Latest / Half the Picture / #22 - MICHAEL LEHMANN & DANIEL WATERS

Transcript

#22 - MICHAEL LEHMANN & DANIEL WATERS · Half the Picture

• 0:00
  I feel like Heather's gets this more than most movies.
• 0:02
  The first time you saw it, it disturbed you, it freaked you out.
• 0:05
  You didn't enjoy it. It was not a pleasant experience.
• 0:08
  But then, when you see it again, it's like, oh my god, it's masterpiece.
• 0:11
  The Richard Curtis wrote Notting Hill.
• 0:12
  Nobody comes up to him and says,
• 0:14
  first time I saw Notting Hill, man, it f**ked me up.
• 0:16
  But now, taking time, I realized, it's so great.
• 0:18
  I remember the first day of shooting.
• 0:20
  A lot of cast and crew hadn't met me yet.
• 0:22
  And I show up with like a black crucifix on my head.
• 0:26
  And I'm like, oh, f**k.
• 0:28
  I knew this movie was written by some Manson F**ker.
• 0:30
  A lot of what's interesting visually in the movie was in Deathscript.
• 0:34
  He wrote a very cinematic script.
• 0:36
  You get a writer like Dan who writes brilliant dialogue
• 0:39
  and also his people walking out on you right in the middle of talking to you.
• 0:44
  I'd never made a better movie than Heather's.
• 0:46
  It's a work that still resonates after all of this time.
• 0:49
  Nobody ever thought that this little team movie
• 0:51
  we were making would be anything more than a bit of a splash.
• 0:54
  I didn't really think that it would have the kind of life it's had.
• 0:57
  Hey everyone, I'm Billy and welcome back to Half the Picture.
• 1:08
  I'm so excited to say that today we have two amazing guests for you.
• 1:12
  Director Michael Laman and writer Dan Waters.
• 1:14
  The guys behind the amazing cult classic film, Hevers,
• 1:17
  which I'm sure many of you have seen.
• 1:18
  And if you haven't, you should definitely check it out.
• 1:20
  Now, this episode is one from our vaults.
• 1:22
  I recorded it a while back with Michael and Dan.
• 1:24
  And you'll be able to tell because
• 1:25
  I haven't got my Velasquist goate in this one.
• 1:27
  As round of the podcast Peter Capaldi described it.
• 1:30
  You look like a Velasquist character.
• 1:33
  A Spanish painter, often painter.
• 1:35
  The name is of the courts of the king,
• 1:37
  Philip, whatever is the fifth of Spain.
• 1:38
  And they were often men like you with a mop of hair like that and a gootee.
• 1:43
  It was so much fun chatting to Michael and Dan all about making Hevers.
• 1:46
  And what it was like working with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater on the movie,
• 1:50
  I think you're going to love it.
• 1:51
  By the way, remember to like and subscribe to the podcast.
• 1:53
  As it really helps us get more amazing guests on the show.
• 1:56
  So without further ado, let's roll on my conversation with Michael Laman and Dan Wars.
• 2:01
  Enjoy.
• 2:23
  You wrote about my returns, Patin Burton, you know,
• 2:25
  of course, you directed your own material later on.
• 2:28
  And I suppose I just want to start off with asking you,
• 2:30
  what not many genres, is there anything you can do?
• 2:34
  This is the question, this is the question.
• 2:36
  What sort of inspires you way back here at the start of your career
• 2:40
  to sort of go to go back to school in a sense and write a team movie?
• 2:43
  What sort of having so much versatility?
• 2:45
  Why does you choose to do a team movie, high school movie by Hevers?
• 2:49
  Well, I was very young and naive.
• 2:52
  I can't recommend naivete, too much because naivete is great
• 2:55
  because if I would have thought a dark high school comedy
• 2:59
  that had that kind of language, that kind of attitude
• 3:02
  could get made, I'd be an idiot.
• 3:03
  I wouldn't have done her.
• 3:05
  But the fact that I was, the fact that I wasn't
• 3:07
  it actually has helped me do it.
• 3:10
  I have the basic principles.
• 3:12
  It's, you know, if the movies were better,
• 3:15
  I would have been a male Pauline Kale.
• 3:16
  I would have been a film critic.
• 3:18
  If like the movies were as good as they were in the 70s,
• 3:20
  I would have been happy to just watch movies and write about them.
• 3:24
  But in the 80s, I started to get bored
• 3:27
  and basically we had these things called newspapers.
• 3:29
  And when I looked at a newspaper, I would say,
• 3:32
  well, what's not playing?
• 3:33
  What movie do I want to see that's not a playing?
• 3:37
  And I wanted to see a Dr. Strange love of a teen comedy.
• 3:40
  So I wanted to see a movie there
• 3:42
  with something different than John.
• 3:43
  He's moved, I thought we're perfectly fine.
• 3:45
  But I wanted something different.
• 3:47
  I had the kind of, the sad conclusion that,
• 3:49
  I guess I might have to write it.
• 3:51
  So I worked, it was working in a video store long before
• 3:54
  Tarantino, by the way.
• 3:55
  I was working in a video store and I,
• 3:57
  and so I, video stores are great because you're surrounded by movies.
• 4:01
  And it's not a taxing job on your brain.
• 4:03
  So you can kind of work out ideas
• 4:06
  as you're checking out movies.
• 4:08
  Things called video cassettes back then.
• 4:10
  And I'm sure Michael has heard this story a thousand times
• 4:13
  that he chokes on him is that, you know,
• 4:16
  my goal was, speaking of working in multiple genres,
• 4:20
  my ultimate goal was to have Stanley Kubrick
• 4:22
  direct a teen film.
• 4:23
  He had done a horror film.
• 4:24
  He'd done a couple of war movies.
• 4:26
  He had done a period film.
• 4:27
  He had done a science fiction film.
• 4:29
  A couple science vision films.
• 4:30
  Of course, the next genre he wanted to work
• 4:33
  it was a teen genre.
• 4:34
  Of course, that was no problem.
• 4:37
  So I was going to mail this off to the New York and England.
• 4:40
  And it was going to be, and I, and I got,
• 4:43
  I have the right to make a three hour script
• 4:45
  because big stands interact.
• 4:47
  Overnight I went from Kubrick to Lehman.
• 4:49
  I use it as a punchline,
• 4:51
  but there's no way Stanley would have got my sense of humor
• 4:53
  the way Michael does.
• 4:54
  Now, do we know if he was ever actually sent the script?
• 4:58
  I did, he was not sent the script.
• 4:59
  I think, I think when no one had told him about it directly though.
• 5:03
  Really?
• 5:03
  And they had a phone about it.
• 5:06
  The way after the fact.
• 5:07
  Later.
• 5:08
  Yeah.
• 5:09
  They have to the fact.
• 5:09
  We have to thank.
• 5:10
  Also, I was at a rap party with Winona
• 5:13
  for one of my unheralded director of debuts.
• 5:16
  And it was like five in the morning.
• 5:18
  And she called JD Sounder and had us all shout hello to him.
• 5:21
  So she did.
• 5:23
  It was some pretty crazy phone calls.
• 5:25
  Wow.
• 5:25
  I know Kubrick was in the 80s.
• 5:27
  He was constantly, he had his assistants
• 5:28
  like constantly searching for scripts.
• 5:30
  And I know that even like one of his assistants
• 5:33
  got the script for the killing fields Bruce Robinson.
• 5:36
  And read it and was like, no, that passed on this.
• 5:38
  This is definitely not, you know.
• 5:40
  And then that obviously went on to get Oscar nominated.
• 5:42
  So you never know, there could have been,
• 5:43
  it could have been in the mix, you know, potentially.
• 5:46
  Yeah, I had, I had sat down with Todd Field once.
• 5:49
  Todd Field just says he got a call
• 5:51
  through the morning from Kubrick telling him
• 5:52
  how much he loved him and gross anatomy.
• 5:54
  I'm like, he's like Stanley Kubrick
• 5:56
  watched gross anatomy, which is a medical comedy
• 5:59
  with Natty Mundine and Todd Field
• 6:00
  way back in the day.
• 6:01
  And Jamie Kurtz, I believe, was innovative.
• 6:04
  So Kubrick does get around.
• 6:05
  But actually, man, that's a name.
• 6:08
  Yeah. So Michael, I was actually, I was wanted
• 6:11
  to jump over to you now and ask a bit about your sort of,
• 6:14
  so the early stage of your career as well,
• 6:16
  because I know that you famously you worked for Zoetrope
• 6:19
  under Francis Ford Coppola back in the early 80s.
• 6:21
  He was producing things like, you know,
• 6:23
  one from the heart and the outsiders around that time,
• 6:26
  which we were chatting, yeah, before we started recording,
• 6:27
  you had done some work on you were managing
• 6:29
  the post-production and the electronic cinema divisions.
• 6:32
  I'm just super curious to ask you about that time
• 6:34
  because I remember when God are past a couple of months ago,
• 6:37
  you said on Twitter that, you know,
• 6:39
  there was so, you know, he had an office on Zoetro,
• 6:42
  Michael Powell had an office, David Lynch had an office,
• 6:44
  like all these sort of filmmakers weren't mulling around.
• 6:46
  I just wanted to ask you what it was like
• 6:48
  to work there at that time when all that was going on.
• 6:50
  And what kind of stories you had?
• 6:52
  Oh, yeah, it was an extraordinary place
• 6:54
  because Francis had this vision of creating
• 6:56
  an old-time Hollywood studio like they had in the 30s
• 6:59
  with contract players and people who were employees
• 7:02
  who work on everything in a kind of great creative atmosphere
• 7:06
  unlike the Hollywood studios in the 30s.
• 7:08
  So he put together, he bought what was then called
• 7:12
  Hollywood General Studios, which is a small studio a lot.
• 7:16
  You can see it featured in the player in the beginning.
• 7:19
  That's where they shot that.
• 7:21
  And he took it over and brought in filmmakers
• 7:25
  from all over the world to have offices
• 7:28
  and be part of this sort of Zoetro thing.
• 7:30
  So Michael Powell had an office, David Lynch had an office there.
• 7:34
  Mel Brooks had an office on the lot.
• 7:36
  Brooks Soms had been there.
• 7:38
  George Burns had an office on the lot.
• 7:40
  He'd been there for many years.
• 7:42
  I would watch George Burns drive onto the lot every morning
• 7:45
  in a huge Cadillac.
• 7:47
  You could see just the top portion of his head
• 7:50
  above the windshield because he was so short.
• 7:54
  And you'd see this big car driving in the top of a head
• 7:58
  and some cigar smoke and you park and get out
• 8:02
  and this little guy walked to his office.
• 8:03
  He was very old at that time.
• 8:05
  So Mel Brooks, George Burns, Michael Mann had his office for thief.
• 8:10
  So he was there.
• 8:11
  He used to drive his Ferrari into my parking spot
• 8:14
  and get really pissed off if anybody was in his spot
• 8:17
  even by an inch or so.
• 8:19
  This was an early Michael Mann.
• 8:21
  Nobody really knew who he was at that point.
• 8:22
  Frank Rotem had an office there.
• 8:25
  Martha Coolidge had an office there.
• 8:27
  Trying to think who else and on the lot at that time,
• 8:30
  they were shooting things like breathless.
• 8:34
  Jim McBride's remake of breathless.
• 8:36
  G'dard was there and he camped out in an office in the back
• 8:41
  and he shot some stuff on the stage with Storaro
• 8:44
  during the making of one from the heart.
• 8:45
  He took over the stage for the weekend
• 8:47
  and he hired me and my buddies
• 8:49
  who were working in this video division
• 8:52
  to use Francis' equipment.
• 8:54
  It was a very, it was a wild place.
• 8:55
  It was a lot of stuff going on.
• 8:57
  Very cool.
• 8:58
  So I worked there.
• 8:59
  I started at the bottom and worked my way up
• 9:02
  about two rungs of the ladder, not very high up,
• 9:04
  but I worked there for three, I take three years
• 9:07
  and made a lot of nice people.
• 9:09
  A lot of good people who went on to do good work.
• 9:11
  Amazing.
• 9:12
  So when you came to film school,
• 9:14
  then you were kind of the hotshot,
• 9:16
  the guy had worked with Coplar and it's so true.
• 9:18
  So that must have been pretty cool coming in
• 9:20
  and then everyone being like,
• 9:22
  oh, who's this guy?
• 9:24
  Well, I had come to speak at a screening of one
• 9:27
  from the heart because Francis said,
• 9:29
  oh, I want to send all the different editorial people there.
• 9:32
  So he sent Rudy Fair, who's one of the editors,
• 9:35
  old-time Hollywood editor,
• 9:36
  edited Hitchcock Stalin for Murder.
• 9:40
  He was cutting on the show and Gorsow,
• 9:42
  who was the more contemporary editor,
• 9:44
  was cutting on the show, a guy named Randy Roberts.
• 9:47
  So he had the editors come and had me come to speak
• 9:50
  to the students at SC and I had applied to USC
• 9:54
  and they'd lost my application.
• 9:56
  And I think I mentioned this screening.
• 9:58
  I said, you guys, while you guys are here studying,
• 10:00
  I was all working on this really cool film
• 10:03
  because the school lost my application
• 10:05
  and then eventually they found it and said,
• 10:07
  do you want to come?
• 10:08
  And at that point, I, Francis,
• 10:10
  was his company was kind of falling apart
• 10:12
  and I said, now I'm going to go make some movies
• 10:14
  on my Tennessee.
• 10:15
  Bracket.
• 10:16
  So how did you guys actually first meet?
• 10:18
  Because I know you'd written,
• 10:18
  have his damn while you were at the video store.
• 10:21
  Michael, you had made the beaver get supported,
• 10:23
  which I got on a lot of notice.
• 10:24
  So how did you guys first actually come together
• 10:26
  and be like, right, okay, these, you know,
• 10:28
  you two guys did the ones who were going to make Heavens?
• 10:30
  Well, I didn't go to USC.
• 10:31
  I went to McGill University in Montreal,
• 10:34
  but I came out to LA,
• 10:35
  meet my best friend from my high school,
• 10:38
  who went to USC.
• 10:39
  Larry Caresus, he who's a writer,
• 10:40
  himself wrote Edward and people first played Flint
• 10:43
  and people versus O.J. Simpson,
• 10:45
  people versus Andy Kaufman.
• 10:47
  But so BC, I moved in with these five USC guides
• 10:50
  and I was all, I was inundated with USC NIS.
• 10:54
  And they all did something,
• 10:56
  whether it was hold the boom mic or edit or shoot,
• 11:00
  beaver gets a boner,
• 11:01
  which is the student film directed by Michael Layman.
• 11:04
  But Michael Layman himself was an enigmatic figure
• 11:07
  in the background.
• 11:08
  You know, people starting out, I'm always like,
• 11:10
  I don't know how to get your script to it,
• 11:12
  how to get your script to an agent,
• 11:14
  but have friends who like your script.
• 11:16
  You can get one person other than yourself,
• 11:18
  like your script.
• 11:19
  Amazing things can happen.
• 11:21
  And so they all like my script.
• 11:23
  They like the 300 pages
• 11:25
  down in the dead of high scope films.
• 11:27
  They gave it to their agents,
• 11:29
  that they had agents and they gave it to the only director
• 11:31
  they know, Michael Layman.
• 11:33
  First agent I met with after Heather's basically said,
• 11:36
  oh, you've got some talent to use spooky little boy.
• 11:40
  We're gonna put this Heather's script in a drawer
• 11:42
  and we'll never talk about it.
• 11:44
  You and I know you're talented.
• 11:45
  So now we'll have you do share.
• 11:49
  But then another agent who happened to be Michael Layman's agent
• 11:52
  said, oh, what a second?
• 11:54
  This is great.
• 11:55
  Why can't we tell the world about it?
• 11:56
  And so Bobby Thompson, from there,
• 11:58
  she kind of connected, but not only Michael,
• 12:01
  another path to Michael Layman,
• 12:03
  but also to Denise Novy.
• 12:05
  It was ultimately a producer of the project.
• 12:07
  You know, Larry Karazyski figures large in all this
• 12:10
  because Larry was, he was a student at SC.
• 12:13
  He's a great writer.
• 12:14
  He's a great guy.
• 12:15
  He's a big film-ficked film fan like Dan.
• 12:17
  He helped put together the crew for the Bieber gets a boner
• 12:20
  because he was actually the person
• 12:22
  who directed me towards the script in the first place.
• 12:25
  He said, hey, you had to read this script.
• 12:27
  This guy Red Beard Simmons wrote it
• 12:29
  and he's in the writing program.
• 12:30
  And I said, oh, Red Beard, I don't know who that is
• 12:32
  and he introduced me who's also a great guy.
• 12:35
  And Larry put together pretty much all the people
• 12:39
  who worked on the crew of that movie.
• 12:41
  And I tried to get Larry to edit it
• 12:43
  and the school wouldn't allow him
• 12:44
  because he was a critical study student,
• 12:46
  not an editing student.
• 12:48
  And at the last minute, they pulled the rug out
• 12:50
  from under that, I still feel terrible with this.
• 12:52
  But Larry, who is very good at putting people together
• 12:56
  was the one who called me and said,
• 12:58
  you know, Dan Waters, he wrote this script.
• 13:00
  It's amazing.
• 13:01
  You got to read it.
• 13:02
  He needs an agent.
• 13:03
  Can you show it to your agent?
• 13:05
  And I said, why don't you show it to your agent?
• 13:07
  Because Larry and Scott, his partner,
• 13:09
  have it done very well coming up.
• 13:10
  The school may add a big agent.
• 13:13
  And I think that's the one, then, is that...
• 13:15
  Well, Natalie, it was near agent, dude.
• 13:17
  So let's put in the door.
• 13:18
  It'll be our little secret.
• 13:20
  Yeah.
• 13:21
  Bobby Thompson was a very interesting young agent
• 13:23
  at William Morris.
• 13:24
  She represented Tim Burton.
• 13:26
  She represented Jim Cameron.
• 13:28
  She represented Joe Minion, right?
• 13:30
  The writer hand wrote, after hours?
• 13:32
  Everybody corkies first agent.
• 13:34
  Right, first agent.
• 13:35
  And Michael Token, I think, was her client as well.
• 13:37
  She didn't keep all these clients for a long time,
• 13:40
  but through no fault of her own.
• 13:43
  Anyway, Bobby had seen Beabry at the boner.
• 13:46
  I sang with her.
• 13:47
  When I sent her the script to Heather,
• 13:49
  she just flipped out.
• 13:50
  She got it completely.
• 13:51
  She loved it and she worked hard to put it together.
• 13:54
  Denise was, actually, Denise was a friend of mine.
• 13:57
  Did you know that, Dan?
• 13:58
  I didn't have another.
• 13:59
  Yeah, I knew we're through other people,
• 14:00
  but she was also a client of Bobby's.
• 14:02
  And so we got together on that.
• 14:04
  And Denise was obviously huge in putting the movie together.
• 14:08
  And I'm very fast.
• 14:12
  I mean, of course, me with visions of Kubrick in my head,
• 14:16
  like, and everybody read the script around in our circle.
• 14:19
  It's like, oh, God, this is amazing.
• 14:20
  Oh, dude, it's so great.
• 14:22
  And then Michael calls me up and just like, pay straight.
• 14:25
  I have some thoughts.
• 14:26
  Like, and he's just giving me, he's giving me good notes.
• 14:29
  But like, look at the fuck is this guy, right?
• 14:33
  I gave you some really bad notes, too.
• 14:35
  Yeah, I remember going, I don't get it.
• 14:38
  This is too long.
• 14:39
  And you'll never get anybody to read this like that.
• 14:41
  I mean, I, and there was a lot.
• 14:44
  Honestly, that boy is saying he did, boy.
• 14:46
  Yeah.
• 14:47
  I don't know.
• 14:48
  I mean, I thought it was an amazing script,
• 14:50
  but I was trying to help you get it.
• 14:51
  And he didn't.
• 14:52
  And Michael doesn't lead with the compliments.
• 14:54
  When we got to the set, I realized he liked the script.
• 14:56
  Thanks for your interest.
• 14:58
  Thank you.
• 15:00
  I'm sure you're used to this, Mike.
• 15:01
  I'm sure you're used to this.
• 15:02
  Because, interestingly, you bring up people like
• 15:04
  Karazizki and Denise Sturvy.
• 15:05
  Because that was what I wanted to ask you about next
• 15:07
  was because when I look back at Hevers,
• 15:09
  and not just Hevers, but that whole period
• 15:11
  of the late 80s and the early 90s,
• 15:13
  especially with relationships and stuff you guys are doing,
• 15:15
  I think about, you know, Tim Burton, Denise
• 15:17
  and Ovi, Karazizki, Alexander, that writing duo
• 15:21
  and you guys, you're making these movies
• 15:23
  that are incredibly subversive, that are blackly comic,
• 15:26
  that often have a real sort of edge to them.
• 15:29
  And of these really fast things,
• 15:30
  of indie-spirited, independently-minded movies.
• 15:33
  And of course, I know, Dan, you shared a house
• 15:37
  with Larry and Scott back in the early days.
• 15:39
  And when you guys look back at the time,
• 15:42
  or at the time, did you feel like,
• 15:43
  oh, we're part of this little gang
• 15:45
  of kind of up and coming subversive filmmakers?
• 15:48
  I mean, I even think about like the co-embrothers
• 15:50
  and Barry Sonnenfeld, like those kind of,
• 15:52
  like that sort of subversive late 80s sort of thing.
• 15:55
  Did you guys think about that at the time?
• 15:56
  I'd say absolutely not.
• 15:58
  I mean, especially in Scotland,
• 16:00
  Larry, Scott and Larry, they're very different personalities.
• 16:04
  They're definitely a nod couple,
• 16:05
  like Felix Unger and Noscow-Merryson,
• 16:07
  no way you'll get that reference.
• 16:09
  But anyway, Scott's kind of per-second, per-snickety,
• 16:12
  and Larry is everybody's best friend.
• 16:15
  But I was there on the ground floor
• 16:17
  for their writing partnership,
• 16:18
  and they were sitting on a terrace at Silver Lake,
• 16:22
  trying to write this script,
• 16:23
  and the rest of roommates would just cry, crack a laughing.
• 16:28
  Oh, how do these guys seem to gonna get along?
• 16:31
  This is the most disastrous relationship I've ever seen,
• 16:35
  like this makes Cisco and Ebert look like lovebirds.
• 16:38
  And they're all underwater approach worked,
• 16:42
  and now we're like, wait, the worst combination of two people
• 16:47
  is now one of the most successful writing teams,
• 16:49
  but we didn't see it.
• 16:51
  They're still doing it, and they're still exactly the same.
• 16:55
  Their personalities haven't adapted or changed over the years.
• 16:58
  They still are the same two odd combined people.
• 17:02
  Yeah, they no longer cringe at each other,
• 17:04
  because they understand each other so well, so.
• 17:06
  Oh, that's Scott, oh, that Larry.
• 17:08
  But, but me on the other hand,
• 17:10
  I knew I was gonna be a god,
• 17:12
  I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
• 17:13
  The death was destined for greatness, everybody knew that.
• 17:17
  At least it's been the 90s.
• 17:19
  Well, it's funny, looking, looking back,
• 17:20
  I mean, you talk about me working in different genres.
• 17:23
  I perverted different genres.
• 17:25
  I never was faithful to a genre,
• 17:27
  and that's why people like you,
• 17:30
  there's a secret call to people get my work,
• 17:33
  but especially Bam and Thand,
• 17:36
  Bam and Returns is not their favorite
• 17:37
  because it breaks all the rules.
• 17:39
  The rule-breaking genre movies take a while to get some love.
• 17:42
  If they get love.
• 17:43
  Mine eventually get love, but.
• 17:46
  But it takes a lot,
• 17:48
  so sometimes it eventually has 20 years.
• 17:50
  So staying with that theme of, you know,
• 17:52
  you guys, there's that group of sort of filmmakers,
• 17:54
  you guys, and Burton, and Denovie,
• 17:56
  and Karate Skienhanger, that, those, you guys,
• 17:59
  are just thinking about heathers as well.
• 18:01
  You're jumping into, like, heathers.
• 18:03
  Because you go, you in Francis Kenney, Michael Schott,
• 18:07
  heathers in, with Wide Angle Lenses, 1851.
• 18:10
  And like, a lot of like, you know,
• 18:12
  like Burton's films at the time,
• 18:13
  like The Little Juice and Batman and Edward,
• 18:15
  and they were all shot in that with those wide-angle lenses,
• 18:18
  where are things distorted and heightened of its,
• 18:20
  and it's all, you know, exaggerated.
• 18:22
  That was a deliberate stylistic choice,
• 18:24
  but was that just purely practical?
• 18:25
  Okay, we've got to shoot it in just with those in that way.
• 18:28
  I always felt like, personally,
• 18:30
  that the way what is considered a wide-angle lens
• 18:32
  sees the world is much closer to the way we,
• 18:36
  or certainly myself, see the world.
• 18:38
  You know, we have a lot of peripheral vision,
• 18:40
  and we don't feel the distortion that happens
• 18:42
  when you get, you know, very close to a camera
• 18:45
  that changes things.
• 18:47
  However, I like that look,
• 18:49
  and Kubrick and Polansky,
• 18:52
  they both kind of, you know,
• 18:54
  use those low-angles, wide-angle lenses quite a bit,
• 18:57
  and I like their filmmaking,
• 18:59
  and I feel like a regular flat, longer lens.
• 19:02
  It's a boring look.
• 19:04
  It tends to beautify things.
• 19:05
  It's easier to shoot with,
• 19:07
  but there's nothing like a nice wide-angle lens,
• 19:10
  and particularly, for me at that time,
• 19:12
  it was a big Kubrick influence,
• 19:14
  because he used those a lot.
• 19:15
  That was a conversation you had with Francis.
• 19:17
  It was like, okay, this is,
• 19:18
  and everything is gonna be heightened,
• 19:19
  and, you know, it's not realism.
• 19:22
  It's, you know, pushing it more into it.
• 19:25
  It's in choice.
• 19:26
  I did, I had that conversation with him,
• 19:27
  and we looked at, so when we were trying to break down
• 19:31
  how to shoot the whole high school cafeteria sequence,
• 19:34
  we looked at Full Metal Jacket,
• 19:36
  which I think was Kubrick's most recent movie, I think,
• 19:40
  at that time, and we sort of broke down
• 19:43
  all the stuff in the barracks following
• 19:45
  the marine drill sergeant around,
• 19:47
  and that sort of thing.
• 19:48
  And I said, our movie, the scene isn't like that,
• 19:51
  but can we use some of these techniques?
• 19:52
  Can we use these lenses?
• 19:53
  Can we make it look like this sometimes?
• 19:55
  That was a way of shooting,
• 19:57
  wasn't, didn't require a whole lot of discussion
• 19:59
  with Francis to try to figure out how to do it,
• 20:02
  but I definitely told him,
• 20:04
  and Mitch Duvin, our camera operator,
• 20:05
  that those were the kind of frames
• 20:07
  that I wanted to work with, and they liked that.
• 20:10
  Speaking of the cafeteria scene,
• 20:11
  I was gonna ask about that,
• 20:12
  because there's some really watching the movie again.
• 20:14
  There's some really wonderful cuts from the film.
• 20:16
  And one of them that I particularly liked
• 20:17
  is there's the cut in the cafeteria scene
• 20:19
  where you have the two jocks,
• 20:20
  and they're talking about how,
• 20:22
  which they're like Veronica,
• 20:24
  the Veronica Heva sandwich.
• 20:26
  And then they do the fist bump,
• 20:29
  and then you've cut to that slow motion,
• 20:31
  track panning shot, a tracking shot
• 20:33
  of Veronica handing the note to Heva,
• 20:35
  and everything is suddenly slow motion
• 20:37
  and the music, David Newman's music kicks in,
• 20:39
  and the pace changes.
• 20:40
  And I also think you're the cutler in the movie,
• 20:42
  where you have Martha Dunstock and the gym,
• 20:44
  and you have the sound of that crowd around her,
• 20:47
  then you cut to a wide, and then she's alone.
• 20:50
  And this is a question of both of you.
• 20:51
  Like, Dan, was that with those cuts,
• 20:53
  those beats sort of in the scripts,
• 20:54
  as you know, when you're writing,
• 20:55
  okay, that is, that beat is there,
• 20:57
  and that beat is there,
• 20:58
  or was that in the editing room that you found those?
• 21:00
  I was, that was definitely with Michael
• 21:02
  and the late Norman Allen in the editing room,
• 21:04
  which was because my script version
• 21:07
  was the Godfather wedding scene.
• 21:09
  It was so much longer,
• 21:11
  so much was cut from that scene,
• 21:14
  and I think, you know, beautiful cuts, beautiful.
• 21:17
  It's funny, there's a lot of us
• 21:19
  that still remember lines in the script,
• 21:20
  like, and think they were in the movie,
• 21:23
  like, there was this whole speech about
• 21:25
  toothpaste commercials,
• 21:27
  and like, you can't have other people
• 21:28
  in toothpaste commercials,
• 21:29
  this is how the channel been talking,
• 21:31
  because you'd be stained with losersness.
• 21:33
  Like, wait, stained with losers,
• 21:34
  this is in the movie anymore?
• 21:35
  Like, what?
• 21:36
  Like, a lot of people have to the movie,
• 21:38
  it's like, that's, where'd that go?
• 21:39
  Did you cut it since the movie was released?
• 21:41
  I'm like, no, it's all,
• 21:42
  yeah, I mean, I'm gonna explain that process.
• 21:45
  I just wanted to point out one thing.
• 21:47
  I never saw a fist bump before that movie.
• 21:50
  I think I invented the fist bump
• 21:52
  because it was a conscious idea,
• 21:53
  not to do a high fives, I had them punch fist.
• 21:57
  I haven't seen it before,
• 21:58
  fogged it and invented it.
• 21:59
  I think I need some residuals on the fist bump,
• 22:02
  but please, I can talk about the editing.
• 22:05
  I think the fist bump in Pilgrim's progress.
• 22:08
  Shh.
• 22:09
  Okay.
• 22:10
  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
• 22:13
  hit me button.
• 22:14
  Well played.
• 22:15
  Well played, son.
• 22:16
  Be sure.
• 22:17
  And I think Dickens had one in Bleak House,
• 22:19
  punch it in, cool.
• 22:21
  You may be right, Dan.
• 22:22
  I don't remember any fist bumps before that.
• 22:24
  And, but, but the guys did it, you know,
• 22:27
  as if that was what they always did.
• 22:29
  You know, a lot of, a lot of what's interesting
• 22:31
  visually in the movie was in the script,
• 22:34
  in Dan's script, he wrote a very cinematic script.
• 22:37
  Is something that screenwriters should be aware of?
• 22:39
  Is that when you get, you get a writer like Dan
• 22:43
  who writes brilliant dialogue and also is capable
• 22:45
  of walking out on you right in the middle of talking.
• 22:48
  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
• 22:50
  Okay.
• 22:54
  Is also important that the writer visualizes
• 22:57
  what is happening because that's what you end up shooting.
• 23:00
  Right, no, and Dan's script was filled with that I don't
• 23:03
  remember, specifically things like going from the fist bump,
• 23:07
  The sound of the fish bump to, you know, the sound track changes and the ghost of slow
• 23:13
  motion.
• 23:14
  Those are the kind of things you play around within the editing room that come up.
• 23:18
  Norm Holland, who edited the movie was a terrific editor, he had a lot of good ideas.
• 23:22
  I thought the Martha Dumptruck in the gym thing, I thought you wrote that the sound of
• 23:28
  cheering was on and then it went out all week.
• 23:31
  Yeah, I did do that.
• 23:33
  That was a change from like in the script, she's alone in a movie theater and she knocks
• 23:38
  over her Coke, which if it's ever happened to in real life, is the most in your alone
• 23:43
  in the movie theater, you knock over your Coke.
• 23:45
  It's secretly the most depressing thing that can ever happen to you.
• 23:49
  But we weren't going to get a whole movie theater to shoot that set, so we had to shoot
• 23:53
  in the gym, so yeah, that's when it fuzzes it up, you know.
• 23:57
  The whole business, the damage I'm talking about though about how we had this really long
• 24:02
  sequence in the cafeteria and it had all sorts of great stuff.
• 24:06
  There was nothing that was off in the script in that regard.
• 24:10
  I mean, it was all, everything worked and I think everything worked in the way we shot
• 24:15
  it.
• 24:16
  You know, the performances were fine, it looked good.
• 24:17
  But when we cut it all together, the first screening of the movie and then you were there,
• 24:21
  the first time we screened the whole thing.
• 24:22
  Oh, yeah.
• 24:23
  People have what it's called a brand screen.
• 24:25
  I call that what the fiend screen me.
• 24:28
  Yeah.
• 24:29
  They came up to me afterwards and said, wow, Laman, that's great.
• 24:32
  So you had a really good script and he fucked it up.
• 24:35
  I mean, these are my friends.
• 24:37
  They were all telling me this and I said, no, no, no, no, you guys, you don't know because
• 24:41
  I had spent time in cutting rooms on movies.
• 24:43
  I said movies take their shape as they get as they get closer to length.
• 24:47
  There's a lot of stuff that improves from things that are taken out, even if what you take
• 24:52
  out is really good.
• 24:54
  It has a life of its own and a rhythm of its own that's not the same as what was
• 24:58
  in the script quite often.
• 25:01
  And the movie got better by cutting out some of the things that were really terrifically
• 25:06
  written and really good.
• 25:07
  And I hate that we took out stained with loserness.
• 25:10
  Then bugs me.
• 25:11
  I thought that was in the movie until just a few years ago, I was like, what, did we really
• 25:16
  talk that out?
• 25:17
  It cut before that cut, which we just watched ourselves without music.
• 25:23
  I thought was brilliant.
• 25:24
  It was like a three hour Tarkovsky film, but it was so, so brutal and it was just brutal
• 25:31
  and nasty.
• 25:32
  The come and see of high school release.
• 25:34
  But then we cut it down a little bit more and it was, you know, it's always, it's like
• 25:39
  the second draft of the script, the second draft of the script is always the worst draft
• 25:42
  because you're, you're trying to do notes, but you're trying to keep some stuff in, you
• 25:46
  haven't re-identified yourself stuff.
• 25:48
  It's like Michael said, we, you can't get rough cone notes that they're young or they
• 25:53
  are.
• 25:54
  What is it in the movie, fuckers?
• 25:56
  So you're, what are your memories exactly of the shoot because it was both of your first
• 25:59
  movie, first feature.
• 26:01
  And I mean, speaking for myself, I mean, I, so I worked on a friend of mine's film as
• 26:05
  an ineditorial capacity, and I was on set every day.
• 26:07
  It was a low budget horror film that actually has a lot, it takes a lot from having this
• 26:10
  actually, coincidentally, but anyway, and I have such, they all, yeah, it goes without
• 26:16
  saying, doesn't it?
• 26:17
  But I have such distinct memories, vivid memories of basically every day of that shoot.
• 26:20
  I can remember what people were saying, what they were wearing, what was going on, what
• 26:23
  the vibe of the room was and the set.
• 26:25
  And as this was your guys first film as well, even though it was 30 years ago, I mean,
• 26:29
  what are your memories?
• 26:30
  Are they basically vivid of the shoots?
• 26:32
  Yeah.
• 26:33
  Yeah.
• 26:34
  Damn.
• 26:35
  Damn.
• 26:36
  Damn.
• 26:37
  Was there every day?
• 26:38
  I, I believe you were there every single day, am I right?
• 26:41
  Wasn't there every single day.
• 26:42
  I still don't drive and I live in LA and some of the occasions, what a far for me.
• 26:47
  But I, I was there most day with my little bus.
• 26:51
  I remember the first day of shooting was Ash Wednesday and a lot of the cast and crew
• 26:56
  hadn't met me yet.
• 26:57
  And I show up with like a black crucifix on my head and I'm like, oh, fuck, this, this
• 27:03
  is movies.
• 27:04
  I knew this movie was written by some Manson fucker.
• 27:07
  They're all a little, get it out, but, um, that, do you remember the first day with we
• 27:12
  were shooting Croquet in the backyard of Veronica's house and there was a huge wind storm
• 27:17
  and it blew, uh, it blew a bunch of our equipment away.
• 27:21
  There was equipment damage.
• 27:22
  We had to stop shooting.
• 27:23
  Oh, I don't remember any of this.
• 27:25
  Oh, yeah.
• 27:26
  Yeah.
• 27:27
  It was the first of the second day.
• 27:29
  I take this first day though.
• 27:30
  I mean, I remember all the crises that came up and no, no shoot is without its, um,
• 27:36
  crises, but that was a very friendly group of people.
• 27:39
  You know, we, we got on well.
• 27:41
  It was a great crew, a lot of young people, Dan, I ran into John Hutman the other day.
• 27:46
  I was having coffee.
• 27:48
  He was sitting at a table next to me and I was looking right at him and I didn't recognize
• 27:53
  him and somebody yelled at him from a car.
• 27:56
  Hey, Hutman, something, it was on the street in Brentwood.
• 28:00
  And I said, John Hutman, an eternity looked at me and we looked right at each other.
• 28:06
  And I said, do you know who I am?
• 28:09
  And he took him about 10 seconds because Michael, it was, it was, it was really strange.
• 28:15
  He looks great.
• 28:16
  Um, anyway, John Hutman was about 25 years old.
• 28:18
  He was production designer.
• 28:20
  He went, he went on to do those Nancy Meyer movies where they do those million dollar
• 28:24
  kitchen scenes.
• 28:25
  Yes.
• 28:26
  He's doing another one.
• 28:27
  He's, he's in prep right now.
• 28:29
  He had a great art department and, and you know, we're very funny people.
• 28:33
  And the prop guy was really funny and our camera crew was, it was great.
• 28:38
  I mean, our camera crew was, I got a UPS delivery.
• 28:42
  Keep talking.
• 28:43
  I'll keep talking.
• 28:44
  This is boring for you.
• 28:45
  Francis Kenney had, had worked with Ed Lockman and he worked on a lot of good indie
• 28:49
  New York movies as an operator, desperately seeking Susan and that sort of thing.
• 28:54
  You know, and, and Mitch Dubin, our camera operator had worked with me at Zoetro.
• 29:00
  Mitch went on, he's Spielberg's camera operator.
• 29:02
  If you look at all of Spielberg's movies for the last 20 years, I think, Mitch is the
• 29:07
  camera operator.
• 29:08
  He does the most amazing shots anybody does, including, you know, uh, saving Brian on all
• 29:14
  that stuff.
• 29:15
  So Mitch was the one who got me in touch with Francis.
• 29:18
  Mitch had also worked with Ed Lockman in New York.
• 29:21
  Uh, Mitch Aminson was one of our, um, was one of our camera assistants.
• 29:27
  He's a big DP now.
• 29:28
  John Schwartz.
• 29:29
  John Schwartz.
• 29:30
  He's a, he's a, she and his son, transformers.
• 29:33
  That's right.
• 29:34
  He's the DP on track.
• 29:35
  And John Schwartzman, who does also tons of big movies like The Rock and many more other
• 29:41
  big films, was second unit DP, because he'd gone to film school with us.
• 29:46
  Tell him about our stunt director.
• 29:47
  Oh, damn Bradley, our stunt coordinator went on to become the second unit director on
• 29:51
  all the fucking big bond movies, right?
• 29:54
  Is that, is there anything else that issues know about Dan?
• 29:56
  The whole, the whole cruise and made us touch.
• 30:01
  But, um, and Denise Denoby is a terrific producer and she got together a lot of really good
• 30:06
  people and she held everybody together well.
• 30:09
  So you know, you think about that shoot, even though we didn't have much money and we
• 30:13
  didn't have a lot of time to do what we needed to do, we did have a really good group of
• 30:17
  people.
• 30:18
  So most of my memories are, are really fun.
• 30:20
  And Winona was fantastic.
• 30:22
  You know, she was so gungo to make that movie.
• 30:24
  Yeah, yeah, Winona went like, I kind of wrote the characters almost like a female
• 30:29
  Travis Bickel, like all snark and she really brought a humanity to it.
• 30:34
  And then you could feel that every day, like her freshness on the set was like, Jesus,
• 30:38
  I mean, I mean, maybe this is a more interesting character than I thought, like enough, she
• 30:44
  elevates everything.
• 30:45
  And I think a lot of people have worked on other low budget pictures that, that have
• 30:49
  their mirrors and have high school comedy to them, but they could tell this was a little
• 30:55
  different.
• 30:56
  So they felt like this was a little special.
• 30:58
  Well, I was going to touch them actually with them because I know the casting process
• 31:02
  was was pretty lengthy and you guys auditioned a lot of people, especially like, you know,
• 31:05
  teenagers, you know, who wanted to be accurate for the ages of the characters.
• 31:08
  And I know like Brad Pitt did a reading once for JD and then, but then you obviously landed
• 31:13
  on Winona and Christine Slater.
• 31:16
  What would they like to get ever into and to work, and to direct to work with?
• 31:19
  They were good together at Winona and Christian got along really well.
• 31:22
  Kim Walker, who plays Heather Chandler, was, was Christian's girlfriend at the time,
• 31:27
  but Winona and Christian always had a, you know, very good chemistry.
• 31:31
  They like each other a lot.
• 31:32
  He, you know, he's an odd, he's an odd duck and I never really could tell how much he
• 31:38
  understood the script and how much he got the nuance of what he was doing.
• 31:42
  He would always do it really well the way he did it.
• 31:46
  And he was a very professional and very good to work with.
• 31:50
  But a little bit less outgoing, less extroverted than, than Winona.
• 31:55
  And then we had interesting chemistry between, between the, the three girls and, you know,
• 32:00
  we auditioned a lot of people for the Heather's and I think we ended up with good ones,
• 32:04
  but it was, it was, it was sort of a strange group, wouldn't you say then?
• 32:08
  Yeah, no, it's a, Chandler changes everything because I know there's this sweet girl from
• 32:14
  a NBC show and whatever reputation Shannon Dordey has started on Heather's and Michael
• 32:20
  can tell the story of Heather Graham, who gave a brilliant audition for Heather Chandler,
• 32:24
  but, um, her parents thought I was Satan, so, well, you didn't have the cross on your
• 32:30
  head.
• 32:31
  If you had the cross on your head at this time, to see that, that cross on your face.
• 32:37
  But Heather Graham came in and just knocked it out of the parks.
• 32:40
  She was the perfect, Heather Chandler was amazing.
• 32:43
  I mean, he just went, oh my God, and she was, he'd already done.
• 32:46
  Didn't she do licensed drive before that?
• 32:48
  She'd been around.
• 32:49
  It's all she had done.
• 32:50
  Yeah.
• 32:51
  And, uh, and I wanted to cast her and, damn, were you in the, you must have been there
• 32:55
  for that.
• 32:56
  I was not in the room.
• 32:57
  Oh, her parents wouldn't let her do the movie because she was only 16 or she was 17
• 33:01
  and it wasn't, she needed their permission.
• 33:04
  Her father was an FBI agent.
• 33:06
  Her mother was a school teacher in Orange County, California, which at the time was
• 33:10
  a very conservative, uh, area.
• 33:13
  And I called the mother and I begged her, I begged her to let her daughter do this movie
• 33:19
  and she was dead set against it.
• 33:22
  She could not believe the language in the script and the murders and all this stuff.
• 33:26
  And I tried to convince her that it had a moral center and that it really wasn't what
• 33:30
  she thought it was and that, you know, yes, it was a stylized kind of language, but teenagers
• 33:36
  really do these sorts of things and really do think this way.
• 33:39
  She did talk to me for over an hour and then she said, no, not for you.
• 33:43
  Well, I don't know how to do this.
• 33:44
  So the first thing Heather Graham did when she turned 18 was drugstore cowboy and then
• 33:50
  she's like, I don't think she would have done boogie nights unless it was to get back
• 33:54
  at her parents.
• 33:55
  Like, yeah, all three peaks as well.
• 33:58
  I mean, Austin Powers, I mean, less than about, you know, that the best.
• 34:01
  I worked with her many years later.
• 34:03
  She was on California occasion.
• 34:05
  I made it matter once or twice in between, but I said, Hey, do you remember that audition
• 34:10
  you do? And, you know, we had a fun time talking about that.
• 34:13
  She, you know, I wasn't sure about all I care.
• 34:15
  Tell me about that.
• 34:16
  I want to hear stories like that.
• 34:18
  That's, I'm sorry.
• 34:19
  You never ask, I was first asked.
• 34:22
  Kevin, you got Heather Graham stories.
• 34:23
  You should be asking me those sorts of things.
• 34:27
  She was lovely.
• 34:28
  She was great.
• 34:28
  And she had a big sense of humor about it.
• 34:30
  You know who else I worked with years later?
• 34:33
  Oh, I'm blanking on her name.
• 34:34
  The one, oh, shit.
• 34:36
  There was, we got another really good reading on Heather Chandler from a young actress
• 34:42
  who was up for a Tom Cruise movie.
• 34:44
  Do you remember who this was?
• 34:45
  Oh, no, I know you said Lesley Hope came in and gave her, you don't know,
• 34:51
  but Lesley hope this, right, Billy?
• 34:53
  This, no, no way.
• 34:54
  It rings the bell.
• 34:56
  So, somewhere like Eagle list is building.
• 34:58
  Yes, sir.
• 34:58
  She gave a terrific reading.
• 35:00
  And I think this was after we couldn't get Heather Graham.
• 35:03
  And the casting director said, well, you know, yeah, she's really good.
• 35:08
  She's so good that everybody wants to put her in everything.
• 35:10
  She's the hot, young thing.
• 35:12
  She's up for whatever Tom Cruise movie was, was happening at that time.
• 35:16
  And she passed because her representatives said they didn't want to be
• 35:20
  out of the running for this Tom Cruise part, which she never got.
• 35:23
  25 years later, I'm shooting Tyrant is an FX show that I was directing
• 35:30
  in Ishton Bull.
• 35:32
  And Lesley Hope, we cast her.
• 35:35
  And she's great.
• 35:36
  She's really good actors.
• 35:38
  And I said, do you remember this?
• 35:40
  And she, she remembered as well.
• 35:42
  She goes, yeah, there were a lot of things I was supposed to,
• 35:45
  that were supposed to happen that didn't happen.
• 35:47
  She went on to have a very good career, but not as the, you know,
• 35:52
  Tom Cruise's lead lady.
• 35:53
  I'm going to ask you one more year, stories you're holding back from me.
• 35:59
  Are you a lot of them then?
• 36:00
  So it's funny because you said what's, there was something that you said
• 36:02
  there that was particularly interesting because you said, so the movie is
• 36:06
  obviously famous for being satirical and edgy and bloody.
• 36:10
  And it, you know, it sticks to a dagger in the, you know, in tea movies.
• 36:14
  But there is this undercurrent of compassion to the film, which I hadn't
• 36:18
  noticed as much before, but on this watch I did.
• 36:20
  And it's interesting because you have these scenes between like,
• 36:22
  Winona and Lizanne, you know, the scene in the bathroom where they sit down
• 36:26
  and Winona, you know, comforts her.
• 36:28
  And then you have the final scene, of course.
• 36:29
  We don't know the multiple endings in play at one point, but the ending
• 36:33
  that we got, which is her, Winona and Martha Dunstock, because as I say,
• 36:37
  the original ending was a lot, originally a lot darker, a lot more satirical.
• 36:40
  That's sort of in the current of compassion and pay for us.
• 36:42
  Was that something that sort of was there from the start?
• 36:43
  Or did that sort of develop as the movie developed?
• 36:46
  Dan, I want to hear your answer, is it?
• 36:48
  No, it was there from the start.
• 36:49
  Years after the movie has come out, I've grown accepted of it.
• 36:54
  I've grown to like the ending.
• 36:56
  I don't think it was in a way.
• 36:58
  I don't think it was that organic, as I was forced to write, you know,
• 37:03
  for you're happy.
• 37:05
  And he was organic at the time.
• 37:07
  To me, it played so happy that there's a wink to it.
• 37:11
  If you're a cynical asshole like me, you could still enjoy the ending.
• 37:15
  We had a lot of dark rendings, and but looking back on it,
• 37:21
  the way people respond to the movie now, I've learned to learn to like the ending.
• 37:25
  Even if it was cynically conceived to help to make playcafe fears
• 37:31
  that the studio is making it was having.
• 37:34
  Like the creators of the head is the musical, which is very popular in England right now.
• 37:39
  And I love the musical.
• 37:40
  I think it's a hoot.
• 37:42
  And and the guys who wrote the musical said they wouldn't have ridden it if the movie didn't have a happy ending.
• 37:47
  It's like the happy ending kind of jared them into thinking a musical is even possible.
• 37:53
  And so just so I have the musical and have this whole new injection of relevance into my life.
• 38:00
  I'm for the ending.
• 38:02
  It's funny because Dan isn't one of his many incredible talents as a writer is if he's given a note
• 38:09
  that even if he doesn't agree with it, but he can make some sense out of it,
• 38:13
  he can still write that note better than anybody else kicking and screaming maybe, but he'll still do it.
• 38:19
  And we had a lot of issues about trying to get the ending right.
• 38:22
  Dan wrote that ending.
• 38:24
  And I always thought, I don't know how easy.
• 38:26
  Yeah, you're a people pleaser, but I thought, well, that's that's a pretty,
• 38:31
  you know, in a way that any backs off from a lot of the stuff we were trying to do,
• 38:35
  but we had no choice.
• 38:36
  You know, we had to do made to come up with something that would make New World happier.
• 38:41
  They're working to make the movie, but the other thing that happened there,
• 38:43
  I think always is a good thing when it happens is no matter how dark you make your material,
• 38:49
  if you find emotional inroads to the characters, it really helps make the movie more engaging,
• 38:56
  more interesting, regardless of how horrible people behave.
• 39:00
  If you believe that they think they're behaving in good faith and the actors playing
• 39:05
  and they think that it brings a certain level of emotional accessibility and humanity
• 39:11
  even to the darkest stuff.
• 39:12
  And I think that's a good thing.
• 39:13
  I mean, I think you still go as dark as you want,
• 39:16
  but try to find those places where that makes sense for the characters.
• 39:20
  My concern about that ending wasn't something I've said it was happy
• 39:25
  because at that point, the movie had obviously played out all sorts of really dark things.
• 39:29
  I just didn't want it to be cute.
• 39:31
  And I remember thinking having Martha circle her in the wheelchair,
• 39:37
  which either came about from just the actress playing around with that thing,
• 39:43
  trying to learn how to steer it, or I might have said to her,
• 39:45
  once she just tried circling around, I was very on the fence about it.
• 39:49
  I thought it was possibly too cute, but we kept it in because it seemed to help
• 39:53
  what I think Daniel were talking about that wink that says,
• 39:55
  yeah, here's your happy ending, motherfuckers.
• 39:57
  We're going to give it to you, but you don't have to really believe
• 40:01
  that that's what we wanted to give you.
• 40:03
  Yeah, it has a fantasy on it to do it.
• 40:07
  Like if we pull that and it's like a crystal ball and some of the devil's
• 40:13
  whole being like, you believe it's like, you know, that there's something
• 40:17
  cinematic about it that I like.
• 40:20
  Well, I mean, I agree with what you said, Michael, in service of fight.
• 40:23
  The fact that you do feel the characters, Penny, you do empathize.
• 40:26
  And you are that you have your in-road into the movie and what happens is
• 40:29
  we're known of course.
• 40:31
  And the fact that you feel it and it is a just, you know, taking a step back
• 40:35
  and pointing a laughing at something, it's that as well.
• 40:36
  But you really feel the emotion heightens the darkness, you know, like,
• 40:41
  it does heighten it.
• 40:42
  It doesn't detract from it.
• 40:44
  Yeah, everybody thinks the movie ended with the school blowing up or something,
• 40:48
  but the ending there we were working with the time was the way JD comes out
• 40:52
  with the bomb.
• 40:52
  It's Winona who character comes out the bomb.
• 40:56
  And she does a file narration on her back and then she turns around.
• 40:59
  She's wearing the bomb and says boom.
• 41:02
  And then the movie ends.
• 41:03
  Now they say to get it chills.
• 41:05
  It's so fucking good.
• 41:06
  That was good.
• 41:07
  Yeah.
• 41:07
  Why didn't we do that by then?
• 41:10
  But my Veronica Sawyer kind of needs to get blown up when known as Veronica Sawyer.
• 41:16
  Hey, Jesus Christ.
• 41:17
  It just came out to see a movie.
• 41:18
  Why you fucking me up so much like it would be a little maybe weird for people.
• 41:24
  I was I wanted to ask going way back to where we talk about editing and rough cuts.
• 41:28
  Michael, of course, you know, you went to Zotrop.
• 41:29
  You were you around all these filmmakers.
• 41:31
  When you were and this is your debut, when you were cutting the movie together,
• 41:34
  when you were screening it and doing the rough cuts and the friends cuts and,
• 41:37
  you know, the friend, the theme screenings.
• 41:40
  Did you ever like ring up any of those guys from the old days from Zotrop for advice?
• 41:44
  Or did you bring them into see your rough cuts?
• 41:45
  What would you, you know, did that ever happen?
• 41:47
  I know that it that theme screening wasn't Zotrop.
• 41:52
  It was Karen, Karen Murphy and Kiva were there.
• 41:54
  Is that right?
• 41:55
  Do you remember that?
• 41:56
  Oh, yeah, damn.
• 41:57
  Karen who produces all of Chris Guests movies, you know, like Best in Show and all those sorts of things.
• 42:01
  She, she was a friend and she'd worked on some really good films in her,
• 42:07
  her husband, I guess is an editor, Kiva Rosenfeld, who also went on to direct some stuff.
• 42:13
  Jerry Ross, who was our sound designer, was a Zotrop guy worked on a plot,
• 42:17
  he was an old friend of mine and so he provided a lot of help in that regard.
• 42:23
  But for the picture cutting, I don't think so.
• 42:27
  You know, I was scared to show it to people and you know, back then it wasn't nowadays.
• 42:31
  You have a rough cut.
• 42:32
  You can just stream it to somebody.
• 42:34
  It's easy to show your rough cuts to people.
• 42:37
  Then it was on film.
• 42:38
  We didn't have the money to make video copies of these things and you weren't,
• 42:42
  you really couldn't send them out.
• 42:44
  So the only way to show it to people would have been to invite them to a screening
• 42:49
  and we had only a couple of screenings during the cutting process.
• 42:54
  I mean, it's such a hard movie to judge because it's a comedy,
• 42:57
  but it's not always a comedy.
• 42:58
  Like when it's a pure comedy, just send the back of the theater and wait for the laughter
• 43:02
  or not laughter.
• 43:04
  But like, like, it's like some seems like it's okay.
• 43:08
  They're not laughing.
• 43:09
  I think it's okay.
• 43:09
  They're not laughing.
• 43:10
  They're disturbed, right?
• 43:11
  At least we got something.
• 43:13
  Yeah, I mean, generally you, when you do comedies,
• 43:16
  you screen them to save the humor and working at all because that's,
• 43:20
  that's always tricky and you fight something that you think is hilarious
• 43:24
  and that you was worked on the page and worked on the set and worked in the
• 43:28
  cutting room and you screen it to an audience and there's no reaction.
• 43:33
  And then you have some stupid thing that you always thought was really awful
• 43:36
  where somebody trips over and falls and that sort of thing.
• 43:39
  And you screen it and everybody's just uproariously laughing.
• 43:43
  You have to screen these things to figure out what I'm working.
• 43:47
  I've always hated the line that I wrote, lick it up, baby, lick it up.
• 43:52
  Geez.
• 43:53
  Even my shit doesn't spell away.
• 43:56
  So when you were sharing it then, what you just said there about how there are
• 43:59
  some things that you thought would be a dead cert, like that's going to kill it.
• 44:02
  And then there'll be just be crickets.
• 44:04
  And then there was something that you thought, oh, that's awful.
• 44:06
  And then it'd be like, it would bring the house down.
• 44:07
  Do you remember like a specific moment like that that surprised you that we
• 44:11
  thought was going to kill and didn't kill that there was nothing but crickets
• 44:16
  and effort screening later on when we were doing the test screenings.
• 44:19
  And I believe at that point, the movie was pretty much finished.
• 44:23
  We did marketing screenings.
• 44:25
  Those were really interesting because the audience reacted in a big way.
• 44:28
  They, they, you know, they laughed at the funny stuff and they, they went a little
• 44:33
  about all this, all the things that were violent and unexpected.
• 44:36
  And then the numbers from the screening, you know, the surveys about how people
• 44:40
  felt were pretty low because they went, oh, we don't know what this is that we
• 44:45
  just saw as supposed to be comedies.
• 44:47
  It's supposed to be horror film.
• 44:48
  What the fuck?
• 44:50
  Yeah.
• 44:50
  It's so, but it's so much fun as, you know, I don't care what it does to the cards.
• 44:55
  But when Heather Chandler drops that glass cocktail, it looks like the whole
• 44:59
  audience was like, what kind of movie is this?
• 45:01
  Wait a minute.
• 45:02
  And Michael was already shooting a second movie when the, when I was, I was the,
• 45:06
  I was the only one of us at the first test screening.
• 45:09
  And it's funny.
• 45:10
  I was sitting next to a girl, a, a young woman who worked for the marketing company,
• 45:14
  hosting the test screen.
• 45:15
  She was miss chatty, Kathy, before I am like, oh, it's supposed to be so exciting.
• 45:19
  The first movie turned her after the movie is over.
• 45:22
  She's just a sheet, a dead sheet and she thinks she's been sitting next to Jeffrey
• 45:26
  Gamer all this time.
• 45:28
  And like, it's done.
• 45:30
  And then years later, Memphis Film Festival, Michael and I were added together.
• 45:34
  She now runs film festivals and she comes up to me and she says, I have to tell you
• 45:38
  a story.
• 45:40
  And she's like, the first time I saw Heather's I was sitting next to you.
• 45:44
  And she tells the whole story, I go, oh my God, I know you told her what she was
• 45:48
  wearing at the time and like, oh my God, my God, I love Heather's and so great.
• 45:52
  I'm sorry.
• 45:52
  I can't believe I can't believe I was so naive back then.
• 45:56
  But like, but I thought that was the, that's the perfect reaction to me.
• 46:00
  It's like, I feel like I get, I feel like Heather's gets this more than most movies
• 46:04
  as far as like the first time you saw it did, it disturbed you.
• 46:08
  It freaked you out.
• 46:09
  You didn't enjoy it.
• 46:10
  It was not a pleasant experience.
• 46:12
  But then over time, when you see it again, that's like, oh my God, it's masterpiece
• 46:17
  or something like that.
• 46:18
  That's pretty much it.
• 46:19
  Damn masterpiece.
• 46:20
  It's pretty good.
• 46:21
  It's pretty good.
• 46:23
  The appreciate more like I joke with Michael before that Richard Curtis wrote
• 46:29
  Notting Hill.
• 46:30
  Nobody comes up to him and says, first time I saw Notting Hill, man, it plucked me up.
• 46:33
  But now, thinking time, I realized so great.
• 46:36
  And it didn't kind of pop me up.
• 46:37
  I will say when I'm first fortunate, that's another story.
• 46:41
  So that's another Q&A.
• 46:42
  We'll do that another time.
• 46:43
  So when the movie first came out, after all those test screenings and the rough cuts,
• 46:47
  as you say, it wasn't a big, you know, it wasn't a big box office for Danzen.
• 46:51
  It took, it took its time to read, you know, for Snowball and really pick up the audience
• 46:55
  that it now has.
• 46:56
  And it was obviously, you know, in Europe, it was retyped or legal attraction,
• 47:00
  which is a totally bizarre move.
• 47:02
  Were you expecting any of that when you first came out or just because I know that
• 47:05
  filmmakers, when they bring the movie, you were one is the European trailers for
• 47:09
  lethal attractions.
• 47:09
  The first line is, it's always been a fantasy movie for two guys at once.
• 47:14
  Like, what?
• 47:15
  I saw that.
• 47:16
  I get how the Blu-ray and I was like, friends, I know it didn't make a lot of money,
• 47:20
  but it was so well received and the right people got it.
• 47:24
  Like, like, again, it's another one of my career-distoring theories of like,
• 47:28
  hey, if 40% of the people hate your movie, then you're doing good.
• 47:32
  Like, you know, like, these are wrong things to be thinking when you're trying to
• 47:35
  make a career, but the right 60% dug it.
• 47:39
  And it got really interesting reviews.
• 47:42
  And so I was happy as a clam, even though it didn't make major props office,
• 47:46
  because I knew my next film, The Adventures of Ford Fairling with the End of
• 47:49
  Race Clay, when it's getting my money.
• 47:53
  How about you, Michael?
• 47:54
  Well, you know, it was funny because I was very sensitive as my first movie.
• 47:58
  I was a big deal.
• 47:59
  I wanted everybody to love it, but then you make a movie like that and you know
• 48:02
  that everybody's not going to love it.
• 48:04
  And if everybody loved it, I'd hate myself because you want to make a movie that's
• 48:07
  going to stir the pie and get it under the skin of certain people.
• 48:10
  So I guess I kind of understood that we had some bad reviews and I can quote
• 48:17
  them all at length.
• 48:18
  And we had a lot of good reviews and I could not possibly recall those because
• 48:22
  you fixate on all the criticism.
• 48:25
  But really for the most part, the fact that we're making water's dialogue is so
• 48:31
  harsh, you could build a second high school on top of it.
• 48:36
  Who said that?
• 48:37
  Some fucker.
• 48:40
  Describe.
• 48:41
  But as Dan said, a bunch of people who were significant as critics or people who
• 48:49
  talked about movies, that sort of thing seemed to like the movie quite a bit.
• 48:52
  You know, we took it to the Sundance festival and it was early days for Sundance.
• 48:56
  It didn't quite mean what it came to mean later to be at Sundance, but it was
• 49:00
  sort of the beginning.
• 49:01
  Even the last day of the year that it turned in the Sundance.
• 49:04
  It was like it was called Sundance was called the US Film Festival.
• 49:07
  But we were with sex size and videotape and Miracle Mile and a lot of great films.
• 49:12
  Everybody loved sex size and videotape.
• 49:14
  But our movie was like, why do people thought we were doing it?
• 49:17
  How dare this is not a dream.
• 49:20
  This doesn't belong in a festival.
• 49:22
  People came up to me and I learned that things like somebody would come up and smile
• 49:26
  and shake your hand and go, yeah, yeah, it was all up there on the screen.
• 49:29
  You know, you know, you know, you know what that?
• 49:33
  You're done.
• 49:34
  I can love that.
• 49:36
  Well, I mean, sex size and videotape is on Criterion, but you guys are on Aaron.
• 49:40
  I mean, and that's the, the true test of, you know, cool, you know, on a Criterion of cool.
• 49:45
  I love Criterion as well, but, you know, we should be on there.
• 49:48
  I don't know why, you know, with Criterion, are you calling?
• 49:50
  Oh, no, I don't know.
• 49:53
  Get out of the lock now.
• 49:54
  We were 4K Remastered.
• 49:56
  So, obviously, even if it had that slow start, the movie over the last 35 years is really,
• 50:01
  you know, is picked up and is really took on a life of its own and it lives.
• 50:05
  And I think five years, okay, I'm not quite for any experience, but you think it has taken
• 50:11
  on a life of its own and it does, I mean, like I say, this is great talk to you guys.
• 50:14
  It made this because, you know, I'm a team movie.
• 50:16
  You know, those movies kind of got me into movies and like, and the fact that, you know,
• 50:19
  you guys made for me, you know, one of the most, the most important ones, I think it is.
• 50:24
  You know, it is, it's great.
• 50:25
  And I think, can I say, give some advice or writers out there if you want for linger,
• 50:30
  longevity.
• 50:31
  Make sure your costumes can be Halloween costumes forever.
• 50:35
  It really loves your longevity.
• 50:37
  I've seen it.
• 50:39
  It's true.
• 50:40
  I've seen it with others.
• 50:41
  It's definitely true.
• 50:42
  We're barely, a lot of poor, barely ghostings out there.
• 50:45
  So, obviously, the movie is influenced so many of it, not just team movies, but
• 50:51
  would movies in general, but specifically, see movies you have like, assassination, assassination
• 50:55
  nation and anime, the movie I worked on and all these movies that have taken something
• 51:00
  from it.
• 51:01
  And then, obviously, the one everyone always brings up is Mean Girls, which I know your
• 51:04
  brother, Mark, Dan, directed.
• 51:06
  And I'm just curious.
• 51:07
  I knew what I was there, I was thinking, I was jumping this up, yeah, fuck it.
• 51:15
  Did Mark ever talk to you guys?
• 51:17
  Seeing as he is family.
• 51:18
  Did he ever talk to our review about when he was making Mean Girls?
• 51:20
  Like, oh, this is, how does you do that in mean, in Heavens or like, did he ever talk
• 51:24
  to you about it when he's making that film?
• 51:27
  I mean, it's kind of like the way you ask for most to have 50 different words for snow.
• 51:30
  You know, he's always been to believe that there can be different kinds of team movies
• 51:33
  that are small.
• 51:34
  Like, he knows that Heather's his hodka tour and he's ready to wear.
• 51:39
  Like, he's the gap.
• 51:41
  But everybody loves Mean Girls.
• 51:42
  It's a terrific comedy.
• 51:43
  It's a great comedy.
• 51:44
  Oh, yeah.
• 51:45
  Well, Mark is a really, Mark's a terrific director.
• 51:48
  He was a film student when we were making Heather's, was he at AFI at that time or a little
• 51:52
  after?
• 51:53
  A little after.
• 51:54
  Like, he had to use my money to go to film school.
• 51:57
  I'd paid for him to go to a buy and what did he do to be stasming the back?
• 52:01
  Yeah.
• 52:02
  But, you know, Mark is really good and Mark is a much more is more gentle and more friendly
• 52:08
  filmmaker.
• 52:09
  I think then, you know, his sensibilities are more that way than dance.
• 52:12
  Dan, you must have talked to Mark about this stuff when he was doing Mean Girls or was
• 52:16
  he just apologetic that he was saying?
• 52:18
  Well, I'm curious stories when we ended up working on a project together at Paramount
• 52:22
  and this was just when Mean Girls about to be released and when Sherry Lansing's office
• 52:27
  and Sherry Lansing just goes, there's never been a movie like Mean Girls.
• 52:31
  I mean, there's been bitches in high school, but there's never been three bitches.
• 52:35
  And my brother died just like biting our lips from lab.
• 52:39
  It's like, he was just so insane.
• 52:43
  Like, obviously, they're very similar, but, but, you know, like I said, it's, it's, there's
• 52:50
  room for both of us.
• 52:51
  And there was, there's already good, like, 15 years between Heather's and Mean Girls.
• 52:56
  So, you know, Dan, that they offered me Mean Girls before they took it to Mark, did
• 53:01
  I ever tell you that?
• 53:02
  No, no.
• 53:03
  Yeah.
• 53:04
  It would.
• 53:05
  I got the call.
• 53:06
  And now they would have been bare sick for you to tell you.
• 53:07
  Yeah.
• 53:08
  Well, I got the call and I remember I read the script.
• 53:11
  They said, I made this movie, you know, I, I can't do this.
• 53:16
  It was out with a really good script, but I went into a live first reading of the script
• 53:23
  and I walked in the room and Tina Fey goes, oh, oh, oh, my, alpha, alpha covering your
• 53:32
  face, which I thought was a delightful compliment.
• 53:35
  But you know, Mean Girls is a really good movie.
• 53:37
  I got no complaints about it.
• 53:39
  Yes.
• 53:40
  95 percent.
• 53:41
  We're 60 percent.
• 53:42
  I was traumatized by Mean Girls, no, you weren't.
• 53:49
  Moving swiftly on then.
• 53:50
  Okay.
• 53:51
  So, like, I'll know that not to bring that up next up, but it's thinking we've not been
• 53:55
  now over 30 years plus since the movie came out when it's done so much and it's influenced
• 53:59
  so much.
• 54:00
  The musical, the TV show, all this stuff.
• 54:02
  And you've got, like, you know, nerds like me talking to you about it.
• 54:05
  How do you guys feel about the movie with all of that, you know, baggage, I suppose.
• 54:09
  All these years, like, how does it resonate with you?
• 54:12
  Well, I went through a period of like, oh, my God, why haven't I written anything as good
• 54:17
  as Heather's?
• 54:18
  Now I'm a, now in my older years, I'm like, hey, at least there were Heather's.
• 54:23
  That's something I can, I can die happy.
• 54:25
  Oh, that's the whole, come on.
• 54:27
  I'll put Heather's in my gym, so that's not can be, I'm, I'll take him to grave with
• 54:31
  me.
• 54:32
  But it's definitely more compliments now for Hudson Art because that thing is just, I
• 54:36
  don't know what, it's kind of a bad cheer round of sounds.
• 54:39
  Yeah, we didn't get many compliments at the time, but you know, Dan, it's, it's not
• 54:43
  as if you only wrote one good script.
• 54:45
  It's always been odd for me because I'd never made a better movie than Heather's, for sure.
• 54:50
  I mean, it's, it's clear.
• 54:51
  And, and so I say, well, that was my first movie shouldn't, shouldn't they all be better
• 54:55
  afterwards?
• 54:56
  But what you learn is in that, and I'm very happy with a lot of my work, but the thing
• 55:00
  that happens is when you get something like Heather's that the combination of elements
• 55:07
  just happens to come together better than, than would be expected.
• 55:11
  And it's, it's a work that still resonates after all of this time.
• 55:16
  That's pretty unusual.
• 55:17
  So like Dan said, I'll take that, that's, that's, that's incredible.
• 55:21
  Nobody ever thought that his little team movie we were making would, would be anything
• 55:25
  more than kind of a bit of a splash in the, in the shock, value, humor world at the
• 55:31
  time, and it didn't really think that it would have the kind of life it's had.
• 55:35
  And partly the life it's had, unfortunately, is because there's been, says, steady waves
• 55:40
  of violence in, in American high schools, which is something that didn't exist at the
• 55:47
  time.
• 55:48
  You know?
• 55:49
  Yes, I prefer the musical to Columbine as far as keeping me in the, keeping me in the
• 55:52
  news cycle.
• 55:53
  Exactly.
• 55:54
  But certainly, because I mean, I mean, over here in Britain, watching the film, it's,
• 55:58
  as obviously, it's always quite different because in Britain, obviously, gun laws, you
• 56:01
  know, that kind of thing really doesn't happen as much over here, but watching it, and,
• 56:05
  and I didn't watch it as a teenager, I watched it when I was a bit older, but it does still
• 56:08
  have that impact.
• 56:09
  That thing, I just being in school and being 16 and just rolling your eyes at absolutely
• 56:13
  everything and, and, and, and seeing, growing up, sort of surrounded by people who add
• 56:18
  that, that sort of spirit, which is the thing that sort of resonates most of me, like,
• 56:23
  in terms of my own student, you know, to adolescence, as just as a kid in, in England growing
• 56:27
  up, was just that, that spirit is everywhere, I feel, even over here, and it definitely
• 56:32
  still resonates, you know, on that level, and, and many others.
• 56:36
  We've rattled through all my questions, which is, and this has been, you know, so much
• 56:39
  fun, guys.
• 56:40
  I mean, this is actually, I've done a few of these Q&As, and this is actually the most,
• 56:43
  I mean, this is the most fun, I've been great listening to you guys, you know, bands
• 56:46
  and stuff.
• 56:47
  Yeah, yeah.
• 56:48
  Who knew Richard Curris once said so?
• 56:50
  Like, like I could get Richard Curris.
• 56:52
  And so, yesterday, Richard Curris, yeah, but, damn, what is it with a lot of questions,
• 56:56
  but, yeah.
• 56:57
  Richard Curris.
• 56:58
  I mean, if I'm honest, I'd rather be fancy than Richard Curris.
• 57:01
  And I know you guys, obviously, you know, you're, you know, you've made, you know, stuff
• 57:05
  together and your, your careers have been so varied, but, and, you know, your, your
• 57:09
  practitioner's a film, and, I know, Michael's why you've directed TV, and, I know you
• 57:13
  also fans, that you're great fans of, of film, and you've talked about the influences on
• 57:17
  others and your other films, and sticking with team movies in the last sort of five or
• 57:21
  ten years, or make, or even, you know, in recent years, have you ever seen, have you
• 57:25
  seen sort of many new films or team movies that have, that you've enjoyed, and that have
• 57:28
  kind of, you feel like got something right about adolescence, because I know, hevers,
• 57:32
  one of the original intentions was to, like, shine a light on the stuff that hadn't been
• 57:35
  shine, you know, shown in, sort of, team movies, but got to that point.
• 57:40
  Have you seen any sort of movies that have done that since?
• 57:42
  You know, what's annoying is that, I mean, there's surely, there's been some fine team films
• 57:46
  on them, but like, I feel like even movies about adults are like high school movies now,
• 57:50
  it's like, all of the same kind of bickering and bitching, I feel like we don't have enough
• 57:54
  adult movies anymore, everything seems like a high school movie, even movies that take
• 57:58
  place in an office, they feel like high school movies now, so I'm a little, a little sick of
• 58:03
  that. There's a movie that nobody's heard of, I recommend to your people, detention,
• 58:10
  look it up, it's a while, it's trying to outdo headers, and it's crazy, but I think it's hilarious,
• 58:16
  and it's the greatest, oh, deteen films I've seen recently, I'd recommend to people.
• 58:23
  Billy, you should know that Dan sees every movie, he sees virtually every movie that hits a
• 58:29
  theater anywhere in the world every year, and he publishes a list at the end of the year of his
• 58:38
  rankings, and always, if you ever want to know whether movies worth seeing or not, just
• 58:42
  get in touch with Dan and ask him, he will have seen it, and he'll tell you.
• 58:45
  Are you guys not part of the letterbox, Chris, are you sort of following on with that?
• 58:49
  Yeah, if I step into Letterbox, I'll never leave, it's like, now there's a bucket of heroin,
• 58:55
  go to it, I can tip to over Twitter and Facebook, but Letterbox, I'm just afraid it could have
• 59:02
  a quick stand for me, it is cruel, it is a problem, I'm looking a lot, and as a whole,
• 59:06
  I think there's a whole generation of us who have kind of succumbed to its charms,
• 59:11
  but we're working it out, we're working out at the order.
• 59:14
  Thanks so much for talking to me, guys, this has been so much fun,
• 59:17
  I just, as I say, I am like a big Hudson Hawk fan, and there is something that I've wanted
• 59:21
  to ask you guys, I know that production was chaos, and the things I've read about it,
• 59:28
  researched it, and I have a strange perverse fascination with that film, and I genuinely think it
• 59:33
  is one of the funniest films I've, I mean, I put it this way, I first watched that because
• 59:37
  me and my friend were like, oh, these are the guys that did heavens, let's watch this,
• 59:40
  and I know Mark Mode is a critic over here is a big fan of it, so we stuck it on, and it honestly
• 59:44
  took us about, it took us about three hours to get for the movie, and the movie is 90 minutes,
• 59:48
  but it took us three hours because we kept pausing it at every 30 seconds, because we were laughing
• 59:52
  so hard, it took us an app and a new. Three hours ago, because I have to lay down,
• 59:58
  and my chest pains died down, I had to finish vomiting, trauma is the premier
• 1:00:03
  hit audience not laughing, oh my god, that was, that was a little...
• 1:00:07
  Is it an audience or a individual period?
• 1:00:09
  Well, I, all I'll say is that like, they were wrong, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing,
• 1:00:14
  I, that maybe got me who's not as deep, tragedy plus time equals comedy.
• 1:00:19
  People were primed to hate that movie when it came out, for various things that had
• 1:00:24
  really nothing to do with what we were doing, they were primed to hated, and they did.
• 1:00:28
  So, anyway, go that way, you can say.
• 1:00:30
  You can say swing dad no,
• 1:00:35
  That's it's bomb.
• 1:00:36
  Well, I guess, so the line does, there's so many lines, so many lines to not film,
• 1:00:41
  but the one that always, that probably, it took us about an hour, as we're color from it.
• 1:00:45
  Well, I don't think you'd have Bruce Road of it.
• 1:00:47
  I think you should be.
• 1:00:49
  It's something to do, it's one of these, it's it's a particular convention to do
• 1:00:52
  of one of these. That's the line of thinking. That's the line. The
• 1:00:56
  hot convention in July. The head convention in July. And you
• 1:00:59
  had added July to it, which makes it even weird. I love that
• 1:01:03
  line. Oh, my God. I'm not mine. Was that bruises or yours?
• 1:01:08
  Or what? I don't remember how we came to that line. The way
• 1:01:12
  bruised it levers it makes me think it was his. Let's say
• 1:01:15
  we'll be seeing that that happened in July. Yeah, basically
• 1:01:19
  well, it's so bad. I can't remember. I may have had some of
• 1:01:21
  you do with that. Okay, bad easy, because it's, ooh, although
• 1:01:24
  it is, it is your kind of sense of humor too. Yeah, I think
• 1:01:27
  it may have been a discussion about is there something that
• 1:01:30
  can be said here that would be, yeah, but get you right. I can
• 1:01:34
  see you. If it came out of discussion, I can see that totally
• 1:01:37
  big here. Let's see, getting. Well, that means you can't go
• 1:01:40
  to a hat convention. One of those hat conventions they place
• 1:01:43
  August. No, you're in that set. That hat
• 1:01:47
  convention in October doesn't sound as good. This is the
• 1:01:51
  least of all the questions that are already through our heads
• 1:01:53
  as we walked. It took us about an hour ago. It was a summer
• 1:01:57
  thing, aren't they? When are most heckent? We didn't have the
• 1:01:59
  internet then we couldn't just look on our phones and go, best
• 1:02:03
  time for a hat convention. The world has changed so much.
• 1:02:06
  You're the line. And actually, I think we talked maybe a
• 1:02:09
  little bit about this Michael when we were messaging, but
• 1:02:11
  after you did the intro for us, but like, so I've got the
• 1:02:13
  novelization of that's not over there or much like that
• 1:02:16
  novelization. I wanted to see how the screenplay ended. And
• 1:02:22
  he says the castle blue bar. Oh my god. So I've I've literally
• 1:02:27
  got the book, the hats. I've got the post, I've got an original
• 1:02:30
  poster of this movie, Daniel. I've got an original UK
• 1:02:32
  quarter pass. There it is. Eventually. Oh my god, it's right
• 1:02:37
  in the novelization because it's so is lazy and then lazy
• 1:02:41
  than the script. I wanted to just, you know, the castle blowing
• 1:02:45
  up and then the castle blew up like you mother fucker. I don't
• 1:02:49
  know how many times have you read this, Dan? Hey, I
• 1:02:52
  skimmed it. What? What? What? This is the fake. So I've read
• 1:02:57
  this book, I've read this front to back. And so there
• 1:03:00
  obviously the production was was chaotic and like Bruce
• 1:03:03
  was coming from the outlines, like, heck, about hack
• 1:03:05
  conventions, July left, Brian said, you know, there was an
• 1:03:07
  energy to it, but whereas, but if you read this, the, I mean,
• 1:03:11
  the book I think is lying of, you know, that so you were in
• 1:03:13
  room, they're in the car, they're outside, Andy and Bruce are
• 1:03:17
  up there. And this is, this is my, anything you do a rape
• 1:03:20
  joke, that's me. You're kicking me canceled, they'll get me
• 1:03:24
  canceled, but this is get this is getting cut out. But like
• 1:03:27
  the bed, when he says, do you want me to rape them? Which I
• 1:03:30
  when I put that again, took about half an hour to get over
• 1:03:32
  that line, I was what we watched, okay, that's got to be
• 1:03:34
  that's got to be improv. But then like, I was reading the book
• 1:03:37
  I was in the book. So was that line?
• 1:03:41
  Dan line perfectly, like, captures the Dan water's tone of
• 1:03:48
  what, I mean, your silly stupid character, say rape, out of
• 1:03:52
  context, it's just, and by the way, when I see the movie again,
• 1:03:55
  I always forget about that line and I always gasp and break
• 1:04:00
  throw on my shoulder, panting myself on the back. It's such a
• 1:04:04
  shocker. I mean, it was Brooks's idea.
• 1:04:07
  That's right. That's, I mean, it was where he was great. I
• 1:04:12
  mean, Tim and Chris lemons, I'm probably hanging free, helping
• 1:04:15
  him, we get cast and bam and returns as Christopher walk and
• 1:04:18
  son, but he's great and had some heart. So that line was
• 1:04:21
  actually in the, you wrote that that was in the script that
• 1:04:23
  made it was, that was first draft gold. And the fact that
• 1:04:29
  it's in the novel, so it gives me a lot of, it brings me
• 1:04:31
  some strange joy, it brings us some strange joy that it
• 1:04:33
  said that's the way that was that was cocky red, that was, you
• 1:04:36
  know, found printed. Yeah, do that anymore. Can make jokes
• 1:04:40
  will read in times change times change. Well, a sale of the
• 1:04:45
  Chris lemons on for me to do. Yeah, that likewise, big fan,
• 1:04:48
  big for Edward as well, you know, big fan of that. We don't
• 1:04:52
  be happy to hear that. John, tell my embroidered novel that
• 1:04:55
  you won't finish. You wrote an excellent novel that I won't
• 1:04:58
  say this. You always give it to Chris, but you wrote, you've
• 1:05:01
  written a novel, then, is this brand new, is this brand
• 1:05:03
  the information, or is this something that has been around
• 1:05:05
  for a while? Well, I'm still, I'm still doing some last
• 1:05:08
  minute, anyway, it's for you. If you like it, want me to
• 1:05:12
  rape him, you're going to love this work. Can I get an
• 1:05:15
  advance copy, please? So can I get like to go for a look at
• 1:05:19
  all the others? Oh, I'll play a look up over your house and
• 1:05:22
  give it to the old memory. I mean, I could talk about
• 1:05:24
  heaven's and like all the stuff you guys didn't scare
• 1:05:26
  over, especially this, and ever for hours, but in all
• 1:05:31
  seriousness, but generally, like, thank you guys so much
• 1:05:34
  for talking to me. It was such a pleasure. This is the most
• 1:05:36
  fun I've had doing one of these so far. So thank you. And
• 1:05:39
  thanks again for, you know, for the work you guys have done
• 1:05:41
  it. It really means a lot to me.
• 1:05:42
  Lewis, thank you.
• 1:05:45
  Drugging regos. All right.
• 1:05:57
  Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for listening to my chat
• 1:06:00
  with Michael Layman and Dan Wars. Remember to like and
• 1:06:02
  subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode and
• 1:06:05
  stay tuned for more exciting interviews and guests coming
• 1:06:07
  soon on half the picture.