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SMC Pod #211: Movies & AI · Secret Movie Club Podcast

0:20
This is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder, programmer of Secret Movie Club.
0:23
It is wonderful to have you. It is the beginning of March 2026.
0:28
Secret Movie Club podcast 212 will be about movie director Louis Boonwell,
0:34
who is one of my all time favorites, top 10 favorite directors, filmmakers of all time.
0:39
He's one of those directors I find interesting that people don't talk.
0:43
I feel they don't talk about him as much today as he might have been talked
0:47
about in the 70s or the 60s or the 50s.
0:51
And I want to talk about him. I think he's one of the greatest that ever practiced the craft.
0:56
He has an incredible body of work, an incredible life story.
1:00
And that's going to be next week. I still can't announce any events.
1:04
So that is on me. please know I am doing
1:06
everything in my power to announce events
1:10
for at this point it's looking
1:13
like maybe the end of March April May as always though in the meantime we'd
1:18
love for you to get on our social medias get on our newsletters so you can hear
1:23
about all that good stuff our social media at secret movie club most people
1:28
I think follow us on Instagram right now but we're we're on the others as well.
1:32
And then you can always go to our website, secretmovieclub.com.
1:36
Wait a moment and a box should pop up. You put your email in and you'll get on our newsletter.
1:42
And then if you actually go to Eventbrite and you follow us there,
1:47
Secret Movie Club, make sure you see our logo.
1:50
And if you follow us there, anytime that we announce an event,
1:53
we're doing most of our events right now in Los Angeles. You'll hear about it.
1:57
We mostly do screenings of what we hope are incredible movies,
2:01
everything from silence with live orchestras to a horror movie that came out and.
2:08
You know, who knows, Sweden a few years ago. We try to do it all.
2:12
And we also do workshops. We also do short film open mic days.
2:16
And we have a lot that we're going to do in 2026.
2:20
It's our 10th year anniversary starting in April. The next three weeks will be podcasts.
2:25
We go three podcasts on Fridays, basically three Fridays on,
2:28
one Friday off. We are starting a new cycle right now.
2:32
So this should be hitting your earbuds March 6th.
2:36
Then the Louis Boonwell podcast will be March 13th. And then our final podcast
2:41
will be March 20th for March.
2:44
And God willing, one of those, you'll start to hear new events on this podcast,
2:48
and then we'll take a week off. We'll be back in April.
2:51
Okay, let's get to it.
2:56
I will tell you the structure of today's podcast should be like this.
3:01
Which is I want to briefly lay out where the technology is right now,
3:07
what people roughly think the pros and cons are.
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I want to get into some specific recent examples.
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And then I just want to talk about potential directions that this could go in.
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So first off, AI is,
3:25
It's such an amorphous term, actually. And I'm not a tech guy.
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I think I have to say this from the beginning.
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So I am not coming on in this podcast as if I really actually fundamentally
3:37
understand the technology.
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And also, too, the fact is that where the technology really is,
3:44
is way further than what we're seeing in the public. So where they're at probably is AI.
3:50
Where we're at right now is not actually what you would call actual artificial intelligence.
3:56
As I understand AI, as we're dealing with it with ChatGBT and Gemini and Grok
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and the Anthropic and all that good stuff and OpenAI is kind of a search engine on steroids,
4:11
basically Google on steroids, which is the AI you'll type in a prompt.
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It will search the entire Internet, which is now the biggest library of,
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you know, good and bad information.
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Do its best to synthesize a response. Now, it can certainly do things that it
4:30
never could do before that a search engine couldn't do before.
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You can give it prompts like write my term paper and it will.
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And then you can actually revise the term paper with a prompt,
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revise the term paper with a prompt. I actually did a version for this,
4:44
just playing with it to create a comedic speech for an event where I said from
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the beginning that the speech was written by AI.
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And I had what I thought was a pretty funny speech for what I was going for,
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I think within two minutes of dealing with it.
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And you could imagine had I just been trying to imitate an AI speech,
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it would have taken me minimum 10 to 20 minutes to write. And that's giving me a lot of credit.
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So already AI is cutting down the time that people generate something they feel
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is good enough by factors of 10 or 100 or 1000. But you can do this.
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There are websites where you can create songs with prompts.
5:27
You can create images with prompts. And just recently with the release of a
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AI engine called Seed Dance and other
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AI engines, you can now with prompts essentially create movie scenes.
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And these movie scenes have been released and they usually run like one to three
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minutes, at least the ones that I've seen.
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And they're the ones that are generating all the talk. Some of the ones that
5:54
have been most prominent and we're recording this in March, 2026.
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There was a very famous one a few weeks ago of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop.
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And the one I saw, somebody had put dialogue in their mouths about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,
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but it had been created by seed dance and you know for me trying to be neutral.
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I didn't find it like impressive filmically but
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it's certainly to anybody who was watching it it looked like it came out of
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a movie and and i'm trying to think how i can say that better because i'm actually
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not trying to be dismissive or damn it with with faint praise that's not what
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i mean i mean it looked like oh there was a movie with tom cruise and brad pitt
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fighting on a roof For sure. It was lit that way.
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It was shot that way. There were edits, there were cuts. The fight looked totally choreographed.
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I'm sure it was lifted from some scene that basically existed.
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And then the AI made a few changes to it.
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I saw an AI where...
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Charlie Kirk, I don't know when people are going to be listening to this,
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but Charlie Kirk was assassinated last year.
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He was a alternative right wing podcaster, had a media empire, has a media empire.
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His wife now runs it, Erica Kirk. And he was killed during one of his free speech college tours.
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And he's popping a lot up a lot in these AI things. So I saw one where he walked
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into a cafeteria with Jeffrey Epstein.
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A lot of these have to do with Jeffrey Epstein, too. I saw one where Charlie
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Kirk walks into a cafeteria with Jeffrey Epstein in handcuffs and Cash Patel,
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who's the current FBI director, drops his tray of food.
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And then I think he walked him up to who was supposed to be Pam Bondi.
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She didn't really look like Pam Bondi to me, who's the current head of the Department of Justice.
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But I think that was supposed to be Pam Bondi. I'm not sure.
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Again, look like a real scene.
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Again, you could tell right away it was AI because obviously Jeffrey Epstein
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supposedly hung himself in a jail cell. Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
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But, you know, it was it was good. It was fairly passable.
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I just in terms of what you saw. And then I most I've seen a lot of Trump AI,
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you know, people also call this technology or they used to deep fakes.
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Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park have actually put a lot of money into
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a company that does deep fakes.
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And they used one of their deep fakes of Trump in the desert naked.
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This is what everyone's looking at. and,
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The dialogue basically breaks down to, oh, this is the end of movies or.
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Oh, so many jobs are going to be shed because of AI, which is actually a conversation
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being had across all industries right now.
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This notion that, you know, if AI really can passively do the job that you used to,
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who knows, pay $100,000 or $1 million or $10 million in payroll for,
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it does seem logical that a
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lot of businesses are going to choose AI over the $10 million in payroll.
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So there are a lot of people, including the people involved in AI,
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speaking and discussions and think tanks expressing this worry that we're about
9:06
to see hollowing out of the workforce like we've never seen before.
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I mean, I've heard some numbers like 20 percent or higher of the workforce will
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be made redundant in a way because of AI.
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And so I think this is also a concern in movies.
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You know, then another version of the AR argument, and it's maybe what you would
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call the more tempered, positive, optimistic version is, look,
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the history of movies is a history of disruptions.
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Movies and technology will forever be married.
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And when there is an advance in technology, there is going to be a disruption
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in movies. And then so far, movies have always found a way, tough as it's always
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been, to innovate and stay afloat.
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Movies were silent. And then there was sound.
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So they adopted the sound, even though a lot of people fought it.
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Then movies were in black and white. And then they were in color.
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Then TV came along and everybody really worried, oh, man, free entertainment in your home.
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And it did indeed, for sure. I heard, I think it was Mike Leisner in a recent
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interview who used to be the head of Disney and before that the head of Paramount.
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Before TV, people were going to the movies once a week. When TV came out,
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it turned out to be more like once a month.
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And now it's something like once every three to four months.
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So the trend is people are going to the movies less and less and less, an undeniable trend.
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And when TV came out, a lot of people worried, and this was in the 40s when
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TV started to become a popular mass medium, that, OK, that's it, movies are dead.
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But movies responded by innovating and having 70 millimeter,
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which just looked way better than anything you could see on a TV screen by having
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widescreen when the movie, when TV was actually, ironically,
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the aspect ratio of TV was meant to imitate the standard aspect ratio that had
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dominated movies for a long time.
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And movies endured when the studios basically fell apart and were gobbled up
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by corporations at the end of the 1960s.
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Everyone was like, oh, I guess movies are now just another appendage of a corporate
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holding company like Gulf and Western and Paramount.
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But then suddenly Paramount makes, you know, the Godfather one and two.
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And all of these filmmakers who were chomping to make movies came and made a
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bunch of interesting movies.
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And there was a movie culture and everyone was back to the movies and so on and so forth.
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And there's digital and, you know, you can go all the way up to the present moment.
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Well, there's streaming, there's the internet, there's Netflix,
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and then movies respond like James Cameron makes Avatar, which is a 3D experience.
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Which even though there is 3D now in your home, most streaming is not doing 3D.
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And Avatar is making a billion, And each avatar, one, two, and three,
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has made over a billion dollars.
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I think all three avatars are in the top 10 of highest grossing movies of all time. Yeah.
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Now, and I hope we'll also return to this.
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Obviously, every movie is not meant to be a 200, 300 million dollar 3D CGI special
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effects sci-fi fantasy extravaganza like Avatar is.
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But nevertheless, you have to give it to Jim Cameron.
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For seeing what's happening and for making something an experience you can only get in movies.
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So this is how movies have always adapted. And now suddenly here's AI.
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And the positive argument is, look, it is a tool, which it is.
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It's another disruption, which it is. Movies have always been forced to innovate
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when faced with existential disruptions, which they have.
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And movies will innovate somehow here, which they very well might do.
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So that would be the positive argument.
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And I'd say another addition to the positive argument would be that AI really
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is a tool and you're already seeing people just like when TikTok came out,
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just like when YouTube came out.
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You're seeing really creative people not getting weirded out,
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just embracing AI as a tool and creating really creative, innovative,
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funny stuff and showing that if you just take a few breaths,
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pump the brakes, look at it as a tool, just like everybody before looked at
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the new innovations as a tool, you can do filmic cinematic things and you can
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push the ball forward and cinema stays alive and people still go to the movies.
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So right now uh let's talk
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about a few of the examples that i brought up a few minutes ago probably the
14:00
most important one the one that seemed to shake everybody whether it was manufactured
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or not and what i mean is whether the outrage was manufactured another thing
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you always have to be skeptical about in this day and age of, uh,
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the people call it the information economy.
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And I, you know, the eyeball economy is the crazier and more extreme,
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uh, you are, the more you break through the noise.
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So a lot of times these posts you see where people are like,
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it's the end of movies very well could just be somebody wanting to promote seed dance and AI.
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And by saying that people click through and they watch it, you know, so who knows, but.
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There was this, I think it ran about four minutes or so, scene of Tom Cruise
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and Brad Pitt fighting on a roof.
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And the comments, which was no movie, no movie was ever made.
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Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise were in a movie together, Interview with the Vampire,
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which we actually screened a few months ago.
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But they never were in a movie where they were fighting on a roof,
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arguing about Jeffrey Epstein, for sure. So a lot of the notes that I saw were interesting.
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They were like, oh, actors are now models.
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Oh, being an actor, being a star means nothing because they'll just take you,
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you'll model, and then they'll just have, they'll do whatever they want with you.
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They don't have to pay for you. They don't have to worry about you getting hurt.
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They don't have to deal with your crazy demands. You'll just license your likeness.
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You'll come in and do a little ADR, which is voiceover at the end.
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They can even get your voice pretty much in your performance and things like that.
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Maybe a little less extreme, but nevertheless, alarmist in a way would be these
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notions of, you know, oh, everybody's job position that used to be below the line.
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Editors, cinematographers, VFX supervisors, makeup artists, all their jobs are
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gone because you can just type in these prompts and be your own makeup designer,
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your own cinematographer, et cetera, et cetera.
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Now, I think there's validity to that. And I think those concerns are valid.
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I think all those concerns are valid.
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I think the question is, is that actually what's going to happen.
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And I am not so sure that.
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You know, another thing that people showed was somebody used Seed Dance again
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to do a Spider-Man scene where it's kind of like you're the POV of Spider-Man
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rushing through between skyscrapers in New York.
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And it looked like a Spider-Man movie. It looked like a VFX shot.
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And ostensibly, it was just done with somebody typing in a prompt over the course
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of a minute, created a VFX shot, a shot that, you know,
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even just a few years ago would have probably have taken 10 to 20 to 30 people
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to do. and a week to two weeks to do.
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And here it's being done in a minute with one person typing words.
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The thing I would point out that's interesting to me is I would encourage you,
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I'd encourage anybody listening to this podcast who is in movies, who's a creative,
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and I'm talking to you, movie lovers, cinephiles, people who love actual 35 millimeter film.
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I do encourage you to play around with some of the publicly available AI.
17:11
I avoided it for a long time. At first, I really had a, no, no,
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this is, it's not, I had a, I just wanted to stay away from it.
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I was very nervous about it.
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And then I had this weird feeling, and I hope this story makes sense.
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I'll try to tell it real quickly.
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My dad, who's a great father, our son is named after my dad.
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And I love my dad. Love you, dad.
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He liked to fire guns. My dad was into guns. And he would take us out to the
17:42
desert when my sister and I were super young to fire guns at empty aluminum soda cans.
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I remember this vividly. right after the divorce.
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Sometimes he'd bring his girlfriends. And then as we got older,
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we would occasionally, not as often, but we'd occasionally go to the shooting range.
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When my dad died, when I was 23, he left a gun and I was with my dad's girlfriend
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and my sister and we found this gun.
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We didn't know what to do. And I said, you know, I'm going to discharge this gun.
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Nobody could, there were bullets still in the gun and we couldn't figure out
18:14
how to, I'm trying to remember what kind of gun it was, but there was a bullet
18:18
stuck in the chamber, basically, if I'm remembering my story right.
18:22
And we couldn't discharge it. We couldn't figure it out. So I said,
18:26
look, I'm just going to go in the backyard.
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You two stay in here and I'm just going to fire into the dirt and,
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you know, let's discharge this because I don't want anyone to get hurt or the
18:34
safety to come off, et cetera.
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So I go out and I could see the looks on my sister and my dad's girlfriend's
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face and they were nervous.
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And I tried firing a few times, you know, way far away from me into the dirt.
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In the end, it was a pretty big backyard, but it was just jammed. It wasn't discharging.
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And I realized, you know what, I don't really know what I'm doing here.
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And I am more of a danger because I don't know what I'm doing.
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And so I just stopped. I came back in, set the gun down. I said,
19:04
you know, I don't know what I'm doing.
19:06
Let's just put this in the gun case and put the lock on it. We'll figure it
19:10
out later, which is what we did.
19:12
And I don't know, a few months after that, maybe as long as a year after that,
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I was thinking about it. My dad had been dead for a while.
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And I thought, you know, one, I don't want people to be nervous around me if there are guns around.
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And for whatever reason, I need to use one or deal with one.
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And two, I know my dad would want me to know how to use one.
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That was probably the whole point of taking us out in the first place.
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And I think maybe the thing my dad always thought was the realization I only
19:40
had, ironically, after he had passed, which was I was more of a danger because
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I didn't know how to use the gun.
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And if I did know how to load a clip, how to unload a clip, how to empty a chamber,
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how to recognize what kind of gun I was dealing with, how to put on the safety, yada, yada, yada.
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And I just looked at it as a tool and I educated myself on the tool,
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I would probably be less of a risk to other people around me.
20:07
So I went to the shooting range quite a lot of times. I haven't been in a while
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because I have a family. I do not keep a gun in the house.
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I firmly believe that it's more of a danger to have a gun in the house than not. And so I don't.
20:20
But I have tried to go to the range once a year.
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It's been a few years since, but for a long time, 10 years or so,
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I'd go once or twice a year minimum and just make sure I was up on my being
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able to fire, load, unload a gun, et cetera.
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And I calmed down and I felt much calmer around guns because I knew how dangerous
20:43
they were, but I knew how to use them.
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And so weirdly, I would say to you guys, that long story is,
20:51
I would say the same here is true of AI.
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If you don't get to know AI and how to use it and what its good points are,
20:58
what its dangerous points are, you're seeding its misuse to potential bad actors.
21:05
Not bad actors like we think in movies, but the way that politicians use that
21:09
term, just bad folks of bad faith who, there are a lot of unethical,
21:14
amoral people out there.
21:15
They're not having these moral conundrums about AI.
21:18
They're just like, hey, how can I have this AI make me money?
21:21
And that's it. That's probably the only thing on their mind.
21:23
So, you know, when you don't engage with it, you're just ceding the ground to
21:29
amoral, unethical people.
21:31
That's my argument to you. So I would say, go play with this stuff.
21:34
I did. And it was fun. There's a lot of fun things you can do.
21:39
I've taken to occasionally creating images that I send group chat to my family
21:44
to make them laugh, I hope.
21:45
My kids and I now will create songs and my kids like that technology.
21:51
You can have the kids' names in the songs and the kids have a real sense of
21:55
pride when they come up with a genre and lyrics and suddenly,
21:59
you know, a minute later.
22:00
And it actually feels creative and fun and we enjoy doing it.
22:04
But what I have noticed is it gets old fast.
22:10
And the AI is, as I said, it's really just synthesizing and aggregating what's available.
22:17
And you begin to notice when you use it that it will spit out very similar designs,
22:26
very similar aesthetics with the music.
22:29
It seems like it's pulling from a lot of unlicensed country music to me, a lot.
22:34
And, you know, some of the songs are good, but I can't really listen to them
22:38
more than two or three times before I get sick of them.
22:41
And, you know, who knows if that's just psychological on my part.
22:44
My kids still want to listen to Prince's Purple Rain as their lullaby song at
22:50
night, which I love, rather than the lullabies we create.
22:53
They'll ask for the lullabies they created once or twice, and then they forget about them.
22:57
And then it's like, Prince, Purple Rain, or we're Irish, so Danny Boy,
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or when Irish eyes are smiling, something like that they love to listen to to put them to sleep.
23:06
So what I feel is, yes, I know the argument that AI technology is just at its
23:14
beginning, so it will only get better. I recognize that.
23:17
And I recognize that what its limitations seem to be now will disappear over
23:24
time. And instead of, oh, these are the limitations, this is the ceiling,
23:28
that ceiling will get higher.
23:30
AI will be able to do more. And we all have to acknowledge that reality of the
23:34
tool and of the technology.
23:35
But I do think at least so far, and it may be for quite some time to come,
23:42
that AI is the equivalent to me a bit of eating that fast food you go to at like two in the morning.
23:52
But when I was in college, if I'd had a few beers to drink, sometimes there's a place called Chano's.
23:58
I went to USC and Chano's was on Figaro. It was a burrito place.
24:02
I don't know what it was, but if you got too drunk, you'd like,
24:05
let's go to Chano's. And you'd like walk over to Chano's.
24:09
You'd get a greasy burrito. It seemed like a great idea.
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It even seemed like a great idea while you were eating it. And then 10 minutes
24:16
after you ate that Chano's burrito, you were like, why?
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Why Chano's? Why did I do this again?
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Like a cycle of humiliation and shame. like
24:27
cha knows no and so it's not
24:31
to say that that's ai exactly but i i i
24:34
do have to say after having played with it a
24:36
while i'm a not that worried about it and b i don't really think it's going
24:44
to be replacing whatever it is in human innovation whatever it was in prince
24:50
that genius imprints to write Purple Rain. I'm not seeing that in AI.
24:54
Now, I think, you know, there's going to be a lot of a lot of stuff created,
24:59
a lot of stuff generated.
25:00
There's no way around that. But I'm not necessarily sure that those people who
25:05
are really creative and talented and geniuses with movies need.
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And look, granted, that's only a handful of people.
25:13
But I'm not really sure yet that people need to feel all that threatened by it.
25:19
And I'm not actually sure how much that's different from how it was before.
25:22
I do think that people who,
25:25
intuitively understand a story, pursue that, whatever that thing is,
25:31
maybe the word is organic. Maybe it's soul.
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Maybe it is some kind of transcendent intuition.
25:40
I don't know you can fake that flavor. And I think that if you engage with the
25:44
AI, you actually, your worries might go down.
25:47
Your panic might go down. Now, on the other hand, I do agree that I think we're
25:53
about to see a lot of jobs wiped out.
25:56
And I don't know what the answer is to that. And we're all going to just have
26:00
to live it like people live the depression or people live the influenza epidemic.
26:04
I don't have an answer for that.
26:06
But I would say for people who
26:08
love movies, it's not going to destroy movies. I really don't think so.
26:12
I think movies are going to be forced to meet this challenge.
26:15
And if enough people who love movies meet this challenge, I think something
26:19
will be created and innovative that still gets people out to the theater.
26:23
And, you know, AI may be able to, you know, at its best, if there's a really
26:30
dangerous stunt, it may be able to lessen the danger of that stunt.
26:34
If something isn't quite working, it might be able to save a lot of money on
26:38
a budget, especially for a low budget filmmaker, to make a change that,
26:42
you know, 10 years ago would have cost you $50,000.
26:46
And again, there's a give and a take there. Somebody isn't getting that money
26:50
because the $50,000 it would have taken to correct the thing 10 years ago might
26:54
have meant the employment of 15 people, and now it doesn't.
26:58
So we have to look at that and be clear-eyed about that.
27:03
Let's move on to the third part.
27:08
When I look at where we're at now and where we're going with AI,
27:14
I have to come back to, and this was a thought I read in my research when I
27:18
was online, and it was basically, I looked up, did people think in the 1940s
27:24
that TV was going to kill movies?
27:26
And what I got back in my research was yes, but movies responded by innovating
27:33
with widescreen and color, and they were able to survive, even though there
27:38
was a decrease in attendance because of movies.
27:40
And there's a competition now for eyeballs. And.
27:44
I would say that probably is where we're at now, which is, will movies survive AI?
27:50
I would say, yes, they will, because movies will meet the challenge.
27:56
There will be some people who love storytelling, who will innovate.
27:59
And there's going to be just a flavor that you get with a, say,
28:06
a Zack Kreger, who just made Weapons and Barbarian, two horror movies I really dug.
28:10
You just don't get with AI. And this notion that studio heads or whatever are
28:16
going to be just creating movies,
28:18
I actually think often, not always, but often when the studio heads,
28:24
and this is not meant to disrespect studio heads at all, when they're like,
28:27
I got to take over the movie.
28:28
It doesn't always work out. Often the movies are ruined.
28:31
The cure is worse than the disease. If a movie was confusing.
28:35
You know, Blade Runner being a good example, the studio thought the movie was
28:39
really too moody and nonsensical, so they forced voiceover on the film.
28:43
I don't think the voiceover ruins the film.
28:45
Anybody who's seen the original voiceover Blade Runner cut, it was still a movie
28:49
that everybody talked about for years and years and years.
28:51
But now with, you know, 40 years in the rearview mirror, most of us watch the
28:57
non-voiceover cut and prefer it. But so you can see that when the studio heads
29:03
took over Blade Runner, they did not improve it.
29:06
They might have had a point that the movie was a little too below the water
29:13
in terms of what it was saying.
29:15
And maybe it could have been clearer. Maybe there could have been more clarity.
29:19
But their answer was voiceover.
29:21
And the voiceover was very clunky. No one liked it.
29:24
Ridley Scott didn't like it. Harrison Ford didn't like it. and you know now
29:27
40 years later Blade Runner plays quite a bit on the circuit the rap circuit
29:31
and it's the non-voice over cut that plays so.
29:36
I'm not so sure that the worry that studio heads are going to create these wildly
29:41
successful films and they're going to cut everybody out of it.
29:44
I don't know, maybe, but I mean, the track record of studio heads doing that is not the greatest.
29:49
My guess would be a few people will try that. It won't go so great.
29:52
They'll realize they need people who have devoted their lives to the positions
29:57
of storytelling and storytellers will continue to tell stories.
30:01
I am cautiously pragmatic and
30:06
optimistic, by which I mean I think there is going to be great disruption.
30:11
I do think there's going to be a lot of pain, a lot of suffering,
30:16
a lot of challenges, a lot of stuff that is no fun.
30:19
So I don't want to sugarcoat this. I think, like all disruptions,
30:24
there's going to be pain.
30:26
But I don't think this is the end of movies by any long shot. I just don't.
30:31
I think there are too many things that AI can't reproduce.
30:35
Live people, a communal experience, eating food, laughing, certain storytelling elements.
30:43
I just think that those people who are committed to cinematic storytelling will figure out a way.
30:50
And it's just what it always is. You just have to innovate. And so that is the good news.
30:55
And the challenge is how do we innovate? How do we make movies more attractive?
31:01
I think the thing that James Cameron said was interesting. I heard him in an
31:04
interview recently say, you know, he just can't make the avatars fast enough
31:09
for them to save the theatrical experience. And he said in a better way than that.
31:14
I don't want to misquote him. But I think his point was that clearly movie theaters
31:18
are obviously under attack right now, and a lot of movie theaters are shuttering.
31:22
And it's just unrealistic to think that an avatar can come out every month.
31:27
It just can't, right? It takes him.
31:29
And now he's got the technology really further than he did in 2010.
31:33
And between 2010 and 2026, he's made three movies.
31:36
So he's averaged a movie about every five and a third years,
31:41
more or less, five and a quarter years.
31:43
That is a good and an important and a valid point.
31:47
So I don't think the answer is trying to make avatars, just trying to make these
31:51
3D high shutter frame rate, you know, epic movies that you just,
31:57
you don't get the same experience, can't see them anywhere else.
32:00
I do think we are, as we always have been from the very beginning,
32:03
are going to have to rely on idiosyncratic voice and talent that make people
32:09
feel a way that they don't feel when they eat fast food.
32:12
You know, it's the difference between fast food and a home-cooked meal.
32:15
And ultimately, people, a lot of people will be like, I'm going to maybe I'm
32:19
going to I'm going to go for that home-cooked meal. I just feel better.
32:22
That's what I want. That's what I need.
32:25
Thank you, Secret Movie Clubbers, for listening to this podcast.
32:30
Next week's podcast, Secret Movie Club podcast, 212, will be about filmmaker
32:35
Louis Boonwell, who made classics like the surreal silent films Unchon Angelou and Lodge d'Or.
32:44
He then, after a period of like 10 years—no, man, it was almost 20 years—.
32:51
He finally got to make movies again in his late 30s in Mexico.
32:56
And in Mexico, he ended up making movies like Los Olvidados,
33:00
The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz, Elle, Susanna, Nazarene,
33:06
The Exterminating Angel.
33:08
Then he went to Spain and made Viridiana, which is my personal favorite,
33:11
one of my favorite films of all time.
33:13
And then he ended his career. He actually had a very long career once he got
33:17
going in France and made movies like Belle du Jour, The Milky Way.
33:24
His most famous film is probably The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,
33:28
which was a movie he made in the early 70s when he was already in his late 60s,
33:32
heading to his early 70s.
33:33
And he ended with one of, I feel, one of the great old man movies of all time,
33:37
last films of all time, a movie called That Obscure Object of Desire,
33:40
which was actually born out of a sort of nightmare production circumstance.
33:45
He didn't get along with the lead actress and he recast her.
33:48
So the lead actress is played by two women and it becomes very surreal and he
33:54
never explains why or what's going on, but it works.
33:57
And so we are going to talk about him, but what this intro doesn't do justice
34:01
to why I think he's so important.
34:03
And I want you to watch his movies and discover him. And he was huge in my own
34:09
film life. And I want to share with you why that was. So there you go.
34:13
Okay, guys, have a good week. Fight the good fight. Run the race. Keep the faith.
34:18
I heard Michael Caine quoting a Rudyard Kipling poem, If, and I liked it because
34:23
I love Michael Caine so much.
34:24
And so I went and I read the whole poem and put it to memory.
34:28
And one of the parts of the poem, if I can remember it right,
34:31
if you can force your heart nerve and sinew to serve you long after they are
34:36
gone and say, hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which to
34:40
them says, hold on. Sometimes that's where you're at.
34:44
But that's what you got to do. You know, Rudyard Kipling was wrong about a lot of things.
34:50
I mean, he was a colonial, British colonial empire poet. We could get into all that.
34:54
But I do think that sentiment, I relate to it. You know, no one's perfect.
35:00
And, you know, you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
35:03
And that is a beautiful poem. There's more to it, but I, you know,
35:08
I don't need to, there's one more stanza, but I think sometimes that's what you got to do.
35:12
You just got to say, hold on when there's nothing in you except the will,
35:16
which to them says, hold on.
35:17
And I hope you do that. And then you get through it. And suddenly,
35:20
you know, like the Buddhists recognize everything is impermanent.
35:25
You're not down forever. You're not up forever.
35:27
So you weather your time in the barrel. And then one day you're like,
35:30
Hey, I'm not in the barrel anymore. And then you take advantage of that moment when you can.
35:35
And I wish you I just ride it out hold on and I will see you next week for Secret
35:42
Movie Club Podcast 212 alright have a good week everybody I love you family.