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SMC Pod #220: Inverting one movie to make another (Gemini movies) · Secret Movie Club Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 220,
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  Inverting One Movie to Make Another, aka Gemini Movies.
• 0:15
  Yeah, that's a long title. Hello, my name is Craig Hamill. I am the founder
• 0:21
  programmer of Secret Movie Club.
• 0:23
  We are T-minus nine days from our 35-millimeter Indiana Jones 1980s trilogy
• 0:32
  at the Million Dollar Theater, LA's first movie palace, Father's Day,
• 0:37
  Sunday, June 21st, 11 a.m.
• 0:40
  Raiders, 2 p.m. Temple of Doom, 5 p.m. Last Crusade.
• 0:45
  And we are also just two days left to get our early bird ticket special.
• 0:49
  $30 is the all day pass that gets you into all three movies. Best deal.
• 0:54
  $12 if you just want to come see an individual movie or two.
• 0:58
  As of Sunday, June 14th, all the prices go up.
• 1:02
  Excited to tell you that this is shaping up to be one of the biggest events we have ever done.
• 1:08
  So if you want to be in a movie palace with hundreds of people watching 35 millimeter film,
• 1:16
  some of the best 35 millimeter film you're ever going to see by steven spielberg
• 1:20
  we would love to have you and your dad or if you're a dad guilt your kids or
• 1:25
  don't guilt them just tell them you want to come we would love to have you we will be knock wood.
• 1:31
  Announcing our July and August events ASAP. I'm actually working on it as we
• 1:37
  speak. If you're new to Secret Movie Club or randomly came across this podcast,
• 1:42
  go to secretmovieclub.com.
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  Go at Secret Movie Club. That's our social media handles. We're on Instagram,
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• 2:10
  They have a lot of things beyond just tickets and what events are coming up.
• 2:15
  And just become a Secret Movie Clubber, and we'd love to have you.
• 2:19
  But I want to let you know that Secret Movie Club Podcast 221,
• 2:23
  which will come out next Friday, is going to be about internal and external horror.
• 2:29
  I just saw Possession, the Andrzej Zalowski movie from 1981 starring Sam Neill
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  and Isabella Gianni. Isabella Gianni and Sam Neill.
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  It's crazy. And it just got me thinking about internal and external horror.
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  This week, I want to talk about when movie makers invert one movie to make another.
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  I had called them Gemini movies last week, and we'll just keep that Gemini meaning twins.
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  But this is when a director will intentionally take a movie that is really well
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  known and will invert it, sort of flip it on its head and make a totally other movie.
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  But when you think about it, you're like, oh, wait, they must have taken it from this other movie.
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  And examples are there's so many, but Raiders of the Lost Ark,
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  Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and
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  the Last Crusade are all inverted movies from other movies.
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  Temple of Doom is a very famous George Stevens movie from 1939,
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  co-starring Cary Grant and Victor McLaughlin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., called Gunga Din.
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  Last Crusade is an inversion of the James Bond movie from Russia with Love,
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  starring Sean Connery, who's also in Last Crusade.
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  I also want to talk about movies like Casablanca was inverted a few years later
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  as the Rita Hayworth starring Gilda.
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  Paul Thomas Anderson does this all the time. There Will Be Blood is a bit of
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  an inversion of John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
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  David Lynch did this with three movies explicitly.
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  Rear Window, he inverted into Blue Velvet. Vertigo, he inverted into Lost Highway.
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  Sunset Boulevard, he inverted into Mulholland Drive.
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  Rosemary's Baby was inverted by Ari Aster into Hereditary, and Wicker Man was
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  inverted by Aster into Midsommar.
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  And there's many others. I'm kind of naming them all right now,
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  but we're going to get into it.
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  So, inverting one movie to make another, I think what I want to lead with here,
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  the thesis of the podcast is, this is a great way to make a movie.
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  If you're, you know, you want to come up with an idea, there is something fascinating
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  about taking a movie you love and flipping it on its head.
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  Oh, in fact, I just got another movie that was inverted, which is Night of the
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  Living Dead, and then Peter Jackson inverted that for Dead Alive.
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  But basically what this is, is you take a movie that you love,
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  and one of the easiest, dumbest ways to do it is just invert everything.
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  So let's take that Peter Jackson example I just mentioned.
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  So in Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, 1968 zombie invasion movie or
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  zombie movie, there is some kind of incident that causes people to become zombies.
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  And a number of people hole up in a farmhouse and work to keep the zombies out.
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  So they board up the windows, the zombies are not very fast moving and they
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  just try to like get through the night.
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  Peter Jackson, and that became a basic trope for a lot of zombie movies.
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  What Peter Jackson did, which was really clever in Dead Alive was take that
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  trope of being somewhere and trying to keep the zombies out and he took somewhere
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  and tried to keep the zombies in.
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  And so in Dead Alive, which you have to see, one of the greatest zombie movies
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  ever made, one of the greatest horror movies, splatter movies ever made. I love Dead Alive.
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  You just have to have a stomach for gore because it is gory.
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  Basically, a guy's mom gets bit by some kind of rabid monkey and she becomes a zombie, essentially.
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  And then she starts biting everybody who comes into the house and he doesn't
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  want his mom to be taken away and he doesn't want this contagion to get out.
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  So he tries to keep the zombies in the house and it gets out of control.
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  And it's such a great, simple inversion, such a great, simple idea that then,
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  led him to come up with, well, why would he want to keep them in the house?
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  Well, what are the things that are going to happen that are going to complicate that?
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  How can the story be interesting if it's all kept in the house and the zombies are in the house?
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  And how can I make it different? And I think all of those questions happen when
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  you invert, and it's a clever,
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  rigorous way to, and I would say a great hack, to really quickly beat out a
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  whole new story and write a whole new screenplay.
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  Because we're doing the Indiana Jones 1980s trilogy.
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  On Father's Day, June 21st this month, 2026, Raiders of the Lost Ark was a George
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  Lucas original idea of updating the famous adventure serials from Republic and other B-movie,
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  studios that were really popular in the 30s and the 40s.
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  And what those were, where you'd go to see a movie and a serial would be like
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  a 10 minute chapter and it would always end on a cliffhanger.
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  So, and you'd always be like, how does the hero get out of this thing?
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  So it'd be the kind of thing where he is tied and he's on a conveyor belt heading
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  to a buzzsaw and you see him go into the buzzsaw. And it's like,
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  stay tuned. Will he get out?
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  And George Lucas pitched this to Spielberg. Spielberg loved the idea because
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  he wanted to make a James Bond movie. and the producers of the James Bond movies
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  would not give Spielberg a James Bond movie. So...
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  Spielberg, George Lucas, and then screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan all sat down
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  and hammered out Raiders.
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  Now, what's interesting is they all came up with ideas, they all batted around
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  things, and then Lawrence Kasdan went away and wrote the script.
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  When you watch Raiders, two or three of the things that pop out to you right
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  away, especially when you see it a number of times is One, the opener in South America with the idol,
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  is more or less lifted and influenced by an obscure Charlton Heston movie from
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  the 1950s called Secret of the Incas,
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  where also the costume was taken and Heston's general demeanor.
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  And it may have even been that Lucas was inspired by that movie.
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  Now, the entirety of Raiders is not an inversion of Secret of the Incas.
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  The most you can say is some of the elements, the hunting for treasure,
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  the exotic locales, the costume, the rugged adventurer.
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  Those things clearly come from Secret of the Incas. But the inversion that's
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  funny is the Casablanca inversion.
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  So what they did was.
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  Was Marion in Raiders owns a bar in Nepal, Tibet, and the Himalayas.
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  And Indiana Jones needs her because she has a piece that her dad had that he
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  needs to try to figure out where the Ark of the Covenant is buried.
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  And so when Indy walks into her bar, he's really playing the Ingrid Bergman Elsa character.
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  Marion's really playing the Rick character because she owns the bar.
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  And it's a Great inversion.
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  It's a great inversion. And then the movie goes different places from there.
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  It's not all, you know, Casablanca is essentially all at Rick's.
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  Raiders is not all at Marion's Bar. But what is great is the relationship,
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  the in-media-rest relationship does become one of, I think, the key things to make Raiders work.
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  And that's clearly a Casablanca inversion.
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  Temple of Doom, the second Indiana Jones movie, is an inversion of a great 1939
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  adventure movie by George Stevens called Gunga Din.
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  And that was supposed to be directed by Howard Hawks. And you can really feel
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  the Hawksian influence in Gunga Din. It really does feel more like,
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  in my opinion, it actually feels more like a Howard Hawks movie than a George
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  Stevens movie. But I love George Stevens.
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  And I think George Stevens brought a ton to it. You can just really feel the Hawksian influence.
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  And what's interesting is Lawrence Kasdan has said this as well,
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  that that Hawksian adventure rat-a-tat-tat that Hawks was so good at was something
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  they wanted to do in Indiana Jones.
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  So Temple in Gunga Din, Gunga Din is about like three British soldiers who discover a thuggy cult.
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  And there's a big sequence towards the end on a really rickety bridge.
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  And so when you watch Gunga Den, ultimately you're like, wait, the thuggy cult?
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  The rickety bridge what they did was they took elements of gunga den and they
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  just reconfigured rejiggered them for temple and then last crusade is even more
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  subtle but it's there so spielberg wanted to make a movie about indian his dad
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  harrison ford liked that idea too
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  and the dad had to be james bond for all sorts of reasons namely one being that spielberg,
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  initially wanted to do indiana jones as his james bond so now you got the james
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  bond as the dad of indiana jones makes all the sense in the world.
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  Well, when you watch From Russia With Love, which is actually my favorite James
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  Bond movie, the thing that's funny when you watch From Russia With Love is in
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  Last Crusade, what they did was,
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  okay, so Sean Connery is in Turkey and he goes underground to spy on the embassy, the Russian embassy.
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  Well, that becomes the rat sequence in the catacombs in Italy.
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  Okay, there is that amazing chase at the end of From Russia With Love that starts
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  on a train Then there's a helicopter trying to kill James Bond.
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  Then they're on a boat trying to get back to Venice.
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  Well, they break that up a little bit, but you can see it. There's the Venice boat chase.
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  There's the plane firing on India and his dad from the sky.
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  And so all those things, you're like, oh, yeah, they just took all the great stuff in from Russia.
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  And they sort of spread it out in Last Crusade.
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  And it's fun to notice that.
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  Another really fascinating inverted movie also using Casablanca as the inspiration is Gilda.
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  The Charles Vidor directed Rita Hayworth Glenn Ford starring Gilda.
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  I was 10 minutes into Gilda and I think it was 1946. And I was like,
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  this is Casablanca, but everything is kind of inverted.
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  And I looked it up because it was just distracting to me. I was like,
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  was this based on Casablanca?
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  Sure enough, it was. And you just, you see it when you watch Gilda,
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  which is a really good movie.
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  I don't, I don't love Gilda, but I really, really like it.
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  I would like, if someone put on Gilda right now and I didn't have four children,
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  a wife and, and had to make everything happen right now, I would watch Gilda
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  again, even though I saw Gilda like two weeks ago.
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  So it's like, it's, it's a really good movie. I, it's a classic Hollywood movie.
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  It's great. It's fun. And Rita Hayworth is gorgeous.
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  It's a really engaging film. But what's interesting is the inversion they do
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  is, okay, so Casablanca was Morocco.
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  Now we're in Argentina. The Rick owns the casino. Now Glenn Ford gets hired to manage the casino.
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  Ilsa is married to a freedom fighter, Victor Laszlo. OK, now Rita Hayworth is
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  married to the crime boss who owns the casino.
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  And the biggest inversion they do is where everyone basically is behaving.
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  The three leads are behaving in Casablanca, according to the better angels of
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  their nature for the greater good, which is what makes Casablanca such an enduring classic.
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  In my opinion, the three leads in Gilda are all motivated essentially by selfishness.
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  And violence. And whereas Victor Laszlo was the height of altruism in Casablanca,
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  the Victor Laszlo character in Gilda is really violent, borderline sociopathic, possessive.
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  So in other words, you take the things in Casablanca and you invert them and
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  you problem solve it. You're like, okay, well, if I flip it all on its head, what is that story?
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  David Lynch did this brilliantly. And I almost wonder, maybe he just understood
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  to do it intuitively. I wonder if this was something that was taught at AFI when he went to AFI.
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  But when you watch Blue Velvet, it's clearly influenced by Rear Window.
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  And so here it's, well, what's the inversion? In Rear Window,
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  Jimmy Stewart is in his apartment.
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  Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, that's one of my top five favorite films.
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  Jimmy stewart is in his apartment spying on his neighbors and he thinks maybe
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  he's overseen overheard a murder,
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  that's rear window well blue velvet kyle mclaughlin breaks into an apartment and hides in the closet,
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  and watches this crazy thing happen between isabel isabella rossellini and dennis hopper but basically,
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  he goes into the apartment so the inversion is he's not on the outside looking
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  in, he is on the inside and it changes him from now. That's a great inversion.
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  Vertigo, Lost Highway, really the inversion is that whereas in Vertigo,
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  the Scotty character, again, Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart,
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  whereas the Scotty character stays the same and the Madeline character played by Kim Novak.
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  She is the same woman, but she appears as two different women,
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  and he tries to make her the same woman.
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  In Lost Highway, it is the Scotty character, the James Stewart character,
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  played by Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty.
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  He's the one who changes. He has two different variations. That's very clever.
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  And even though Patricia Arquette appears as apparently two different women,
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  and is actually two different women, really probably the inversion is having
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  the male lead also undergo what is ostensibly a change, but not.
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  And that's a really clever inversion.
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  Mulholland Drive is very different from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard,
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  but the inversion there is probably that William Holden, the screenwriter,
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  gets involved with Norman Desmond.
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  And it becomes a corrosive, dark, dark comedy satire on Hollywood.
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  Billy Wilder famously said he loved to bite the hand that fed him.
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  Which is pure Billy Wilder. And David Lynch also does this really dark,
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  corrosive take on Hollywood and the industry and Los Angeles.
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  The inversion is, whereas in Sunset Boulevard, the story is told from the point
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  of view of the screenwriter, Joe Gillis.
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  In Mulholland Drive, the movie's told from the point of view of Norma Desmond,
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  and all the way through her psychosis, really, when you think about Mulholland
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  Drive. So that's, again, a great, brilliant inversion.
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  Ariaster did this most recently with Hereditary and Midsommar.
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  I don't know that he really inverted anything other than, well, no, he did.
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  Yeah, no, he did. So in Rosemary's Baby, really, Hereditary is Rosemary's Baby
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  told from the point of view of the baby, when you think about it.
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  And Midsommar is the wicker man.
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  But and again spoiler alert so don't listen to this guys skip ahead 15 30 skip
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  ahead 30 seconds if you don't want to hear the spoiler of the wicker man but instead of.
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  The main character solving the mystery and being the sacrifice,
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  the main character in a way becomes the sacrifice, but she becomes the May Queen.
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  So she's not really sacrificed. All the people around her are sacrificed.
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  And that's kind of an interesting change or inversion as well.
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  George Lucas took Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress and took two minor characters
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  and took that same basic story of we're going to tell the story from,
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  two bumbling escaped slaves, basically.
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  And in Star Wars it's R2D2 and C3PO but he did also take the princess trying
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  to save her kingdom basic story.
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  I don't know necessarily it's an inversion other than he took Hidden Fortress
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  which was almost a fable fairy tale in feudal Japan and he put it into outer
• 19:09
  space which is a kind of inversion.
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  You take something and what if I took this story but I put it in space? kind of thing.
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  And then all these ideas probably suggest themselves.
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  Oh, I'll take the two bumbling slaves and I'm going to make them robots.
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  I'll take the general and I'll make them Han Solo, et cetera, et cetera.
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  A really fascinating inversion is a Takashi Miike movie that I love called 13
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  Assassins, which is an inversion of Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai,
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  which is my Desert Island movie, the movie I give,
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  the aliens if they needed to know what cinema was and said we can only watch one movie.
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  Now, what's interesting is Seven Samurai, 1954's Seven Samurai,
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  is Seven Samurai are hired to protect a village of farmers from bandits who
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  are going to come and rape and maraud and pillage in a few weeks.
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  13 assassins are 13 assassins who need to break into a village where there are
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  hundreds of bodyguards to protect a dissolute, corrupt bad guy,
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  and they've got to get in there and kill him.
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  So it's a great inversion and the title gives it away tarantino did this interestingly
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  he took magnificent seven which was itself a remake of seven samurai and he inverted it,
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  to make hateful eight so magnificent seven is all outdoors it's western he puts
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  it all into an inn you got the magnificent seven they're,
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  again seven altruistic cowboys and he basically makes eight people pretty venal and puts them in a room.
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  The one last one I'll leave you on, also fairly recently, is Paolo Sorrentino,
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  the Italian filmmaker, took Fellini's La Dolce Vita and made The Great Beauty,
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  which in some ways is a variation.
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  But what's interesting here is whereas the lead character in La Dolce Vita in
• 21:07
  some ways loses his way and loses,
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  his soul, the Jep character in The Great Beauty, and I love The Great Beauty,
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  discovers his soul, discovers his essence, discovers his humanity.
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  Even though both movies take place in the very hedonistic world of,
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  italy the big city rome and i mean and sorrentino didn't try to hide that he
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  was basically doing la dolce vita but the inversion he makes is the character
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  arc the character journey
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  and that's fascinating so i hope you'll watch all these movies i love all the
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  movies i named and i hope you'll think about inverting a movie if you got to,
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  and maybe it'll help you.
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  And it'll give you a rigor of, okay, how do I, let me invert, flip the idea.
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  And what are all the problems now I have to solve because I inverted the idea
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  and hopefully something creative will come out of it.
• 22:04
  Okay, that concludes Secret Movie Club Podcast 220.
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  Thank you. Thank you very much for listening, for giving me this opportunity
• 22:12
  to just riff in a jazz way about cinema and movies. It is a tonic for me.
• 22:18
  So I am very grateful to all of you who are listening. Stay tuned.
• 22:22
  Secret Movie Club Podcast 221,
• 22:25
  which comes out next week, will be about internal and external horror.
• 22:29
  We will talk about what that is.
• 22:31
  Most movies are a combination, actually. Most horror movies are a combination
• 22:35
  of internal versus external horror, but some of the best ones are not like,
• 22:40
  I think one of the great external horror movies is Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• 22:44
  I guess you could make an argument that there's some internal horror there.
• 22:48
  There is, but it's mostly external horror, but it becomes so brilliant in its own way.
• 22:56
  But internal horror, you know, a great example would be the Deborah Carr movie,
• 23:00
  The Innocents, which was based on Henry James' Turn of the Screw.
• 23:04
  The Innocence is a great example of internal horror. You know,
• 23:08
  are those ghosts in her head?
• 23:10
  Are they a manifestation of her sexual repression?
• 23:14
  So, you know, we will talk.
• 23:16
  By the time you hear this, we will be nine days out from our 35 millimeter Indiana
• 23:21
  Jones 1980s trilogy at L.A.'s first movie, Palace, the Million Dollar Theater in downtown L.A.
• 23:27
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• 23:31
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• 24:23
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  I will report back on disclosure day next week.
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  Um, fight the fight, run the race, keep the faith.