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The Informant! • Member Bonus · The Next Reel Film Podcast

• 0:00
  Pete Wright: I'm Pete Wright.
• 0:04
  Andy Nelson: And I'm Andy Nelson.
• 0:05
  Pete Wright: Welcome to the next reel. When the movie ends,
• 0:07
  Andy Nelson: our conversation begins.
• 0:09
  Pete Wright: The informant is over.
• 0:12
  Everyone in this country is a victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast. That's a disappointing opening line.
• 0:26
  Andy Nelson: Yeah. Thanks for waking us up to the sad realities of our world.
• 0:30
  Pete Wright: Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty much this movie, Soderbergh. We're in the middle of our true lies series, where we're discussing the lives of real people who got caught up in their own malfeasance as frauds. And, this is our our extra member bonus, the informant.
• 0:49
  Here we are. What what do you I mean, the informant. What can you say? Matt Damon, goofy. True story.
• 0:56
  Makes you sick to your stomach.
• 0:57
  Andy Nelson: Yep. Steven Soderbergh. The two of them working together. You know, I enjoy the pairing. I enjoy Soderbergh.
• 1:04
  This is an interesting movie because I struggle with it, because I love so much the tone that Soderbergh creates with it, like this comedic irony that we have throughout. I love the narration. It is some of my favorite voice over because it's it's unreliable, but it's not really it's it's not and it's it's not because it's lying, but Mark is lying in the way that he's talking. And I think that's funny. And but but I still think, in the end, like, I I love what Soderbergh's doing.
• 1:39
  I love the performances. I especially Matt Damon's great, and Marvin Hamlisch's score is just so freaking awesome. Outstanding. But I still feel like the way that Soderbergh chose to tell the story keeps me at arm's length for a long time. And it's only in the final act that I I finally feel like I click with it.
• 1:59
  Pete Wright: It's an interesting one to come right after we finished. I I don't know where this is this gonna this is gonna drop right after
• 2:05
  Andy Nelson: It releases before Shattered Glass, but for the public, this will actually be the first episode of our series. Oh, for crying out loud. Welcome to True Lies, everybody. We are talking about the stories of people true
• 2:18
  Pete Wright: stories of people caught in their own malfeasance. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we've talked about, can you ever forgive me? And we've you and I have already talked about Shattered Glass, the story of Stephen Glass, a reporter at the New Republic, who got caught making up a whole bunch of stuff, framing it as journalism. Our primary concern walking out of the structure of that movie is that essentially what they gave us was the third act of one of these stories in Shattered Glass, where from the moment the character starts talking, you already are pretty sure he's a liar, and we just get to watch the fall over ninety minutes. What's really interesting about the informant is on second watch, I think you get that vibe that something is wrong with Mark, that he is you you could possibly, like, put the transparency on top of this movie that is shattered glass and see that they actually kinda line up, but that Matt Damon delivers it better.
• 3:18
  Matt Damon delivers it in a way that is more it it has more of that sort of crazy squirrel energy, that sort of I'm helpless under the weight of my own instincts, and my mouth just won't stop and ends up being his effort to end up helping to be loved, to be loved just like Stephen Glass was eager to be loved, has led him to get himself tied in knots and and fraud. But he's also kind of a sociopath, and they the movie never really commits to that because the movie never really commits to how much crime he really did to the very end, the sort of epilogue in jail. He still gives us a new number, which is incredible how much money he embezzled from Arthur Daniels.
• 4:11
  Andy Nelson: Midland. Midland. Mitchford? Arthur Daniels Mitchford. Andy, it's Mitchford.
• 4:17
  Pete Wright: Don't worry about it.
• 4:18
  Andy Nelson: Does that make sense? Does that seem
• 4:20
  Pete Wright: like a fair way to think about how these movies are talking to each other?
• 4:24
  Andy Nelson: I think there is some room there. It's interesting. I I I definitely think that your point lines up. Like you said, these there's a there's a way that these kind of, like, mirror each other. But I do think that there is a little bit of a difference in that in as we talked about with well, and I don't wanna give our shattered glass conversation away here since it's not gonna come out till afterward.
• 4:47
  But, you know, we talk about the fact that, like, it it feels like we needed more of Steven Glass before the movie. Like, give us an earlier understanding of him. Here, I I don't know. Like, we're getting bits and pieces of Mark at the beginning. But well, and to a certain extent, I do feel like we needed more at the open of this to get a little bit more set up with Mark and his world, and especially the world of Lysine and everything that was actually happening.
• 5:20
  Because it took me a few I had to rewatch it a couple times to really understand what was going on as far as the price fixing in the lysine. And, you know, this was a news bit that was big at the time, but honestly, I wasn't paying attention. And so I I kind of missed I I had to look at it a few times to see what was going on. But we do have like like, there's two things going on with this movie because we have Mark Whitaker, the whistleblower. He decides, you know, he and his wife, like, he he's obviously talked to his wife about the fact that the company is involved in price fixing with all these other companies from around the world for the price of lysine Because his wife is the one who pushes him to be honest with the FBI agent at the beginning and says, tell him the truth.
• 6:09
  And so he does, and that kind of sets him on the whistleblower path. At the same time though, we're also following Mark Whitaker, the embezzler, who is going to be stealing, I don't know how many millions, but 9 to $11,000,000 from ADM over, over the period this period of time. And we are getting some bits and pieces of that story. Very subtle. But it's it's subtle, and we just kind of, as the audience are assuming, in some capacity, it's tying into the whistleblowing activity.
• 6:43
  Like, I, you know, I I was like, well, this must be something he's doing for the whistleblowing stuff. Like, when he's creating the fake invoice or talking to some of these various people. Creating fake companies. Yeah. Like, I I I don't think I connected the dots.
• 6:59
  And so so that's, I think, a struggle with the film because and in both cases, like, we're left in a situation where we're like, how am I supposed to be feeling about this guy who just always seems to be kind of lying, and I I never know if I'm supposed to be trusting him or not. And that's that's, I think, the comparison I see with both movies.
• 7:20
  Pete Wright: Well, and because it seems like everybody likes him. His wife seems to like him. Up until the bitter end of
• 7:29
  Andy Nelson: the movie when he gets out of jail, his wife is there with a smile on her face. She loves the man, not the crimes.
• 7:37
  Pete Wright: Yeah. Right. But it's stunning to me how that that scale never shifted in the other direction for her. I don't know how she can stay married to him. Of course, this is a true story based on a true story.
• 7:49
  And so I I have to imagine. I don't know if they ultimately stayed married. I I don't have that one. I know where he ended up. We'll talk about that.
• 7:58
  But I don't know about their marriage. Either way, I think what the movie does expertly in terms of world building, in terms of showing us how things are off, starts early on in the movie when they start dropping hints that they're building a horse barn. Some stables across the road. Yeah. Stables across the road that is a it it's practically mean, it's a training facility is what it is.
• 8:23
  It's giant for their horses. Every scene in the first half of the movie, I think, he shows up in a different expensive car. The Ferrari Testarossa, the BMW eight fifty, the Porsche or Porsche, never sure what to call it, he says. He has as she says later in the reckoning, the wife says, you know, we had eight cars. Two of them we never even drove.
• 8:48
  But all of those cars were fantastical for a even for a guy like this. So I I think they they built the uncertainty about how he is able to afford his livelihood, his lifestyle expertly. It is really subtle. It's there's nothing sort of it just feels wrong so that that aligns up when he starts, you know, completely fabricating, you know, invoices and things. It just starts to make more sense toward the back of the movie.
• 9:21
  I think that works really, really well.
• 9:34
  Andy Nelson: Hey, everybody. It's Andy. Alright. You have just heard the opening moves of our member bonus conversation about Steven Soderbergh's The Informant, part of our true lies series, where we dig into true stories about people getting tangled up in fraud, deception, and the weird little justifications that keep it all running. And just like Mark Whitaker himself, this is where the story splits.
• 9:54
  Because what you got in the public feed is the sure, I'm helping version. The rest of the episode, the part where the narration gets slipperier, the details get weirder, and the questions get a lot harder to ignore, that's in the member feed. If you want the full conversation, you'll need to become a member at truestory.fm/join. Membership gets you monthly member bonus episodes like this one, including special series picks voted on by members, early access to ad free episodes across the whole Next Real family. That's the Next Real, the film board sitting in the dark, movies we like, and CinemaScope.
• 10:24
  Additional preshow and post show segments on select episodes, the extra rabbit trails, lists, and side conversations that don't make the public cut. Access to members only areas inside our Discord community, plus the ongoing film talk in the Show Talk channel. So if this tease worked on you, good. That means the system is functioning exactly as designed. Head to truestory.fm/join.
• 10:46
  That's trustory.fm/join. It's $5 a month or $55 for the year. And that's where we're gonna leave you because unlike Mark Whitaker, we're being completely upfront. This is the end of the sample. To hear the rest of the informed conversation, you'll have to join us in the member feed.
• 11:02
  The next reel, when the movie ends, our conversation begins.