Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 390: Becoming a Jack of All Trades Writer/Director with Greg Mottola

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BPS 390: Becoming a Jack of All Trades Writer/Director with Greg Mottola · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  Speaker 1: You are listening to the IFAH podcast Network.
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  Speaker 2: For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to
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  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three ninety
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Wait you changed your name to McLevin? What kind of
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: stupid name is that? Are you an Irish R and
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: B singer?
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  Speaker 2: Super bad broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: When we really should be working on that next draft.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and
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  Speaker 2: business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your
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  Speaker 2: screenplay bulletproof.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble host,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof script Coverage. Now.
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  Speaker 1: Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses
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  Speaker 1: on the kind of project you are and the goals
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  Speaker 1: of the project you are, So we actually break it
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: down by three categories, micro budget, indie film, market and
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  Speaker 1: studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from a
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  Speaker 1: reader that's used to reading temp pole movies when your
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  Speaker 1: So if you need your screenplay or TV script covered
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  Speaker 1: by professional readers, head on over to covermiscreenplay dot Com. Well, guys,
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  Speaker 1: today on the show we have writer director Greg Mottola.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: And Greg is an amazing writer director who has done
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  Speaker 1: films like super Bad, Day Trippers, Keeping Up with the Joneses,
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  Speaker 1: and the new film Confess Fletch with John Hamm and
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  Speaker 1: Greg and I had a fantastic conversation about what it
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  Speaker 1: was like coming up in the nineties, how he worked
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  Speaker 1: on a set as a intern, an art department intern
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  Speaker 1: with the late great George Romero, and the behind the
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  Speaker 1: scenes of his indie film Classic Day Trippers is worth
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  Speaker 1: the price of admission alone, not to mention the Super
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  Speaker 1: Bad stories. So without any further ado, please enjoy my
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  Speaker 1: conversation with Greg Mottola. I like to welcome to the show,
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  Speaker 1: Greg Matela Hated and Greg, I'm I'm very good.
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  Speaker 3: Nice to meet you, Alex.
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  Speaker 1: A pleasure to meet you as well, my friend, thank
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  Speaker 1: you so much for coming on the show Man. Like
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  Speaker 1: I was telling you earlier, I've been a big fan
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  Speaker 1: of yours for quite some time, back from the days
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  Speaker 1: of Day Trippers all the way through Super Bad and
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  Speaker 1: Keeping Up with the Joneses and Paul, which was a genius, lovely, fun,
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  Speaker 1: fun film, and your new film, Confessed Fletch, which I
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  Speaker 1: had the pleasure of seeing early and fantastic, and we'll
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  Speaker 1: talk all about that. But my very first question to you, sir,
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  Speaker 1: why in God screen Earth did you want to get
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  Speaker 1: into this business? And how did you get into this business?
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  Speaker 3: You know, like all of us, grew up loving movies.
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  Speaker 3: I had a pretty sheltered childhood on Long Island, you know,
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  Speaker 3: middle class, not my parents weren't like foreign film goers,
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  Speaker 3: but I would discover things. My dad loved old movies,
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  Speaker 3: so he'd point me in the direction of things to
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  Speaker 3: watch Saturday afternoon black and white films on Channel eleven
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  Speaker 3: and stuff like that. And so I already started get
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  Speaker 3: a love of old films and would see everything that
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  Speaker 3: came out, and had some teachers in high school turned
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  Speaker 3: me on to like, you know, one teacher showed us
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  Speaker 3: Citizen Kane and and that kind of blew my mind.
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  Speaker 3: And then I went to art school. I drew a lot.
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  Speaker 3: I you know, like many kids read comic books, I taught.
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  Speaker 3: I drew pretty well, and I did a lot of
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  Speaker 3: other kind of art stuff in high school, and I thought,
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  Speaker 3: you know, the skill, let's see if it'll take me somewhere.
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  Speaker 3: I got to art school and realized, I don't want
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  Speaker 3: to be an artist. This is way too hard. There's
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  Speaker 3: no money in it. If fine art is is, I
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  Speaker 3: respect for it. But I don't. I don't. I don't
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  Speaker 3: see myself as a great painter. But I was a
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  Speaker 3: painting major at Carnegie Mellon University and at the same
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  Speaker 3: time going to every single movie they showed on campus,
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  Speaker 3: you know, like the first time I saw Clockwork Orange
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  Speaker 3: was on campus Carnegie Mellon, and and you know, I'd
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  Speaker 3: go to once again, go to everything. So a lot
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  Speaker 3: of foreign films for the first time. So my first
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  Speaker 3: Felini film, my first Bergmann film, versus Corosala, and and
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  Speaker 3: I was like, this is the best possible thing a
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  Speaker 3: human being can make, is a movie. And I really
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  Speaker 3: wanted to do it then, and I really wanted to
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  Speaker 3: learn to be a writer. School didn't have any film classes.
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  Speaker 3: They had a video class that was that was a
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  Speaker 3: conceptual art class. I once made the mistake of showing
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  Speaker 3: my teacher short film I'd made, and he gave me
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  Speaker 3: a c for the semester because because narrative movies were
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  Speaker 3: the devil to him, you know, he just wanted it
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  Speaker 3: all to be non nonlinear art. So I found a
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  Speaker 3: space called Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which is a little It was
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  Speaker 3: a little group of basically documentary filmmakers and experimental filmmakers,
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: and they would teach you how to film. They stick
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  Speaker 3: a bullocks in your hand and say, go shoot it,
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  Speaker 3: cut it on this little thing that you just you know,
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  Speaker 3: you hand roll the reels, not even a steambag, not
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  Speaker 3: even a machine, and then you're gonna you're gonna cut
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  Speaker 3: the negative and get it printed in a lab in Pittsburgh.
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  Speaker 3: And I may. I started making short films which were
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  Speaker 3: not great but exciting to me because because you know,
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  Speaker 3: I was seeing how lenses were, and I was loading
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  Speaker 3: cameras and I was cutting negative. And one of my teachers,
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  Speaker 3: Tony Bouba, a great documentary filmmaker, kind of in the
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  Speaker 3: style of the Mazes Brothers. He would make these kind
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  Speaker 3: of personality movies about funny people, weirdos who lived in
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  Speaker 3: his town is called Braddock, which is a big steel
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  Speaker 3: mill town where that was very economically depressed because the
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  Speaker 3: mills were all closing. And he would make these some
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  Speaker 3: social commentary short documentaries focusing on big personalities in his
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  Speaker 3: area and they were great. And Tony's brother was George
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  Speaker 3: Romero's editor. Tony got me a job working for two
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  Speaker 3: weeks in the art department of Day of the Dead,
• 6:42
  Speaker 3: the third Romero zombie film. I was making zombie vomit
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  Speaker 3: out of glue Elmer's glue paint and rice crispies and
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  Speaker 3: whipping it against a wall with a rag as one
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  Speaker 3: does to stimulate. And I don't know if you've ever
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  Speaker 3: seen Day of the Dead.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, it's it's a toxic film.
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  Speaker 3: It's great, it's great, and so yeah, but we were
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  Speaker 3: I was. I was putting a lot of vomited bubbs
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  Speaker 3: like little cell and then I was helping with the
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  Speaker 3: r n D of the there's the shock moment where
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  Speaker 3: all of the zombie hands come through a cinderblock wall.
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  Speaker 3: I was there when they were trying to figure out
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  Speaker 3: how do you score styrofoam make it look like cinder block, like,
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  Speaker 3: you know, all the little experiments, and so they'd say, okay,
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  Speaker 3: go over there and score one hundred pieces of styrofoam.
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  Speaker 3: That was, you know, because I was unpaid intern.
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  Speaker 1: So so let me ask you the what was it
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  Speaker 1: like working on the set with George Ramiro. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: at that point in your career, he must have essentially
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  Speaker 1: been almost godlike to you as a director.
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  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I he this was probably
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  Speaker 3: the year after Creeps Show. Certainly had seen Dona the
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  Speaker 3: I mean Living to End Dona the Day a bunch
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  Speaker 3: of times. I loved his movie Martin. I tracked that
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  Speaker 3: down and maybe saw it at a theater somehow in Pittsburgh.
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  Speaker 3: Maybe there was a great rep theater near my college.
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  Speaker 3: I remember seeing doing there when it opened. It was
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  Speaker 3: very exciting, even though people kind of trashed it. I
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: was like, I don't know, this is sort of awesome
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  Speaker 3: and terrible at the same time, and h and so so, yeah,
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  Speaker 3: I you know, I didn't. I was too shy to
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  Speaker 3: talk to him. I didn't. I wasn't a precocious and
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  Speaker 3: still am not terribly precocious person. So I just watched him,
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  Speaker 3: and I watched him and Tom SAVIENI talk a lot,
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  Speaker 3: and and was just excited to see how they were
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  Speaker 3: going around making decisions. I was my work might work there.
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  Speaker 3: Whatever it was was done before they started shooting, so
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  Speaker 3: I just got to see them prepping. It was. They're
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  Speaker 3: shooting in this cave, like deep in a cave. We'd
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: have to say, golf carts and their bats flying all
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: over the place. It was. I was so happy to me.
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  Speaker 3: It was like I was missing all my classes and
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  Speaker 3: getting more c's and I was on a movie set.
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  Speaker 3: And you know, and I have a great affection for
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  Speaker 3: independ of filmmakers. Here's a guy who worked and lived
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  Speaker 3: in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, making movies his whole life, not exactly
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  Speaker 3: Beverly Hills or or Universal Studios. And uh and the
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  Speaker 3: only other time I was on a movie set, I
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  Speaker 3: got a day as an extra and Gung Ho the Ron.
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  Speaker 1: Howard Ron Howard. Yeah, I love that movie. Back in
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  Speaker 1: the day, it was great.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I watched it not that long ago. It
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  Speaker 3: holds up really well. It's it's I thought, like, is
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  Speaker 3: this am I gonna like it is? Yeah, it's great
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  Speaker 3: and so uh so, you know I And then I
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  Speaker 3: was making I was taking the video equipments from my
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  Speaker 3: video class and shooting short films. But I just wised
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  Speaker 3: up and stopped showing them to my teacher. I just
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  Speaker 3: made them for my own learning purposes.
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  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: and now to the show.
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  Speaker 3: But the minute I finished film school, I mean art school,
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  Speaker 3: I went straight to Columbia University. From film school, I thought, okay,
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  Speaker 3: now I need to there's a lot of skills I
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  Speaker 3: need to learn no no during grad school.
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  Speaker 1: Now. So during that time, if I'm not mistaken, you
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: were starting to come up in the nineties where it's
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: you know, I look at it as the kind of
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: golden age of independent film as we know at the
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Sundance movement as many have coined it, because from basically
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: from eighty nine to early two thousands, I mean Sundance
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: was just popping out amazing film after amazing filmmaker after
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: amazing filmmaker. Mason filmmaker. What did that impact that because
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: I know day Trippers came out in ninety six, So
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: you were kind of like in the middle of that renaissance,
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: you know, but you know, Robert had already come out.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: I think you came out around the same time as
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Ed Burns did with Brothers. McMullen, Yeah, around that time
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  Speaker 1: as well. So this was just like any time I
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: have any of you guys on the show that came
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: up in the nineties, I always say, it didn't feel
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: like that. Every month there was a new Kevin Smith's story,
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: or Robert Rodriguez, or Spike Lee's story, or Rick link
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: letter story. Is it Wasn't it a crazy time for filmmakers?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was kind of amazing. I mean, I, you know,
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: graduated from film school, I had no real connections to
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: the business. I wrote a script that I thought was
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: pretty good. Campbell Scott read it. I had a mutual
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: friend and he wanted to do it, but we couldn't
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: raise the money. It was a little too expensive as
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: the first movie. So I sat down and wrote Day
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: Trippers in about a month because I just wrote it thinking, Okay,
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  Speaker 3: I could set a scene in an apartment and get
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: someone's apartment for free. I can set a scene on
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: the streets and get permits and like anything that could
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: be free. We shot at my parents' house. We shot,
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: you know, everything was a favor. And during that time
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: I'd also met Steven Soderberg. I met Stephen right before
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: Sex Lives came out. I made a student film that
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: was kind of making, like the student film Rounds. Someone
• 11:58
  Speaker 3: showed it to Stephen. We met. I went one of
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: my first trips to La I went to meet Steve
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: and he was prepping or starting, I think, to prep Kafka.
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  Speaker 3: But Sex Lives had been like a sun Dance phenomenon,
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: and there was a big article about him in The
• 12:14
  Speaker 3: Rolling Stone but it hadn't opened yet. And so you know,
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  Speaker 3: we got along really great, and Steven and I stayed friends,
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: and a couple of years later, when I wrote Day Trippers,
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: I showed it to him and he said, let me
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: help you make this. He put in some money, he
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: got some friends to put in some money. You know,
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: we shot it. We got in the can for like
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: sixty thousand dollars, but it, you know, Stephen called in favors.
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  Speaker 3: He got Kodak to give us a huge discount on
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: film stock, and and and you know, I at the
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: same time was meeting people like cal Hartley, one of
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: my best friends from Columbia. She was dating where Clink
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: Letter I was hanging out with him. So I was
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: meeting all these people I met, I met Noah bombback. Yeah,
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: it was, it was. It was a great time. I
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: mean they're like people were just saying, fuck it, We're
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: going to go around the system and make our ship
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: for very little money. And yeah, well like when Day
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: Trippers came out, it played in art houses. There were
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: a handful of prints that would trial around the country
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: and it took you know, months for it to get
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: to every city. But to me, that was a dream
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: come true because it got to every little art house
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: theater in America and we were able to sell out
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: to some other countries and pay back everyone who worked
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: on it and my first paycheck ever as a filmmaker.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: Uh and yeah, it was. It really felt like a
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: time like I remember, you know, going to a bar
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: with some of those people and like Noah or how
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: and just like complaining about Hollywood and saying, fuck those people.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: And there's slick movies and and they don't have any
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: soul and you know, we've got to pretend to be
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: rebels and uh yeah, artists, they don't get it. And
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: you know, in Soderberg and I have state friends this
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: whole time. In fact, I just worked on he did
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: a bunch of short, uh humorous black comedy shorts that
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: I was a quasi producer, you know, essentially just a
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: friend helping out on that were shot like you would
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: shoot a student filmer. Stephen you know, has on he's
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: he's he can do every job. And he was shooting
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: these on iPhones and and he certainly didn't need my help.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: But it was really fun to be there and watch
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: him work and and I helped, you know, bring some
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: actors into it. I like got Michael Sarah to be
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: in it, and we have Schreiber, and you know, it
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: felt very very full circle that you know, we're we're
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: still here and we're still we were still doing it.
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: But the nineties were it was It was, it was
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: it was a unique. I kind of feel like I
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: knew everyone because there's so many of them were in
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: New York. Mary Harron was a friend, Nicole Holli Center,
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: I went to film school with she and I are
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: still friends. It was it was cool, It was, I mean,
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: it's you know, because of technology it's become easier to
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: make movies on a low budget and have them look good,
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: look professional because of digital technology and both shooting and
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: post production. But uh, and there's a lot of great stuff,
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: and you know it, it's very heartwarming to me to
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: uh here from sort of the next generation of indie filmmakers,
• 15:40
  Speaker 3: the what were they called mumble core. Yeah that that
• 15:48
  Speaker 3: likeah like for yeah, like Marke row Plastom, it's like
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: day Trippers. Was was a big inspiration to him because
• 15:54
  Speaker 3: he's like, oh, you can make a film for nothing,
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: and it's okay if it looks like it was made
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: for not said I think that's a compliment, No, but
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: it was true. It was ablutely true.
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: And you know I I I at that point had
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: absorbed many different genres of film and whether it's a
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: low bunch of American films from the Corman years or.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: India like films from Europe that were made on a
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: shoe string. And and I still believe it. I still
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: I still feel half Indie and everything I do. Maybe
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: that's because I have a really hard time getting enough
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: of a budget for anything, but no, I've been very lucky.
• 16:39
  Speaker 3: I've been very very lucky. I have no complaints.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: No, it's it's really interesting when you brought up Stephen,
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: because I knew that Stephen worked on Day Trippers and
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: he's been quietly behind the scenes helping filmmakers make their movies.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Open Doors, wasn't it him that helped Nolan get on
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: in some Yeah, without without without Soderberg going, I always
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: call it the Donnie Brasco effect. He's a good fella pinion.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: He's all right, and he's kind of someone vouching vouchi
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: and he he does that a lot, very quiet. Yeah,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Spielberg does it too, and he does it as well.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: I've heard so many filmmakers and screenwriters who come on
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: the show who're just like, yes, Stephen, open this door
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: for me. And so it's really fascinating to see these
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: kind of guys do that.
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: He's very and it's very unselfish, and it's it's I mean,
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: it's totally authentic. He just he if he thinks you know,
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: your heart's in the right place and you could do
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: something interesting, he wants to help you and he will.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: And No, he's the greatest guy. I also had an
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: interesting this is a Day Tripper story, which which is
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: sort of another corner of the filmmaking business, which is
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: that two days before we're going to start shooting the film,
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: I got a call in my shitty little tenement apartment
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: on Thompson Street and solo from James L. Brooks, who
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: I had never met, and no idea have we add
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: my number? It turns out I'd given a copy of
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: my script to a friend who had a friend at
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: the New Yorker who was good friends with James L. Brooks.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: And James likes to Yeah, he likes He told his
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: friend at The New york Er if you ever read
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: a script you think is interesting. You're here about a
• 18:17
  Speaker 3: young cell maker. I want to you know, I want
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: to know who's out there. I want to try and
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: help people. So somehow my script for day Trippers got
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: into got onto James L. Brooks's desk, and and and
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: months had passed, and unbeknownst to him, I was about
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: to make it on a shoestring. And he called me
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: up and said, I really love the script. What's going
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: on with it? I'd like to help you make it?
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: And I said, well, we're shooting in two days. And
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: he said, what's the budget? And I said well, we
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: have sixty thousand dollars. It was like a long silence
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: where he was like, no, I staid, what's the budget.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: No, no, that's what Craft services for the first week.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and so and so I told him how
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: we were making and who was in, and he said, well,
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: you know, obviously I don't want to stop you. If
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: I were to get involved, I do have some notes
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: and I would do it on a different scale and
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: it would be a different kind of cast, and I
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: don't want to screw you up. Just know that I
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: like this enough that I would help you make it
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: if you wanted to make it at a bigger budget.
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: And I was credibly flattered. I think that guy is great.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: And I slept on it and the next day I
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: called it back and said, I just you know, I
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: feel like I have to follow through. You know, all
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: these people are ready to go, and as tempting as
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: it is, I'm going to go ahead and make it.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: And being a huge man, she said, well, you know,
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: sixty thousand dollars was a little ridiculous. I'm just going
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: to send you a check for ten thousand dollars. Just
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: make me a silent partner. Whatever other investors are getting
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: give me, you know, the same proportionate amount. And the
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: day we start shooting, I got a DHL package that
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: had to check for ten thousand dollars from James elber Brooks.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: and now back to the show.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: I mean, not knowing me whatsoever, just being that I've
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: never done anything before except for a student film. Just
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: based on the script that guy semi ten thousand bucks,
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: which which when when you're working on sixty thousand dollars,
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: that's huge. That's a huge addition to your budget. And
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: you know it was ninety five ended ninety four when
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: we were starting shooting, and you know, that's that was
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: a big deal. And I'm forever grateful and I've you know,
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: since hung out with him a bit and we tried
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: to make a movie together. It didn't all come together,
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: but you know I will. I will always love that man,
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: you know. And it's it's like people say to me,
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: young people say how do you get started? And I say,
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: get really lucky and hope that people like Steve sober
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: Tage lt Brooks take pity on you. I don't know
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: what to tell you. I got super fucking lucky.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: No, it's my favorite. I asked that question all the
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: time on the show, and I heard Quentin once say
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: at a panel somewhere, I think at Comic Con. I
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: heard him years ago, years ago, probably fifteen years ago,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: and some kids like, how do you make it into
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: the film business. He's like, right, reservoir dogs. Yeah, he goes,
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: I don't know any other way to break into the business.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Write reservoir dogs, direct reservoir dogs. That's how I did it.
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, Day Trippers got my foot
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: in the door, and as I almost got a second
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: film made that was set up at Sony that was
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: a real labor of love. And unfortunately even we were
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: in Green LT. We were in pre production and the
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: studio got coal fee and thought it was a little
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: too indie, a little too depressing, and I was like, yeah,
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: it's depressing. That's what I did. And they put it
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: in and turn around so that one didn't get made.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: And then eventually I said, well let's go to LA
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: and diregged a lot of TV and then once again
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: I was super lucky. But yeah, I mean, what I
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: tell the one thing I try to tell other like
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: when I go up to Columbia Film or something and
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: speak with students there is there are different ways it's
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: goin to cat The way I chose was get a
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: really great cast of actors who are working, professional actors,
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: who are taking taking you know, the shitty shitty sag
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: special low budget salary, and don't use that much of
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: their time. Shoot it as fast as possible. That was
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: That was how I did it. I shot day Trippers
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: in about fifteen days and was thus able to get
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: people like Stanley Tucci and camble Scott and Corporate Posy
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: and and Mira and and you know, I couldn't ask
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: them to do that for you know, meet me every
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: weekend for the next seven months and we'll make this.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: But you can ask your friends to meet you every
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: weekend for the next seven months. And if you've got
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: some really charismatic, interesting people, you know, who are patient
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: and who will say, okay when you call me and
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: say the light's really good and let's go shoot the
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: scene now it's going to look really pretty. Or you know,
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: I got this location for the next two hours, come
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: to meet me. You know, that is a way to
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: do it. I mean, you can take a really long
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: time to make a movie. If that allows you to
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: get all the coverage you want, you just have to
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: have people in the movie who love you enough to
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: put up with your bullshit.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: Which yeah, I mean, look, it's an insanity what we do.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: It's a general statement, and the independent filmmaker as a
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: creature is one of the most insane of the bunch,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: without question, because I mean, unlike you at this point
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: in your career, you have success in your career, you've
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: built a career for yourself, and when you're starting a project,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: there's you know, there's risk and things like that. But
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: when you're starting out, you're doing the work without ever
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: knowing if it's going to pay off. And so many
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: filmmakers in today's world because there's so many just I mean,
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: when you were coming up in the nineties, it costs
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: still costs money to make a movie, even sixty thousand dollars.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: You know, there's still needed to be a technical amount
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: of knowledge to make it look presentable. You're show shooting film,
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: you needed a real DP. Now everybody in their mother
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: can make a feature film look good, but now who can? Now,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: how are you going to get it seen? Is?
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly yeah, exactly. I mean there's you know, as
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: we all know, there are it's hard to get on
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: a screen, and great indie films do get on screens
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: even more so we can get to this later than
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: sort of mid tier entertainments like Confess Fletch actually have
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: a very hard time getting on screen because because Hollywood
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: puts most of those kinds of movies straight to streaming.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: But even for an indie film to get on streaming,
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: you know, it's it's you have to you kind of
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: have to get that home run and make something like
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: Coda or or everything everywhere all at once, something that's
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: gonna that's really gonna land with an audience that someone
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: will get behind it in some way. And there are
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: there are, thank god, still art house theaters places that
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: will show that are dedicated to showing new new foreign
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: films and new American indies. But yeah, because a lot
• 25:38
  Speaker 3: of people can make a film, there are a lot
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: of films.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: It's a gluttony in the marketplace, without question. There's just
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: so many. I mean, I think Sundane's got forty your
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: fifty thou eighty thousands of submissions last year or something,
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: oh my, like something insane and there's like one hundred
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: and twenty five films including shorts picked. So like the
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: at the level of you even you know, that wasn't
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: the case when you guys were in the nineties. There
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: was there was still a lot, but it wasn't the
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: competition wasn't as fierce. And I always I always love
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: asking this question of you know, guys and filmmakers of
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: that time. It's like, do you think, like when I
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: had it Burns on the show, I go, do you
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: think Brothers Molla would make it today? And he's like,
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: absolutely not, I would have that would have been lost
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: and had no stars and it had nobody, you know.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: So I'll ask you the same question. Do you think
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Day Trippers if it showed up today? I mean with
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: this cast obviously because now they're all big stars, but yeah,
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: but generally speaking to you, what do you think the
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: chances of it actually finding an audience is today?
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: Hey, look, we got a rejected from Sundance back then,
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: so we wouldn't even Yeah, that was that. I take
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: some pride in that. That was the year they rejected
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: us and Swingers, so it's like, okay, well you were
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: a good cup rejected by another you know, with another
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: good movie. Yeah, no, I think absolutely not. It would be.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: You know, it was so modest. The you know, it's
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: medic comedy is less serious.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's not. It's not real filmmaking comedy.
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Right. And yeah, even though, like in the history
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: of American film, if you if you want to through
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: the list of what people actually remember, so many of
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: them are comedies. All the silent movies, remember like ninety
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: percent of our comedies because it.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: Was easy to translate back then. Yeah, Chaplin and Keaton
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: and all those guys.
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but still not to get on the comedy versus drama,
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: thanks them both. Uh, it's yeah, I think it would be.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: I don't. I have no idea how I could how
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: one can break through. I mean, I mean there's a
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: lot of movies with political conscience consciousness that I think
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: is great. But I'm sure now there's tons of them too.
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: I mean, you know, it's it's it's it's got to be.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: It's got to be really hard for people coming up
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: to figure out how to get their foot in the door.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: I you know, I was very stubborn at the beginning.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: I thought, I'm just going to write and direct my
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: own stuff. I'm going to be an O tour and
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: then and then I started. After my second film didn't
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: get made, I started to try and write a third
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: one and had writer's block, and I have a I
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: have a you know, slight propensity toward depression, and writing
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: became basically napping. And I was in New York and
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: running out of money quickly and thinking, shit, I'm gonna
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: have to go back to the job. I hated that
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: Pete my way through film school. And then I got
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: a call from Jed Apatow who said, you want to
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: come to l A and do Undeclared? And I think
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: before I hung up the phone, I was in his office.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: He's like, I didn't I didn't offer you the job yet.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: I just like a smoke outline of you was in
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: the phe like a cartoon exactly.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: So, so is that how you got involved in Super Bad?
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: Yes? I when doing Undeclared, which was a weird process
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: only in that it was only had one season, but
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: it was done in three different groupings because they'd say, okay,
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: we'll let you do seven and then they started to
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: air and it's like, okay, people seem to like it enough.
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: We'll let you do a couple more, and then they
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: let's do a couple more, and then they canceled it.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: So I was back and forth, but I did like
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: five or six of those, so I was around Judd,
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: and you know, it was a great writing staff. It
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: was Rodney Rothman, Nick Stoler, Jenny Connor, all these people.
• 29:39
  Speaker 3: Jake Casin was one of the detractors. I became friends
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: with all these people. It was like a really fun group.
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: And enough, of course broke in and and so one day,
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: toward the end of the final batch of Undeclared, I
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: was told, thats gonna be a reading of Seth's script
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: that he wrote with his buddy Avon.
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: and now back to the show.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: Of super Bad that they were trying to get made
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: with Seth and Jason Siegel as the leads. And it
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: was pretty much the funniest script I'd ever heard, uh.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: And it had a great authenticity to it because you know,
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: Seth and Evan Goldberg were writing about their lives. They
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: started a version of this when they were kids. They wrote.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: The only joke that survived the kid version was the
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: name MC Lovin, which only I think a thirteen year
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: old could think of. I mean nothing, you could never
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: top it, and so so and but it was amazing
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: and and it was at the end of it, jud said,
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: would you consider directing it if we can get it
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: set up? And I was like, fuck yeah, I I
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: you know, even I was still a bit of a
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: recovering snob. Then I thought, well, teen movies. I was like, fuck, yeah,
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: what am I an idiots?
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, Orson Wells never did a teen movie?
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: How actually exactly? But then I remembered, you know, Bergmann
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: and Fellini did teen movies, so that's okay.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: You know what's interesting. When I was moving to La
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: from Florida, I was two thousand and seven, two thousand
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: and eight, and I remember the marketing blitz for that movie,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: which was arguably, at the time one of the most
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: brilliant marketing pushes for a small film. It wasn't a
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: massive tent pole out in stretch. It became a tent
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: pole film afterwards, but it was just I mean, I
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: was taking meetings, I was doing the water Bottle tour
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: on some of my projects around town, and we were like,
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: people are like, yeah, we need something like super bad
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: before it even came out. Before it even came out,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, we need something like a super
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: bad thing, like that's lightning in a bottle. And I
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: was like, what the hell is it? Like when is
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: supermand that I saw the trailer, I'm like, that looks
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: freaking hilarious. And then it came out and it exploded,
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: I mean in a massive way. Even culturally in the zeitgeist,
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: McLevin is still mclovin, Like I.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: Know, I still see kids with the mclove and I
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: D T shirt.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: It was insane. So I have to ask you, like
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: you were real kind of thrust into, you know, being
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: the bell of the ball in Hollywood for a moment.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: There's always that moment that if you're lucky, you have
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: a big hit and then everybody wants to work with you.
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: What was that kind of hurricane the Big Glove and
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: super bad hurricane, like being in the center of it?
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Well it, you know.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: I the first time we screened it, we did test
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: screening and it went incredibly well. And I was sitting
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: with Bill Hayter and Bill nudged me and said, look
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: at the girls behind us, and they were like holding
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: each other and crying at the end of the film.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: I was like, wait, I didn't expect that, but I did,
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: Like when I first heard it, I thought, the way
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: in to this movie is that is the ending, which
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: is that hovering behind everything is the fact that they're
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: going to get separated soon, and that's gonna be the
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: first big test of them, the first big loss in
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: their lives. Like this this it's the scariest thing that's
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: ever happened to them, is losing this this best friend
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: who helps you go through adolescents not knowing anything really
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: about women and how to get how to score, and
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: how to talk to a girl, and and and the
• 33:37
  Speaker 3: fact that they're both really scared that underneath it all,
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: they're really scared that Like even though Jona Hill's characters
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: is the most horrible things, Jonah intuited got it. He's
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: the only actor who came in and played that character
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: as that you could tell under the bluster was terror.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: And that made it acceptable that he said such terrible
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: things because he's he's not toxic masculinity. He's living in
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: a world of toxic masculinity and he's trying to survive it,
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: and he's trying to he's trying it on because that's
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: what he thinks you're supposed to do. And what he
• 34:12
  Speaker 3: learns over the course of the movie is that's not
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: him and that's not how it works. If you want
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: any if we want a woman to respect you and
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: get to actually know her, and and I thought, okay,
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: that's what everything's leading up to, so we have to
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: just keep that simmering underneath the movie. So anyway, I thought,
• 34:30
  Speaker 3: you know, that'll give it a humanity, that'll make it
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: feel real. Plus we had this great luck of that
• 34:36
  Speaker 3: nobody was making R rated teen movies anymore. Right, Yeah,
• 34:40
  Speaker 3: it was all like PG thirteen kind of glossy, you know,
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: fine movies, but they they didn't have that that chaotic,
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: irreverent but it was your nose an adults thing.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was. It was the it was I think
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: there was the overcorrection of the eighties, of the Avenge
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: of the Nerds and the Porky's and you know at
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: all of those kind of you know classic teen movies
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: that were all hard rs I mean hard, hard years
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: in the eighties, but then it was over corrected and
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: then like hey it's been a while, and then American
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Pie was probably one of the I think it was
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: that was nineties, wasn't it the American Pie nineties?
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but it had been a while since American Pie
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: when super Bad showed up.
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And in fact, when I went to that reading,
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: it took three years for Judd to get the film
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: green lit. I mean everyone was saying, we all want
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: to do an R rated comedy. Yeah, this script is good, good,
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: but rated comedies, Like, why would we make a movie
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: where the people with the audience's work can't come see it?
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: And it was like, of course they're going to come
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: see it. They're going to find a way into the theater.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, I wasn't seventeen when I saw an Animal House,
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: but I saw it. So anyway, so the film, you know,
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: we knew that people liked it. We showed it at
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: a comic con, which was like a rock concert. It
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: was amazing, and so it's like I can't believe, like,
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: how well to but still no one knows these actors
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: really will it just translate in a bigger way. But
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: Sony was selling the hell out of it. They were
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: doing a great job. And the first day when I
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: got a call saying these are the projected numbers for
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: the weekends. And it was like late August, mid late August.
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: It was a time when like it was like a
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: dumping ground for a movie. For a long time, it
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: was not considered a time you're going to open a movie,
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: that's gonna open it millions of dollars whatever, whatever was
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: considered good back in that year. I forget. But anyway,
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: we opened at a number that was considered very good
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: at that time, especially for an August movie. And and
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: it was so bizarre. I mean I'd go on the
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: street and I'd hear people talking about it, and you're
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: talking about on the subway, and and it was it
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: was crazy. I mean it was I have you know,
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: I have to be honest. Was super fun to be
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: attached to something like that, and I loved everyone involved.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: I loved, you know, all the people who made it
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: with me. And it was great to share that with
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: this group of people that I had such affection for,
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: some of whom i'd known, you know, Judd and Sath
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: I had already known for quite a while. I had
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: to work with Michael Sarah on a rest in development,
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: and yeah, it was a thrill. I have to say
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: it's a thrill. At the time, I thought I may
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: never experience the thrill again, and that that's remains true.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: But that's fine. That's fine in a bottle.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: It was literally lightning in a bottle. I mean, look,
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: I mean the Worsarski's hit the matrix, you know, you know,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: they never really hit the matrix again. You know, it's
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: like it's okay, you know, and you still then you
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: still have a fantastic career, but you're right, there are
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: those moments in time that you're and again, when I've
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: spoken to some other dictors have had these kind of
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: kind of just rocket launches, a lot of them said, man,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: I wish I would have enjoyed it. I didn't know
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: that this was not this This situation was really right place,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: right time, right film, and it will never be like
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: this again. Even if it maybe I have another hit
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: later on, it's never going to be the first one.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: It's never going to be this again.
• 38:24
  Speaker 3: And I I think I had some sense of telling myself,
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: you better appreciate this. I mean, this may be the
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: stupidest person alive. But shortly after Superbad came out, Judd
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: asked me if I wanted to possibly direct Bridesmaids. And
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: I was trying to get adventure Land set up, and
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: because I am an indie at heart, I decided to
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: pursue Ventureland and not pursue one of the other most
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: loved successful companies.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: Whole I've never heard of that, sir, what movie that
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: I've never heard?
• 39:01
  Speaker 3: And uh and you know, on paper, everything about bridesmaid
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: sounded fantastic and and and I loved Christen wigg and
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: I ended up begging her to be an adventure Land.
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: And you know, so I I maybe frittered away a
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: chance to build on a kind of uh more mainstream success.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: But I am.
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: I am a half indie guy, I really am. I mean,
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: I don't I don't regret making adventure Land. It you know,
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: wasn't a big box office movie. But I have to say, like,
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: for certain people, like I have more people come up
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: to me and talk to me about that movie than
• 39:38
  Speaker 3: super Bad, possibly because they think jut appatatract super Bad.
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: Although I do remember one review of adventure which was
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: really cruel. It said, well, this proves that it was
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: jud appathouse hand that made super Bad as fat Oh.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: I was like, dude, it's a different movie.
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: I'm I'm thinking of the same movie.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: and now back to the show. Oh oh, and you
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: still remember it, and you still remember it?
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I don't remember any of the good reviews.
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: I was gonna say, there were tens of thousands of
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: good reviews.
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: It's mostly very well reviewed, yes, but there's the one.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: That you're like, son of a bitch, that dude.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: The the thing about indie filmmaking and making something personal
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: that you know some people are it's just not going
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: to be for them, is that it's a feeling of
• 40:35
  Speaker 3: like seeing a movie and saying, I know this is
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: for me and it's not for everyone, but it is
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: really speaks to me, right, And that's you know, that's
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: another kind of very satisfying thing to pursue. There are
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: certain Fellini films that I love, and I know, like
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: a lot of people are going to get bored in
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: a Fellini movie, But a movie like Knights of Kabiria
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: moves me in a way that I will never get
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: from a certain kind of mainstream movie. It's just it's
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: a different experience and I want to I always want
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: to try to be able to do both, and I
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: thought that'd be cool to get to do both, so
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: so you know, yeah, so I've gone back and forth. Now,
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: of course I'm want of those people out there clamoring
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: to get an indie film made, because I wrote a
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: script that I've been working on for years and portray
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: projects that I love and I feel it's the best
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: thing I've ever written. I've only shown it to a
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: few possible financiers, and the basic line is like, well,
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: this is more drama than comedy, and unless you come
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: back with some really huge stars, I don't see you
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: getting this financed.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: You know, And I want and I want to just
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: hold on that for a second, because so many people
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: listening to the show think that, oh it's good Madala.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: You know, he's had he made these big hits and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: he's had a great career and he's worked so much
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: he can get anything done. The more I talk to
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: people on the show, the more I understood a long
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: time ago that it doesn't matter who you are, even
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: spiearb'g going to get Lincoln financed.
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I need.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: It to struggle all the time, almost all the time.
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, I mean, I'm basically like I do want
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: to do another indie soonish, and I'm thinking if I
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: can't do this one the way I see it, because
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: I don't want to do it the wrong way, and
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: it's a movie that does require it would be like
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: an eight to twelve million dollar film. I don't see
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: a version of it that's three million dollars. But I
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: could write something that I could do for three million dollars.
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: I mean Nicole holl of Center wonderful filmmaker, wonderful writer,
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: and she designs her movies that they could be made
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: for a number that's that works in the marketplace people's minds,
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: and she is very shrewd that way, and she keeps
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: making really great movies. And so maybe I need to
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: think about that as I'm trying to attach the right
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: cast to the one that's a little more expensive, and
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: see if somebody, you know, find the right or the
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: right or maybe be the right moment in my career
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: where I can cash in a you know, it helped
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: me get eventually I made because super Bad was about
• 43:06
  Speaker 3: to come out, and there was enough buzz about it
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: that I got its actually on set up before super
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: Bad even came out. But it was you know, I
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: got a lot of passes and a lot of people
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: telling me, yeah, well, we'd like the funny side characters,
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: but who you know? The central stories is kind of
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: like a I don't know a love story. We don't
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: like it that much.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: How do it? And this is another thing that so
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: many filmmakers and screenwriters have to deal with on a
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: daily basis that I think people in general in the
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: creative industry is how do you deal with the nose?
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: Because this business is all about nose and no and
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: the door's closing on you all the time. So especially
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: when you're coming up, how do you keep going? What's
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: is that thing that keeps driving you to keep going?
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: When everyone's just telling you, no, kid, it's not gonna happen.
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: You just die inside and then you're fine. No I
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: for years, you know, well it's still it's still a
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: struggle to this day. But you just take the attitude
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: of it's a real waste of time to lick your
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: wounds for too long feel sorry for yourself. And I
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: made that mistake when my second film almost got made,
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: it didn't. I spent years trying to set it up
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: elsewhere and I couldn't and it was just it was,
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: you know, the writing was kind of on the wall
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: that it wasn't the right time to try and get
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: that movie made. Ironically, people have come to me and
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: tried to make that script, but there's a legal problem
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: with someone who I was in business with at the
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: time that I've never been able to solve, and that
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: person has never let me free. So ironically I could
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: have made that movie, but I can't. But you know,
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: that attitude of like put it in a drawer, maybe
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: the day will calm is actually not impossible, and and
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: just you know, fuck it. If I'm doing a pass
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: on this script because it's a New York City story,
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: I was going to go out with it a little
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: bit wider to try and finance it than the pandemic
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: at New York City changed a lot, and I thought
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: it's not going to seem viable to people the way
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: New York City is now during the pandemic. Now that
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: New York City's you know, the pandemic's never going to end,
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: it appears, but it's more itself. I'm doing a rewrite
• 45:30
  Speaker 3: kind of address New York City at its very moment.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: It's a real sort of you know, hand in her
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: sister's multi character. In this case, it's three stories that
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: are being told simultaneously that are all connected. It's kind
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: of like three main characters and you're following them and
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: it intercuts between their stories, and it's ambitious and it's
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: it's it's uh, you know, I'll I'll do my polish,
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: I'll send it around, I'll try and attach a few
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: more actors, and if and if it seems like it's
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: not the right time, I'll put it down and do
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: something else. I won't I won't waste time.
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: And this seems like a film that would have been
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: financed easily in the nineties, because those are the kind
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: of movies that were being.
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: Made in Yeah, yeah, I think exactly, God, damn it.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: What was I think? Super Bad?
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: Kindean?
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: Damn comedy? So I always I always like to ask
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: this about of directors because we all, you know, when
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: we're on set, there's a day that the entire world's
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: come and crashing down around us. You've lost your camera,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: you lost your actor, you lost your location, the sun's
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: going down, you can't make your day. What was that
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: moment for you on any of your projects, including the
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: new one? We're going to talk about, to talk about Fletch,
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: that you felt that the entire thing was coming crashing
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: down around you and how did you overcome it? And yes,
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: I know every day is like that, but there's that
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: one day that is just like, I don't know if
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna make it well for me.
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: Luckily, it was the very first day of my very
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: first movie. We loaded out all of our equipment in
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: our production office on day trippers in New York City,
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: took our Super sixteen camera, weird won and our small
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: package of lights in a truck to a location on
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: Long Island where we're going to shoot the first set
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: of scenes with Hope Davison, Stanley Tucci and I get
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: to the location, we start to rehearse in my ad,
• 47:29
  Speaker 3: who was one of my good friends from film schools
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: named Brian Linstrom. He's talking sort of nervously or worry.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: He has a worried expression on his face, and I'm
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: sensing this behind me and I'm thinking, what the hell
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: could be happening? And he's like, just keep rehearsing. Do
• 47:50
  Speaker 3: we need to do? And so finally we work out
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: the first scene and we were ready to set up
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: the cam and he said, appears the camera has been
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: stolen it God, and we trace it back to the
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: loading of the truck in New York the day before.
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: It somehow got taken on the sidewalk or something and
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: nobody noticed. And that's you know, low budget film and
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: a lot of people working on the field work first timers,
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: and and you know, mistakes happened. So you know, we
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: don't have the budget to really absorb this problem to
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: come back and pay for a locate. This is one
• 48:30
  Speaker 3: of the few locations we're paying for. And we had
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: all these things locked down for the next few days,
• 48:35
  Speaker 3: which you know, I'm going to lose actors because they
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: had lives and careers. So they scrambled and found another
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: camera in Manhattan. By the time they got it to set,
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: we had about two hours and I shot like three
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: scenes in two hours in I'm assuming in a lot
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: of a lot of one ers are a lot of
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: one one takes, and and you know it's like various
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: you know, man, what's the you make plans and God
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: laughs at them. Yeah, it was like like a lot
• 49:16
  Speaker 3: of my my shots went out the window, and and
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: you know, we shot in and we got something and
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: it worked. Okay, and we put it in the movie,
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: you know. I remember the next day were shooting at
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: my parents' house along island Uh, in this town called
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: dickx Hills, and a bunch of us slept on the
• 49:33
  Speaker 3: floor of my parents' day because we didn't have hotel
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: rooms and people didn't feel like doing the drive back
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: and forth, all crashed and sleeping bags on the floor,
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: and I remember waking up, surrounded by other crew members,
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: thinking this is it. I'm done. I'll never end that.
• 49:49
  Speaker 3: Whatever we got yesterday had to be terrible. I can't
• 49:53
  Speaker 3: do this. I don't know what I'm doing. That's what
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: I've never made a film before this. I just felt
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: a fleet crisis.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: and now back to the show.
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: And then people start to show up. We started set up,
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: and I'm like, I'm uh, is there can I run?
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: I note the neighborhood. Well, I grew up here, I know,
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: I know hiding spots uh and you know. And then
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: then I and Mirror looking and be like, well, where
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: do you want me to stand? What do you want
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: me to do? And I'm like fuck, and Mirror will
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: kill me if I try to run. She's way too tough.
• 50:35
  Speaker 3: So I was like, Okay, I have to pretend I
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: know what I'm doing, and I and I don't. I'm
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: not freaking out. And and luckily, because I'm I'm an
• 50:43
  Speaker 3: introvert and pretty poker faced, I could. I most of
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: my anxiety goes, you know, straight to ulcers, so I
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: I fake my way through it. And then watching them
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: act started to get exciting, and the actors would have
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: suggestions that were making the scene better. It starts to
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: get more and more exciting, and and I started, you know,
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: in case I freak out and say, like, my parents
• 51:07
  Speaker 3: are here. Do they realize I've hired two actors to
• 51:10
  Speaker 3: play them? That's that's a little weird. But my mom
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: made a big tray of baked ZD for us to eat,
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: and and uh, and I started to really enjoy it.
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: And I realized I like being on set. It's terrifying
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: and it's you feel so alive. And I love actors,
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: and I am so grateful to anyone on the crew
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: that they're willing to help me make something. I got
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: over it pretty quickly. I'm always I always get a
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: little anxious right at the end of prep before shooting.
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: It creeps back in this feeling of oh fuck, what
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: if I fucked this up? Or there's so much to
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: think about, There's so many variables, can you control them?
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: Some I'm going to steal my goddamn camera again.
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: You still wake up in a cold split over that,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: even on the bad.
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm still trying to crack that case. So I
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: have still investigating it in my in my spare time.
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: Who the hell and that that camera?
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: Cold? The cold case?
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: That camera's worth what fifteen dollars? Now twenty dollars exactly?
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: The bastard only got that on eBay.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: But you know, listen, I'll tell you what I mean.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: I have to. I had a full blown panic attack
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: on my first shoot day. Like I had a full
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: blown panic attack. Yeah, like I had. I had to
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: as you should. I literally was the biggest thing. I
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: was shooting an action sequence for the short field I
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: was doing, and I go, guys, can you give me
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: five guy to go to the restroom. I went to
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: the bathroom and I literally had a full blown planic
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: back for ten fifteen minutes. Had to like meditate and
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: I didn't even meditate it at the time. I was
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: just like I just need to calm myself. I like
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: water on the face, and then just like Okay, there's
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: like twenty people out there and we've got an action
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: sequence to shoot, and I just and I went out
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: and did it. But it's it's it's something that they
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: don't teach you in film school. They don't talk about
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: this in film school. But this is the reality of
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: what it's like being a gyred toron said at any level,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: whether it's on a two hundred million dollar movie or
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: a sixty thousand dollars movie like day Trippers, like you know,
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: shit happens, Like your camera getting stolen on day one
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: is a pretty real I have.
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: That's say, yeah, yeah, that suck.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: But you know, but on Fletch, you didn't have that
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: from no one stole a camera. On Fletch, no one
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: stole a camera.
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: We yeah, we managed to hold on all of our equipment.
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: But tell me, so, tell me about So let's let's
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: go into this new film Confess Fletch, which is, you know,
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: for a for a certain demographic of my audience who's
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: uh had a little gray in their beard like I do,
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: uh will remember the original Fletch, which is a legendary
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: movie series by the the great Chevy Chase. And when
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: I was when I was pitched this for you to
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: come on the show, It's like, oh, they made a
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: movie called Fletch. Did they know that there was another?
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: Like I couldn't come back because it was like it
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: was John Ham starring in it. I was like, and
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: I was watching that, I was watching Jerailer. It was
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: like man, and then I saw the logo and I
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: was like, oh, it is Fletched. Okay, they're remaking it. Okay, fine, okay,
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: because it was just so different because it didn't feel
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: like the original. It didn't have the gookiness of the original.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: It's a completely different approach to it, which is wonderful.
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: And I did get to see and I loved it.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: So tell me how you got involved with Fleedge and
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: how you approached dealing with a movie that for a
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: certain generation has a shadow over it, which is Chevy Chase.
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: It's kind of shadow over it.
• 54:25
  Speaker 3: In fact, the second movie I was going to direct
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: that it got set up at Sony was going to
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: start John q S X Steve's On and Chevy Chase,
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: and I met with Chevy a bunch of times and
• 54:33
  Speaker 3: you did table read and I was so excited. I
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: was always been a huge fan, and I grew up,
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: you know, watching SNL from the first season. I was
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: probaying eight or nine years old, and then I was
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: when it fell apart. One of the things I was
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: most sad about is not getting a chance to work
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: with Chevy. So cut to many years later, John Hamm,
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: who had worked with twice before and as a friend
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: now we were hanging at and he said, what would
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: you think of doing a Fletch movie? Mirramax owns all
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: the books except the first one, and then he told
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: me when he saw the first movie, he loved it,
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: and then discovered there were books and read them and
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: saw that the books have a slightly different tone than
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: the movie, that Chevy brought his own style of comedy
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: and it really influenced the Flesh movie, and that there
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: was another way to go with it, and he loved it.
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: And he claims he was so broke as a teenager
• 55:27
  Speaker 3: he stole the books from a Walden books store, the
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: various Fletch books that were published in thineteen eighty five.
• 55:35
  Speaker 3: So I think they're probably not I think they're out
• 55:38
  Speaker 3: of business. So they're preently kind to come after him.
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: We should be okay, you should be okay.
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: Okay. So I had always heard the books were great,
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: and I love detective stories, but I had never gotten
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: around to them. So I went off and I loved
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: the first movie for sure, and really enjoyed the second one,
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: and so I went off and read a bunch of them.
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: The one John was thinking would the most sense was
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: Confess Fletch. That book starts with him already having retired
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: from being an investigative reporter, but he can't keep out
• 56:08
  Speaker 3: as the business of investigating mysteries, and it gets sucked
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: into not one but two. And I thought it was fantastic,
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: and I also saw where you could go a different
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: way with it, and I felt as much as I
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: loved Chevy, I felt like I'd seen a lot of
• 56:25
  Speaker 3: sort of eighties reboot nostalgia fest movies that some are great,
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: some are less great. I just thought that doesn't interest
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: me as much as a filmmaker. It's you know, I
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: did the movie Paul, which has an enormous amount of
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: paying homage to Spielberg and Lucas and eighties science fiction
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: fantasy movies, and I love doing it, and that was
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: really fun that was baked into it, and that was
• 56:54
  Speaker 3: to me, that made sense. But in this case, I thought,
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: you know, there's a new generation I think that may
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: not know this character. And there are between TV and movies,
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: there have been fifteen Philip Marlowe's the famous Raymond Handler
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: detective character. He was played by Humphrey Bogart and Elliott
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: Goulds and James Garner and a whole other people. And
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: I thought, you know, people have tried to revive it,
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: and I can understand why it's been hard, and it's
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: in the shadow of Chevy's performance, which is unique. He's
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: a unique, brilliant comic of our time. I thought the
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: only way to go really is to go a different way,
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: because trying to impersonate Chevy, I thought would be a disaster.
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: And John didn't want to do that either. So before
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: I was involved with this, writer Zev Borrow was working
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: on an adaptation and I had read some of his
• 57:48
  Speaker 3: outlines and we had consulted. He was letting me read pages,
• 57:51
  Speaker 3: and my gut feeling was like, this is very funny.
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: It's really funny stuff. It feels a little too much
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: like a Chevy version. But I wanted to, let's say,
• 57:59
  Speaker 3: finish his script, and he turned it in and john
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: first words were like, this is a great movie for
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: Chevy Chase, but not for me. And so I said,
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: let me take a crack at it, and I went
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: back to the book. Zev hadn't used as much of
• 58:15
  Speaker 3: the book as I ended up using.
• 58:17
  Speaker 2: It.
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: Took more characters from the book were translating it from
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: seventies to twenty twenties, so I had to kind of
• 58:25
  Speaker 3: find twenty twenties equivalent to some of these characters. But
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: I really I took more stuff from the book. I
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: underlined lines I really liked from the book and put
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: them in the script and thought, this is a comedy
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: of manners. This is you know, this character of Fletch
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: says a lot of bag in his DNA has baked
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: out a lot of similarities to what Chevy does. But
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: in the books he doesn't have disguises and funny names,
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: and it isn't quite doesn't quite. And one of the
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: things I love about the Chevy movies is having just
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: comes into a room and just confuses everybody with this
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: dead pen acting absurd like almost like the Marx Brothers
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: just complete, completely observed. No one knows what's going on,
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: and in that movie everyone's kind of straight man to Chevy,
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: and I thought, well, there's funny, interesting characters. Maybe if
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: we cast this right, we can let them be funny too,
• 59:14
  Speaker 3: and not just be reacting to John, let him interact.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: And something I felt in the series of Fletch books
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: is Fletch as a character likes weirdos and loners and outsiders,
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: people who are authentic, and he hates phonies. So he
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: an wuks with people lie to anyone at any time,
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: but he has sort of a good heart. He does
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: wrong things to make the world a little more right.
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: He doesn't believe in the cops and the justice system
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: getting there.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: and now back to the show.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: He does it his own way, and I thought, well,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: that's great, and I think John is being both a
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: comedic and dramatic actor. He could really kill this. And
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: I saw the style a little maybe a little more
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: old fashioned dialogue driven talkie comedy, less slapstick and broad,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: more behavioral comedy with hopefully you know, still a bunch
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: of good lines. And I stole a bunch of Zev's
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: really good lines in his script, and I took a
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: lot of good lunch from the book. And this being
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: a genre I hadn't quite worked in, there wasn't like
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: semi a biographical thing. I did what I've watched people
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: like Judd do, which is get some of your really
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: smart comedy friends to read it and pitch you some
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 3: of some ideas, which really helped unlock some things that
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 3: I could write to. Bill Hayter gave us great ideas.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: John's really good friends with Robert Carlock thirty Rock. He
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: gave us great ideas. He gave the script to Neil Gaman,
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: who John knows from good Elements. Neil Gamon loves the
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: fledged book and and I was so thrilled because he
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: liked the script and he gave me. He gave me
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 3: a cop of like two notes that I absolutely did.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: The made things much better. So you know, I, I uh,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 3: I thought, well, why not take advantage of all these
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: great people. I know, that's a make advantage of the
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: great cast that I think we can get. And that's
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: where we were began.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, look, if you if you've got Dale Gaman
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: on tap, I mean, if you're gonna yeah. I mean
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: I take advantage of that.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: You know, what kind of idiot would not.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: Ship that's that's amazing, Like, yeah, Neil, but they said, yeah,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: here's a couple of notes like sure, it's it's it's
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: great if you can get that access. That's a man,
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: that's that's remarkable. No, it was a really fun movie,
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: and the way you approached it was really and John's
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: performance is I've been a fan of John's. One of
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: my favorite things John ever did was the SNL Skitch
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: with Michael Bobble Yeah Ham and Bubbly, one of the
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, my wife and I watched that like every
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: every like six months, like you remember, let's what let
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: let's bring that back. It's just so performance. It's just
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: a John is such a great, great, great comedic actor,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: and he is such great timing. I mean, he's a
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: fantastic dramatic actor. But in this movie he gets to play.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: Both really really really well. Well that's what I was
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: excited about for to get to put John in the
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: middle of you know, these weirdos and let him do
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: both and let him yeah and and and let really
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 3: lean into his timing and and you know, yeah, have
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: a real sustained comedic performance, but to be a very
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: specific guy who's unconventional, who looks, you know, like there's
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: a lot of sending up rich people in the movie,
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: and he he looks like he could walk into a
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: yacht club or a really upscale art dealers gallery or
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: the rich person's apartment or whatever, and and they all
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: let him in, and they'd all open up to him.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: They think he's one of them. And I really believe
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: Fletch has a different value system than all these people.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: He just happens to look like, you know, a handsome
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 3: wasp and so and so he can he can go
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: around taking advantage of that to get the information he
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: wants and to trick people. And so I thought he's
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: kind of perfect. If you go back to the character
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: from book, he is character in the book is younger
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: than than John is. So but what kind of worked
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: about Confess Fletch is he's a retired investigative reporter. So
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: that made some sense that he's he's been away from
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: this world and he's kind of getting sucked back into
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: a version of it. And you know, some people have
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: reacted to like, you can't make Fletch with someone who
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: isn't like Chevy Chase. And I think, I think I
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: can see that that's so, that's what they want. They want,
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: you know, they want more movies with Chavy doing the
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: part and.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: From Chevy from nineteen eighty something, which is.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and I and then and I would have loved
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: that too. I wish I wish they had. I mean,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: maybe they made a mistake by making the second movie
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: not based on one of the books. Maybe they should
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: have tried to stay a little more fatal to books.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: Who knows, It's not for me to decide, but I
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: would have loved to have seen Chevy do all the books.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: But at the same time, you know, The Long Goodbye
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: by Raymond Chandling has been adapted probably three or four times.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: She's stars for.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 3: God's sake, Yeah, I thought, I thought, you know, for people,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: some people say this is sacred, you cannot touch it.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: I was like, well, you know, it's it's an adaptation.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: You know, if it doesn't float your boat, you have
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: to watch exactly exactly.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: Look I was. I was there at the premiere of
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: Footloose when they made the remake with Preig Brewer who
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: made the remake of it, And you know, the remake was.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: The remake was fine, but it's not the it's not
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: the Kevin Bacon one. It's just it's never going to
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: be the Kevin bik It's that moment in time, just
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: like Fletch in the eighties was a moment in side
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: that can never be reproduced no matter what you try
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: to do now.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So that's why I thought we'll use a
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: different book, and we'll have a different tone, and we'll
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: you know, we never really talked much about making it
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 3: a period piece. That's probably wouldn't have been too expensive. Anyway,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: we had to, you know, part of the way we
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: broke the Fletched curse was that we were willing to
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 3: work really fast and work with then. You know, it
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: felt a little more like Doom Day Trippers than I expected,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: you know, but that's the kind of the way the
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: world now is. Like, certain, they give a billion dollars
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: to the Lord of the Rings, and then the rest
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: of us have to have to work out in the
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: the catering budget from Lord of the Rings.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, but if you would have put a John
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: in a cape, I mean you would have got at
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: least another fifty million. Yeah, Yeah, that was if you
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: can we make Fletch, I can imagine in the studio?
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: Can you give Fletched superpowers? Can we can he be
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: like a mutant that solves crimes?
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Just you know people who love the books won't
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: have a problem.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: With that exactly, which is millions of people. Uh now
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: when is it coming out? And one of people? Where
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: could people see it?
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: It's what's getting kind of this hybrid release because we
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: live in a brave new worlds where where you know,
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: the pandemic screwed with movie distribution and this kind of
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 3: medium mish comedy that is adult skewing to a bit.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 3: I mean it doesn't really you know, there's not a
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: lot of pop culture references and dirty shit like in
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: super Bad. I apologize they can't do it every time,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: and so you know, it's not perceived as necessarily a
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 3: big theatrical money maker, which I get es fishing this
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 3: moment time is everything all better off? People scream and
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: trying to figure out what are movies now? Anyway? So
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 3: we're getting this limited release in theater starting this Friday,
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: the sixteenth. It'll be in about four hundred and fifty
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: theaters around the country and the main major markets. You know,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: it's not getting a top of gun level promotion, But
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 3: I didn't expect it to. I'm actually quite honestly, I
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: always thought this woe go straight to streaming in this
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 3: moment in time, the kind of size of movie it
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: is and the style of it, it being not super broad,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: and how many movies, how many comedies have been on
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 3: screens lately. It's I feel, not a lot.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: I can't in the theater.
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, since not not ones that come from studios.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: No, no, not not in a big not big releases. No.
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean like yeah, all these big yeah, all
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: these you know, like Kevin Hart movies go to Netflix.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: I mean he was yeah, yeah, his stuff made tons
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: of movie his his movies made tons of money in
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 3: the box office, and now they're all going to Netflix.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: And it's I mean, The Rock is going to Netflix
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: for godsakes. I mean, it's got Black Adam coming out.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: So but but I mean, when you got someone like
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: one of the biggest movie stars in the world went
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: straight to streamingn't that went straight it started in streaming?
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean could notice could red notice if
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: it was released because that's an action comedy. Could that
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: have made a couple hundred million dollars in the box office.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: Maybe you would, yeah, you'd think, but you know, with
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 3: the pandemic change things, and yeah and and and you know,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: people are strapped for money, and I get it. But
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 3: so I'm glad that it's getting kind of theatrical. I
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: see it as kind of an indie release. It's sort
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: of like getting the The thing that's that has changed
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: that's interesting is that even maybe a year ago or
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: two years ago, the major change a mc regal so
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: forth would not take a movie that's also opening on
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 3: demand the same day, and we are opening on demand
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: the same day, and they're the major chains are willing
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: to show Fletch so.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: So, but they don't have a waste.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: Now yeah, I mean exactly. The the you know, the
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: whole like we won't take anything less than a ninety
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 3: day window has all gone away. And and which is
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: good for me because now some people can see in
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: the theater and I think it. I think it, you know,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 3: because a lot of the jokes are not pointed at
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 3: they're a little more dry or just happened without without
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: elbowing the audience in the ribs. I think I've seen
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: it come with an audience a few times, and it
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: plays nicely. I think people actually laugh and and focus
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: in a in a slightly different way. But I'll be
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: happy if you watch it on any form, if you
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 3: watch it on your Apple Watch, It'll be grateful. And
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 3: then I was just gonna say, at the end of
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: October it's going to be it's going to move to showtime.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: Okay, so perfect, perfect. I tell everybody they have to
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: go watch it. It's a really, really fun film. We'll
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: be right back after a word from our sponsor. And
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: now back to the show. Whether you like the JV
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: one or not, it's just a good film standalone. It's
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: a really nice approach to that material. With that question, now,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: I do have to ask you one question because you
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: worked on one of my favorite shows of the last
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: you know, ten fifteen years, Newsroom Is. It was a
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: masterpiece of television. It's one of those it's up there
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: for me, up there with the Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: It's just such a well written show and such a
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: well done show. And you were obviously a co executive
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: producer on it. You worked with Aaron. I just have
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: to ask you, what was it? What did you, how
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: did you approach working with Aaron's workin and how was
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: that collaboration on the Newsroom?
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: Well, it's I mean, yeah, Aaron's brilliant, there's no question
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 3: of that. And I, you know, for Better or Wars,
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: I thought, well, let's approach the pilot slightly differently than
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 3: his other which are very sort of classical, beautifully directed,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 3: often by Tommy Shlami, who's fantastic director. But I thought,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 3: I don't want to ape his style. What if we
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 3: give it a slightly edgier more you know, all green
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: grass handheld. Yeah, it's not dirty or a vibe or
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: you know. And I actually ended up getting I have
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: terrible memory. The DP who shoots who shot like United,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, Paul's Paul's DP. Yeah, And I can't
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: believe I'm forgetting a space and it's just my terrible
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: I'm getting old great guy, great DP who operates himself,
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 3: shoots all of Ken Loach's movies, and and we shot
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: everything with three cameras going at all times. I kind
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: of wanted to shoot thirty five HBO thought well, that'll
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: you know, get a little expensive and the cameras are heavy.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 3: What about sixteen? So We shot the pilot on sixteen
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: and then it moved over to digital. And you know,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: sixteen has its drawbacks because it is it is grainier
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: and maybe maybe a bit too granny. But I feel
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 3: like it was an interesting experiment for the pilot. And
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 3: the cool thing about pilots is you can change a
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: lot in episode two and people tend not to notice.
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: Like all the offices. We built this amazing set for
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 3: the pilot, which was like the bullpen and the and
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 3: the control room and this little stage where he does
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: his broadcasts where a world mack of voice sits and
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 3: it was all live and wired. You could have it
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 3: one camera in the control room with Emily Mortarmer, other
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: camera with Jeff Daniels and be shooting lives and it
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 3: was fantastic. It was so much fun and it was exciting,
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: and I think it gave it. It gave it. It was
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: very such a feel. But they didn't want to spend
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: all the money to then build all the offices, so
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 3: we shot on location for the offices, and of course
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: they all changed in the second episode. No one's ever,
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 3: no one's ever asked about it, and I'm sure I
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: wouldn't have noticed if I was the few so so
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: you know, so we took that approach. But with Aaron's writing,
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: actors need to be fully prepared. The way every scene
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: would start was Aaron would come down to set, we
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: just read it sitting in chairs, and the actors would
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 3: read it and Aaron would give notes on performance and
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 3: lines and sometimes on punctuation. Aaron's the kind of guy
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: who says like, no, that's a double dash. You need
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: to clip it at the end, or you need to
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: cut her off exactly at the beginning of this syllable.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: I mean, he hears it it's musical and poses it
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: in his head and he wants to he wants to
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 3: be acted the way he heard it, because it's not
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: like he wrote it and said this is perfect. No,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 3: he wrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it, and
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 3: rewrote it, and the music sounded right to him. So
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: there is there is a real mastery as to how
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 3: he's writing. And some of the actors were used to that.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: Some of the actors are in a lot of theater.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 3: People were used to it, and some of the actors
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: like what the hell, And then once they start to
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 3: do it, they see why he wants it that way,
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 3: and so often we would start shooting the scene and
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: slowly speed it up as we'd go along. We'd get
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 3: the beats down, so the psychology and the behavior all
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: felt right, the moments all felt right, and then I'd say, Okay,
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 3: now do it a little bit faster and a little
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 3: bit faster. So then it starts to feel like at Sorkin,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 3: which is that incredibly bright people, Yeah, with neurons firing
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 3: way faster than mine do. And and it's great, it's great.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 3: And he's also a lover of you know, I watched
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 3: I watched His Girl Friday a bunch of times before
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: starting because because I was saying this to some of
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 3: the other day, those those old Hollywood movies, those scripts
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: were like one hundred and fifty pages because people talk
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 3: so fucking fast. And that's the way, that's the way,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 3: that's the way Aaron writes. And it's so pleasurable when
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: you've got great actors doing it. And that cast, that
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 3: cast was amazing.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, Jeff, I mean, Jeff Well, that whole
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: opening monologue on about America, Oh my god, I mean
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: I've seen that on YouTube a thousand times of like,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: you know, how America's not great and all that stuff,
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: but the way he did it was so loving, so beautiful,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: so truthful, so raw, and it's just like the cadence
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: of a Sorkin script, and it's like, you're right, there's
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: people firing on all syllators, like everybody is so like
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: even the intern in the scene. Yeah, he's smart as
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: a whip. It had some amazing lines. It's just the case. Yeah,
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: that's that's a sort. It's kind of like a Tarantino script,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Like Tarantino has his own vibe of that and people
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: don't talk like that. Human beings don't talk like that.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 1: But that's what's beautiful about watching and listening to that. Yeah.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's his that's his that's his style, that's his
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 3: artistic choice, and it comes from theater. And he tends
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: to write scenes that have movements in them. You know,
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 3: some writers write for the visual medium that something happens
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 3: and butts up against something else in another scene and
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 3: butts up against something else and the story unfolds. Aaron
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 3: writes like a playwright, and he writes things that happen
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 3: and unfold in front of the audience. And I think
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 3: it's totally valid and quite exciting when it's done by
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 3: a master, because it is a different experience watching things change,
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: watching the actors attitudes change, watching watching them affect each
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 3: other in real time in the scene, as opposed to
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 3: seeing the change happening over a series of you know,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 3: of the course of an episode. You're seeing the drama
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 3: happening in front of you, which sometimes I think people
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 3: forget is a tool, yea of storytelling because they you know, look,
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 3: I love things being sintamatic, but there there are a
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 3: lot of ways to do that, and his way is
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 3: a really interesting one, endlessly watchable.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for making helping make that show
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: where it is. I like, literally just love love I'm
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: so sad when it didn't come back.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: I wanted more and I was there's those five seconds
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 3: where they thought they maybe they would revive it in
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: the Trump age, and I think probably the end of
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 3: the day, they were just like, what how how would
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 3: you even take this on?
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: Oh? Like, I mean, how can you make it? Yeah
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: you can't, Like, yeah, I can't even go down that
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: road now, Greg, I just have a couple of questions
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: ask all my guests, and real kind of rapid fire
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: questions what is the lesson that took you the longest
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: to learn, whether in the film industry or in life.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 3: The list of technic the longest to learn was probably
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: that I didn't. I meant I touched on this earlier
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 3: insists that I have to be you who writes and
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 3: directors on movies. I really thought it was still how
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 3: cheating to direct other people's words, that it had to
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 3: be personal because those are the films that affected me
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 3: the most. And I realized I'm a slow writer. I'm
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 3: sometimes a neurotic, uh not terribly confident writer. You know,
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 3: I have to I have to be doing it for
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 3: a while to get back into it and believe I
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 3: could do it. And I also like being on set.
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 3: I really love being on set. And in Sodabers, when
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 3: of the first people said to me, like, it's okay
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: if you direct someone else's screen screenplay, It's it's fine.
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: It's like those take really long time to write. Spend
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 3: more time on a set, and you'll get better and
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: better at making movies and TV and and it was
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 3: great advice. And and I was so lucky that when
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: I moved to I got to work on Undeclared Arrest
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: development the comeback. I mean, I worked on only fucking
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 3: kick ass shows, so so it's like, you know, with
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: great writing.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: Uh.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 3: And then and then later the News Road and got
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 3: to work with Cia Pey and Nick Frost, who I
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 3: absolute adore. So yeah, so but then I thought, you know,
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: I have done more writing in the last decade, some
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: of things that I haven't gotten made in addition to
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 3: my little indie FELM. But you know, I take the attitude.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 3: Like I said earlier, the lesson is is it's okay.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't direct everything. I don't write anything
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 3: I direct. That's okay, and and I'm much happier for it.
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 3: And and it's okay to take time to write and
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: and wait till it's ready, but not waste time. Feel
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: you know, I'm feeling sorry for myself if things fall apart.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: And last questions. Here three of your favorite films of
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: all time. We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: Ooh, this is fun. You know, it's hard not to
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 3: pick movies that are giant classics. I know, like, if
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 3: I were to be honest, two thousand and one is
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 3: one of my favorite films of all time. To me,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: it takes the spectacle movie and turns it into something
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: completely different. Yeah, and it takes a spectacle movie in
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 3: terms of our house film, and yet still is also
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 3: like a cat and mouse thriller for the whole house
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 3: section and is brilliant and gives you so much to
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: think about and wonder about no matter how many times
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: I see it. And when my parents took me to
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 3: see it when I was nine, they fell asleep, and
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 3: it's stuck in my head like a crazy dream for
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: my entire life. So there's that the movie. I probably,
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 3: if the world was exploding and I was told I
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: could say one movie would probably be eight and a half.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: I love Felini deeply, and I love everything about that movie.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 3: That movie, to me, is the most entertaining exploration of
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: self that I've ever seen, and I love every detail
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: in it, and I love how it's shot. I love
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 3: the music, I love the performances. I just it's another
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 3: film I can watch a million times. Now, picking a
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 3: third it's gonna be a little tricky. There was a
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: time where I might have picked a Woody Allen movie,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 3: but I'm not gonna touch that right now. And I mean,
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 3: to be honest, I can't. I can't lie about my
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 3: experience when I saw those movies. I know what I felt.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, look, all I gotta say is I had someone
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: to say the other day is like, can I say,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: any Hollow, Any Hall is a great movie? I'm sorry,
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: it's it's a great movie. It's you know, it's a COLLI.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: It's really good. But I understand where you're coming from.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: I I would probably say, I probably say good Fellas.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 3: Good Fellas is, you know, being a New Yorker, being
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: I'm half Italian American, being a lifelong Scorsese lover, uh course,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: fascinated with that world and just the explosion of cinema
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: that movie is. But everything is there for a reason.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 3: There's there's just it's not it's you know, endlessly inventive cinematically,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 3: but it's not somehow it's not. It doesn't feel show offye,
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 3: it doesn't feel like, hey look at the eye can
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: do this? This looks this is cool. It's like, it
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: is cool. But it's better than just being cool. It's
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 3: fucking telling the story and and immersing you in the
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: emotions and expressing everything about that world. What's exciting and
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 3: dangerous and compelling and just horrifying and awful and vicious
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 3: and inhuman about that world.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know that's it. And so many filmmakers,
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: especially when we're starting out, we all want to do
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: the Scorsese shots. We all want to do the Kubrick shots.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: We all want to Yeah, we all want those like
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: you know, long crane shots, the wonders, this.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 3: Kind of stuff, right yep.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: But even in Goodfellas, the wonder that everybody wants to
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: try to do, which is that bad that going through
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: the kitchen steadakam shot? It's not there to show off.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: It's literally there to tell the story. And I guess
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: truly don't under like as a director looking at that scene,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: I'm like, how do you tell that story without the wonner? Like,
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: how do you tell all that yeah bit of information
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: about Henry Hill without that wonder? The winner is so
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: economical and yes, oh there's so beautifully done.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you could tell it in shots. You could break
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 3: it up into shots, and you could you could show
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 3: his well walking through all those places, but it wouldn't
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 3: have the emotion of passing through the kitchen and all
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 3: all the life going on and ending up at that
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 3: table and the table being plopped down in front of
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 3: them and ending on fucking Henny Youngman.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: What do you do again? Somehow in construction.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, no, and it's and it's and it is.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 3: It is an incredible mastery of the forum. But it
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 3: isn't just there to show look, I'm a master. It's
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: there because that is the best way to tell that's
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 3: that part of the story. And it's yeah, it's amazing.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 3: And I can watch that movie again and again and
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 3: again and again and and come away from a thinking
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: boy on mediocre.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: And how and by the way, and this is the
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: last thing I want to say, how many of us
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: growing up look at the masters, the Kubrick's, the Scorsesees,
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: the Wells, the you know, the all Spielberg's, and you
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: look at their films and you're like, I can't get
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: out of bed because and this is asanda filmmaker. You're like,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: I'll never be Kubrick. I can't get out of Why
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: should I even try. It's kind of like I'll never paint,
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: I'll never be Picasso. Of course not. There's only a
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: hand full of those masters in the world. But you
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: can do something I hate to say, look, Kubrick would
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: have made an interesting super Bad, but probably not as
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: good as You're super Bad in my opinion, though would
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: have been a very interesting Scorsese could have done an
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: interesting super Bad, no question. But also, and I think
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: it's Denzel Washington. He says, like, you know what, Stielberg
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: could have been an interesting Good Fellas, and Marty could
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: have made an interesting Shindler's List, no question. But those
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: films were built for those filmmakers from their perspective life
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: and and you know, everyone has that about that path
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: they walk, and not everyone's going to be the Actually,
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: there's gonna be no one that's going to be a Nolan,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: There's no one that's going to be a Fincher or
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: soder Bird or Spielberg, because they've already taken that mantle,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, there's a great Albert Brooks story. He became
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: friendly with Kubrick because Kubrick really liked comedy. He loved
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 3: Woody Allen, he loved Albert Brooks and he doctor Straan
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: he and yeah, and he wrote he became like a
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 3: kind of a phone friend with Albert Brooks. And at
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 3: one point he Albert Brooks was writing Lost in America
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 3: and Kupery said, let me read it. I'll give you
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: some notes, and so he's like, oh my god, Stanley
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: Kubrick's going to read my fucking script. This is amazing.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: And then the notes came back. He's like, they were terrible,
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 3: but it was really cool. Still, He's like, but they
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 3: weren't funny. It's like Stanley Kubrick's Lost in America would
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 3: be very, very different. And Albert Brooks I think is
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 3: brilliant and he's one of my favorite comedy shell makers
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 3: of all time. But yeah, it's like, yeah, to your point, Yeah,
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 3: you guys just have to try to be the best
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 3: version of yourself. I try to push the things and
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 3: say like, well, what do I think I could do
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: here that the other guy wouldn't do, that might actually
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 3: do it be good. So that's how I go in.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: Greg Man, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: my friend. Thank you so much.
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: Sing here Alex this was much fun. Man.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: Thank you for all the years of amazing entertainment. And
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: continue doing what you're doing, and continue doing what you do, sir,
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: even though your mediocre, as you said, but well you
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: know no, seriously, my friend, thank you so much for
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: coming on the show.
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 3: I appreciate you man, Thank you, Thank you so much, Alex.
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 3: I hope to do it again someday.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: I want to thank Greg so much for coming on
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: the show and sharing his super bad knowledge with all
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: of the tribe today. Thank you so much. Greg. If
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: you want to get links to anything we spoke about
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: in this episode, including how to watch his new film,
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: Confess Fletch starring John Hamm, all you gotta do is
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: go to these show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: Forward slash three ninety. Thank you so much for listening
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: to guys. As always, keep on writing no matter what.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: I'll talk to you soon.
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at Bulletproofscreenwriting
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: dot tv.