but he's like sort of billboarding it's sort of like the way the bad robot is sort of like billboarding his name in order to sell these things done by creators that he backs and supports or our flag needs to death which he showed up to like star in which is something of like you know a little phenomenon he showed up to star in it's not a type of show he's in it restarted his one-time collaborator is in it it's uh but like david jenkins is the creator of that show but like so there's this type of tv brand that he has sort of created in order to lift up queer stories and stories about you know native kids and all sorts of stuff like that and i think that's a really cool thing to do with your marvel you know you can you can date read a aura and you can also champion these projects you know i agree it's an awesome thing that he does and all other shows that you mentioned the exception of our flagging staff i just haven't had a chance to watch um but what we do in the shadows and reservations are both great and if his name on that billboard helps more people check it out that's fantastic um i'm a fan of his despite being a little bit mixed on this movie i am really excited to see him outside of the mcu and outside of his established world of ip and see what next goal wins looks like because i believe with a small amount of reservation that uh he's like a singular voice who can kind of cut through what it means to be a big name director right now which is not having to lean on the marvels and star wars of the world but he seems to be trying to balance in the one for them one for me mode these days but to your point and he gave this great interview i'm gonna plug another interview he gave to my pal katie richard from the local men podcast really great long-form interview mostly about our flagging staff but also about the 90 things that he was doing once because he was like doing our flagging staff which meant getting into like major hair and makeup for hours every morning and katie was basically like how do you have time to do that if you're trying to bring a marvel movie across the finish line you've got this soccer thing that you've done got all this other stuff going on so again to my point about marvel being stretched thin like we don't want to dilute the taika magic which i think is what you're saying right it's like it's like submission returns if you're everywhere doing everything everywhere else right so my ideal i wanted taika star wars only because i'm very curious what that looks like but i would i do less taika joe you have a long conversation coming about thor love and thunder on the house of our on monday you have a conversation coming on monday you're coming back on prestige tv pod to recap it also you're recapping westworld with shoemaker and heifetz what else you're everywhere right now on the network everything everyone wants probably content is still going strong content of course yeah you're doing like eight out of the week you're in the cr zone something no no like six like i'm still in jv i think we'll see we'll see if i can make varsity this year okay thanks for doing this i appreciate it okay let's go to my conversation now claire denis it's an honor to be joined by claire denis claire how are you i'm fine i'm fine thank you for doing the show both sides of the bleed your newest film was made during the pandemic i'm wondering if you can describe what it was like to make a film during that time the best that could happen during the pandemic is being able to do that film you know like something um i thought maybe we had to be tested three times a week now everybody's doing that you know but at that time we were like slightly afraid especially because we were mostly shooting in cars and one apartment and a small house not in large locations so but i think most of us were really happy to get you know did that period in our history do anything to your creativity did you feel more or less creative did you struggle with thinking about how to make a film in that period i don't think so first of all i don't think i i wake up in the morning feeling creative you know i never thought oh my god i'm feeling so creative today you know no i think i was um i was cooking a lot and i was afraid by the amount of people contaminated and in hospital and suffocating and i was afraid by the pandemic but for some reason i felt more afraid for for other people than for me myself you know it's always like that i was feeling like i was well protected washing my hands wearing masks i don't know and even during the shooting no i think we we felt lucky more than in danger i read that you were preparing to shoot the stars at noon as it started to happen and that you had to pause that and change some plans of course i wanted to shoot stars at noon but then the pandemic end of march so i had been already doing location scouting you know in central america and suddenly there was no way to travel anymore and also especially people coming from england or america we could not connect but by zoom or phone you know and to do casting was impossible almost you know would you have never made both sides of the blade if that had not happened then or is this something you had been thinking about making for a while not at all i was working on a script with christine the writer and and then because the story took place i thought i had to forget for a while stars at noon so we had this work with christine going on for another project and then vincent landon and my producer and juliette we decided the four of us maybe let's do something in paris instead and we change completely the project i use a the structure of one of christine novel and changing things of course because in that novel christine was speaking in the first person she was the woman and speaking in the first person so i had to change a lot of things for to make the film for those actors and i don't know it was um like rushing through script writing and we were ready end of november and it was not easy to do location scouting even in paris and we had a very small budget but i have to say yeah i'm sure this film would not have happened without the penalty i think so it feels like a a reunion of sorts of a lot of your films sort of coming together with vincent and juliette and christine and grégoire and tender sticks and so many of your past collaborators are all sort of meeting together at this time is that something that you you thought out is just because these are your friends and so it's easier they're always there yeah i mean unless one day they might say no but uh as long as i say yes yeah i'm lucky and happy now grégoire was the perfect person for me because as is as there is a dialogue between juliette and vincent where when she said oh i'm sorry when the past is coming back and vincent says ah the past is coming back and then i thought well then maybe the past for me would be uh grégoire no i thought grégoire was the perfect guy for the film this is one of your most intimate movies i feel like the close-ups and the intensity of the encounters and the mystery of the love at the center of the story when a story is this intimate especially in this period when you're making a movie in a pandemic with a small cast in small locations how do you accomplish that what do you think about when you want to make a movie feel this way i think it's not a joke i think it could be also a result of the pandemic because there was this thing that we were mostly all in our apartments not with a crew around and suddenly we were used to be closed you know i mean there was no really need for a large shot anywhere in the apartment would have been difficult but suddenly completely this moment we're in you know to be in an apartment to be in the corridor of a subway wearing a mask to be in a car i mean all those closed locations were not only convenient but in a way we were used to you know and so we're just reopened by the way at that time and the only thing we did um with another perspective was the opening in the sea when they are swimming and that we did that scene with um it was such a small budget to me i really wanted to open the scene like that like a statement to say they are still in love with each other it's not like a couple tired of each other it's a real couple they feel good together you know they come back home and and i thought it was important after the pandemic because the first time we were by the seaside you know the beaches were empty i mean it was just a sort of prologue to say they feel good together i love how you open the film that way too because it feels like the rest of the film takes place in in rooms and in darkness and at night and this is the only time in winter yes and it's like that there's it's almost like their last moment of bliss you know before everything unravels exactly exactly how did you collaborate with eric gothier because i think this is the first time you've worked with him as a dp yeah yeah not only because of the schedule of the people i work with were changed and agnes was preparing staying at home by zoom film and then eric was free to work with me and ready to do so and we knew each other and so i asked him would you do that and i think it was a for some reason i i don't know we were like another couple you know we were always next to the actor i was walking by by him and the camera i mean it was a very close uh collaboration with eric and very great very interesting yeah both sides of the blade reminded me a little bit of bastards as i was revisiting your films and i was wondering if you think of your films in relationship to one another i don't think no i i'm sorry to say so but i'm not such a well-organized person it's not that i'm badly organized but i think it's hard to connect what i'm going to do a new film to a film from the past you know it's like um the lover from the past but it's to start a new movie it's good to have the less burden as possible you know not a heavy weight on my shoulder so to think about the previous film it's not my my type of solution it makes sense the reason it made me think of that way is because you know the big theme of that film is also how the past can kind of haunt you and seeing that song and actor's faces that are memorable but in the same vein i was wondering i saw in some marketing materials this film described as an erotic thriller both sides of the blade i'm not sure i agree that it's an erotic thriller but i was wondering if you think about genre when you're sitting down to make a film no this erotic thriller was absolutely not me inventing such a subtitle for the film but i thought somebody from the market wrote that you know somewhere if i remember well i think but it's certainly not my my style erotic thriller uh i would never say that erotic thriller no no no do you think of your other films that way though you know do you think of trouble every day as a horror film or anything like that do you think of these films and genre stereotypes even when i did trouble every day before i start writing the script ask are you ready to do a i was asked to do an horror movie for a producer for an american producer and i i told him i'm afraid i am not able to do a genre movie because knowing me if i try to do an horror movie it will really be horrible you know it will really be horror so genre is great but genre means a sort of it needs a sort of distance a sort of relation with a distance to horror or fear you know so i think for me it was like diving into into a sort of horror yeah i wanted to ask you about your experience on high life and working in english with some american english movie stars and a bigger budget and all these other things did it did it change how you think about the kinds of films you want to make in the future at all no and you could ask robert i i don't think it was such a very such a big big budget you know for a film like that it was a rather small budget except the only luxury was to have a set you know in a studio in germany but that was of course necessary for the film you know and very little special effect so i never felt when i was shooting high life and i think no nobody else on the set felt we were doing a huge science fiction movie and certainly robert was not complaining we were shooting fast and and robert was part of the crew robert was such a i mean all the actors mia juliette andrew andre benjamin we were like a sort of a group of people in a small set you know if i think about the film the only thing i see is that long corridor and the film take place in a sort of corridor and a garden you know i never thought i was on the way to big movie you know i was happy to work with those actors and actresses very happy honestly i i really love to work with rob and even english thing was not so difficult because also when i met rob or me or most of the time we were speaking English on the set you know very little German and no French you know so it was like the way to do that movie it was not on the way to bigger movie to Hollywood no it was like I remember when I started the script I said after all if it takes less in space what other language we could use English I mean American Russian and maybe Chinese that's all nobody will use there is no of course there could be Spanish speaking but there's a French space program there is a French space program in Guyane only to send satellites you know not with people and I think in the American both American and Russian program there have been three or four French space notes with the Stars at Noon coming out later this year this is going to be your most prolific year ever I think and yeah it's true and they're both adaptations which I thought was interesting very different adaptations we have not in mind to adapt that novel at all it's suddenly in the process of writing for Vincent Juliet, Grégoire and also the story of the boy the young boy and Diorgier and his grandmother all this we could find in a common trunk of memory and story and the couple and the ex-lover was something I knew there was in a Christian novel and we find it great but Stars at Noon it's a very different thing when I discovered Dennis Renssel novel I didn't start reading Stars at Noon I read other novels first and when I read Stars at Noon I was devastated by its style the melancholy reading Dennis Renssel was finding a kind of way to tell a story that felt really close to me and then as usual I took my time and then I had a meeting with Dennis and his wife and it was great and then he told me don't ask me to adapt this novel I would never do it because I tried before and it's not a good memory so it told me a lot about this novel that was really the true story of him and I don't know I think I thought maybe Stars at Noon would be only a project would never be a film although I had Robert read it and it was a sort of project and then for Robert came Tenet and after Tenet Batman and then the pandemic all together seemed put in a distance but when we were shooting I live with Robert I was told one day in the middle of shooting that Dennis just died and I told Robert it's strange because now that I know he's dead it's as if I was obliged to do the movie I cannot go on dreaming about I'll do that movie I'll do that movie one day no suddenly it became very important for me just because I had met him I thought it was a way to be true to him you know and true to my admiration also so as soon as I could travel and cast in foreign countries then I thought with more or less money whatever I tried to do it and then we were helped by A24 and in the end we were on the edge of the pandemic but then I just could travel and come to Panama because also yeah the origin was to shoot in Nicaragua but in the meantime because of the pandemic and because the president of Nicaragua decided to be re-elected there was a sort of impossibility to go there the border was not open anymore and no insurance company would not accept us to go there so then because I had that plan B with Panama we went there you know it's exciting that you're adapting that book I love Dennis Johnson as well are there other projects that are like that that you've been thinking about for years and years that you've been wanting to tackle but it hasn't worked out for some reason we started no it does not work out it's just like you know time is a very flexible material and I thought oh I have time I have time you know and it's the when the muse of Dennis' death I freaked out I thought oh time is not as long as I thought it's not as flexible as I thought so there is a play written by a French play writer that I want to adapt also maybe sometimes yeah I don't know you don't scheme you don't strategize these things you just you take them one at a time the play if I adapt the play it means probably to be going to Africa to find a location in Africa and I know I need a brave producer and a brave crew brave actor and I need myself to be brave because it's it's going to be these days are not so easy you know I know a lot of tourists are traveling back now it's like a rush of tourism but on the other end there is a the fact is the world is not at peace you know and the pandemic is not completely finished and some countries are suffering more than others you know so I don't know if a project to go back to do the film in Africa is realistic or not I don't know yet it's been a long time since you made a film in Africa it's obviously such a significant part of your life in your story it's been almost almost 15 years something like that but as I tell you time is when you say almost 15 years for me in a way it was yesterday the time is so location scouting writing shooting what matter was great great I loved shooting the film with Isabelle I loved it but that's why it seemed to be yesterday but I know it took me a long time to be ready for that I love that film I hope you make another film in Africa I hope to Clary end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what is the last great thing they have seen have you seen anything that has moved you recently yeah films going back to theater moves me always you know and I've seen a few films that are opening in Paris from Cannes I've seen a few I think the most incredible recent memory of watching a film in a theater was Memoria is Memoria by Abichatmou I felt with the pandemic and this cruel time we are living through and dangerous and full of craziness you know we live near Ukraine I think in America a lot of tragic things are happening Europe is also facing a crisis I mean some people cannot travel yet there is not such a peace but when I in my spirit but when I was in a theater watching Memoria I felt I was in harmony that is a wonderful recommendation Claire thank you so much for your time and for your films thank you thank you very much thank you thank you Claire Denis what a thrill thanks to Joanna of course thanks to our producer Steve Allman for his work on today's episode filling it for Bobby Wagner stay tuned next week a little more Thor, Love, and Thunder a little more Marvel see you then