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Going Dredd - Interview w/Tansy Gardam · CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody, David here, you may recall while back when and or season two is running.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got a chance to have a long conversation with Tansie Gardum who writes and produces the podcast going rogue.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she does these incredible deep dives in to film production, and in some cases does these multipart series, other times just these standalone episodes.
• 0:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I find the insights that she has really fascinating and I really nerd out on all of that behind the scenes stuff that she talks about, especially with shot compositions and production and things like that stuff that I really like.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, she had just released a new standalone episode on the film Dred from 2012.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that was a project of Alex Garlins, who is in the media a lot recently with 28 years later, as well as another movie called Warfare.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I was really fascinated by this episode and
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: thought I wanted to ask her some questions.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she graciously agreed and we recorded this interview and we talked about the movie, Dred, starring Carl Urban, also a twin-film called The Raid, which came out just about the same time.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talked a little bit about Alex Garland and then we
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I hope you enjoy this episode, as always a reminder, there are links in the show notes to everything.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tansy's Blue Sky and Patreon are in there.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would strongly encourage you to go check out her Patreon.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an incredible value for the quality of work that she puts into it.
• 2:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, if you want to support creators like her or like us, Patreon is really the best way and we appreciate your support.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, we are currently covering foundation, John and Marilyn are covering that.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: John and Alicia have been doing a lot of work in the movie and comic space.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, we had iron heart and Superman just dropped and we've got fantastic for coming up and I'll be covering alien earth when it comes out in August.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So check all those out, subscribe to the feed, check out our Patreon as well.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you want to support what we do,
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as always, thanks for listening.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tens of God, I'm welcome back to the lower hounds.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Are you doing good?
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for having me.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, pleasure.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Your last podcast really caught my attention because it's not a topic that I, like, the title was not like, oh, like, I really want to know about dread.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look, it's important to not have like topics that really attract listeners.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's important to really not chase an algorithm.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's important to make your continent as inaccessible as possible.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a fidelity in there to being human, right?
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's just chasing something you remember from 2012.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I think that's an important place to start because, you know, why dread and, you know, then why smuggling the raid will get there in a minute, but you make some arguments about
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: what dread represents in the space of filmmaking and tell, you know, to putting things on screen because we're getting to this weird convergence between television and movies, but that's another topic that I hope we can get into a little bit.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: But can you sort of outline your central premise or your thesis, so to speak, of this episode and what it is that you were driving at with tackling this topic?
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely, so dread for those who don't know is a 2012 film.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was broadly independent, it was funded by a lot of different pre sails, it was a British production, and it has kind of fallen into legend as the directorial debut of Alex Garland, who went on to do X-Macana, is his formal debut, he did annihilation, he's just recently done, he co-directed warfare, he wrote 28 days later, and
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: the subsequent 28 years which has just come out.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I find him fascinating as a filmmaker.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've long been a fan particularly of his writing, but dread is really interesting because a it's quite a beef film.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very aware of its own limitations of the film.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very ambitious.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's trying to do a
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: ambitious world on a relatively small budget.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is not formally Garland's directorial debut.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: He wrote it and produced it, and it was kind of well-known that he had taken over in the edit.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the thesis that I come to with the episode is one that Garland really draws, which is he's kind of refused to talk about dread,
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: from a directorial perspective, because his argument is that to do so, it raises everyone else who was involved in the production.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: It erases the cinematography entity.man told the composable Leonard Morgan
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: the editor market has lead that all of these people get lost in this essentially pissing contest between himself and the credited director so central premise of the episode kind of unfolds over the course of it in that a lot of the time on going rogue we will start with the story of a film and then get to the point where it is taken over by a different director this one we came in straight with
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: you've, if you've heard of this, chances are you know that Alex Gallon shadow directed it, but what does it mean to shadow direct?
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And is that even the discussion that we should be having?
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting because this whole thing that, you know, you start to unpack in your episode, and you've got some great audio clips to of Garland himself talking about these, these things.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this idea that there's a collaboration, while we of viewing audience are intellectually aware of that and we certainly see if you stick around for all the credits, especially of a CGI movie these days that go on for days, right?
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that starts the butt up against a tour theory.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that Garland thinks or Twitch theory is bullshit.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that that would be a fair summation of his theories, but within that, he also is interested in showrunner theory, where the writer is given a degree of power that they are usually not on film showrunner is really common in television, far less common in film.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, he really highlights, like individual team members, like a set decorator who made creative choices that really fed into the film.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you do lose those people's names, like these are crew members that don't get their own title cards, but their impact on the film is not necessarily as because the director, but it can really create choices that are then attributed to the director.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Garland really argues against that.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting too after our last conversation about indoor, uh, especially what, you know, around the season two of it all.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gill right, gill right, gill right, gill right, right.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was all Tony Gilroy and I caught myself on podcast trying to remember.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: We demand there's like, there's a group of people here that are involved in the production, especially on the Star Wars lore stuff because Tony Gilroy is the last person that would say, you know, there's anything about Star Wars.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I think Pablo Hidalgo was credited as the law consultant on Andy.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Milton makes it sounds like he sort of swan.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or maybe it was even law master.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like he got a particularly fun credit for that one.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But even so, that's like, oh, he swan in, he, you know, set a couple of things, uh, issued an invoice and then walked away.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, he's deeply embedded in Lucasfilm.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He would have been like, but he wouldn't know where he was from.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, if you're just the average, like, oh, everybody's talking about Andy or someone could check it out.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only thing you know about it is Tony Gilroy.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and there's definitely marketing, has an influence on that on being able to sell from the person who brought you Michael Clayton.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: But it is a minimization of so many people.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think we're already kind of here, in this conversation now, which is the convergence of big screens and small screens, so to speak, or I am increasingly challenged to understand when do I, because I can watch a movie on my laptop as opposed to hopping down to the local cinema.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when you talk about a tour theory versus showrunner theory, and this, what's happening, I mean, in going back to Andor again, that these were a series of small movies that were bundled into this episodic format.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, what should we start to think about when it comes to, when somebody like Alex Garland says, you should not credit me as the sole creative behind this piece of, Yeah, I think it's really interesting because this collides with the collapse of television in that we've seen an absolute, like, break down of the numbers of,
• 9:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: episodes in a television series.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very common to have six episodes in a series now, which was always common in Britain, never common in the US.
• 9:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was a mini series, previously.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is now you know, and as season that you might wait 18 months for.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we've seen a collapse in the size of television.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: That has also come with an increase in
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: showrunner power in a lot of cases.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: We are now seeing director showrunners where previously the showrunner was largely the domain of the writer, but within that we are also seeing the collapse of television episodic director as a job.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And all is in perfect example of this.
• 10:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: They went with a European model where a director will direct a block of episodes, which in
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there is also the possibility that it will be something like, I think Benjamin Karen was the director on the first season who did the last two episodes and also episode seven, which is an odd outlier of episodes, but it is about bundling that together, the director coming in and doing three episodes is the time.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there isn't really as much standalone storytelling in television now.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's very rare that you will watch one episode of something.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I can understand that from a view of perspective.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's so rare that you will sit down and be like, oh, what's on tonight?
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'll catch an episode of that.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I didn't care for it.
• 10:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm never watching it again.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: You probably don't watch shows out of order anymore.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: So all of that comes
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: back onto the showrunner as someone who is crafting a story and now that audiences are consuming things in one go or consistently they're watching an entire show, that does give the show run a more power in that they are crafting a narrative that is going to go out entirely to the audience as opposed to trying to kind of meet them where they are in terms of viewing.
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of this
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Concurrent to that collapse in television, we've had the rise of the cinematic universe as a concept, which I would say is actually now collapsing in and off itself.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't disagree.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Kevin Feige of Marvel is probably the closest thing we have to a film showrunner, where as a producer, he was largely across creative decisions, he was kind of keeping things consistent,
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: over the entire franchise.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in that first phase, you also have, unfortunately, just Sweden, is kind of the directorial creative voice who was showing up on other sets to make sure that everything fit together, but that is still more the role of a television director than a film director.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Ray.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: So historically, we have seen those two forms as very separate.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now they're all collapsing as, you know, as you say, you can watch a film or TV on your laptop.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: The medium of consumption has become far more uniform.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the content itself has.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we're recording on the weekend that Superman.
• 12:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: James Gunn's Superman is out.
• 12:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, which you see universe.
• 12:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Which absolutely feels like the second movie in a universe.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I don't know if that's what they went in with as their idea.
• 12:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: But, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry yesterday.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, even the friend I saw it with is not as cursed to media as I am.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he was saying afterwards that he assumed he had missed a previous film.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was like, oh,
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, she hit it up fairly quickly, but I assumed that, you know, there was something that had happened before, I hadn't seen it, this was continuing on that.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The interesting is it, obviously we're avoiding spoilers because there's not a Superman podcast, but that's something that you and I have talked about, especially around the andor thing, which is the way that exposition is handled and I think good bringing it back to the dread of things.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I watched the Stallone movie, the Carl Urban movie, and also the Raid, and at various points that each of the three films handles their exposition dumps or world-building setups a little bit differently, but I thought overall, they all did a reasonably passable job because there's not going to be that many people who are going to know the dread, well, for the two dread movies,
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: then you do need some world exposition, right?
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, whereas Superman is playing with, obviously, the cultural knowledge of Superman.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it is going in, it's not doing an origin story.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: It opens with some on-screen text, sort of setting the table, and then it goes in with, he's been Superman for three years.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the first time he's lost a fight.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that is essentially almost acknowledging that the audience have probably said another Superman movie.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the first minute.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Phil.
• 14:14
  [UNKNOWN]: Okay.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just, yeah, make sure that people, because people are weird on the internet, right?
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a weird convergence.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're just sort of coming out of the conversation here with the dread films and with
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Garland's shadow directing and writing the, the Carl Urban version, this world of comic book adaptation.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm, I'm just personally curious as to your sense of where are we in this world?
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And is it still a rich vein to mine?
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it still a good place where, where
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's definitely, there's definitely still a lot of really great comic books that could be adapted that have the space for them.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: The interesting one is something like DC Marvel or 2008D, which is where you can come from.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm sure yourself.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm culturally a comic book person, I'm largely not practicing.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, there are, like, a little bit of explanation.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: But within those particular lines, you've got hundreds of writers, hundreds of artists, you've got all of these different interpretations on the character.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So even deciding which particular vein you tap is a creative choice.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's almost, this is gonna sound wanky.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's closer to making a history film, where there's kind of different historical interpretations
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: and how they would behave in one world they're existing in and you know every 10 or so years they have to do a hard reset of the franchise because it's become too difficult to keep track of who is where at what point.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there is definitely still story there whether or not there's audience there I think is interesting because definitely audience fatigue has come for comic book movies,
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's been a real depth of good films for a while.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've had Thunderbolts this year, which was treated as a great return to form for Marvel.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would say it is the best MCU film in the past five years.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a three star.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not anything phenomenal.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not bad.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's, you know, it's got some really great, interesting creative choices.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I did see it.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not expectations.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, if it had come out in 2014, I think that maybe in 2014 it would have been frothed over, but like definitely if Marvel were at a stronger point in their releases, it would have had a different reception.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a hard one because often times they've fallen into a pattern, I think, unfortunately, which is the fate of the world that stay, this grouping of people must come together themselves and the group dynamics to be, and then they do.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then by doing so, they solve the crisis of the fate of the world.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's incredible that James Gunn, even while making a Superman movie, has still managed to make a movie about a group of
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, back again, we keep pulling off the dreaded.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was something I was struck by, too.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit about dread itself, especially with Carl Urban.
• 17:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It took me a while, because I watched the Stallone film first, and then I watched the Carl Urban.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then I had a real problem with Carl Urban at first, because he did not have the screen presence that Stallone does, and he didn't cost you them in a way that actually filled out the uniform.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think as well, like, it's a very minor thing.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But color open is obviously K-way.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's American accent is good.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something a little wrong about it.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's something that is sort of non-specific in a very, like, tiny way.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you value that?
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: And when you combine that with Olivia, not Olivia Felby, she's the highest ranked, but the highest, builds American in the cast.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Lena Heady, as Mama also, that little sense of, like, you are a Brit on you.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that I was really fascinated by though with the Alex Garland version was the pacing.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It had this really steady slow pacing that seemed to maintain for the whole movie.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It never really sped up and it never really slowed down.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just kept its beat.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought that that was an interesting directorial and editing.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the things that I kind of struck me after I finished watching the movie was...
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: how the slow mode did the slow mode drug kind of affect the pacing, was that something that they were trying to connect?
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think they definitely went with the aim of the film being relentless, like it having a fairly consistent pace throughout.
• 18:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we think that you also have the idea that this is a day in the life for Judge Dread, the kind of cool premise of the film is that it's not, this is his worst day, it's not this is his first day.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: it's that for him this is just the job.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there is definitely an argument for that idea of it's you know, it should feel like sending your emails and doing your printing and getting all of your work done in an office job.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: It should be just kind of what happens as you go through your day for him.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the judge character and I think you point this out in your podcast,
• 19:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: his arc, his degree of change is, it's in miniscule.
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Miniscule across the comics, right?
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the way, I think you said the comics were laid out.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So in this, we have no deviation of his character arc until that very moment when he gives her a pass.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the, obviously there's all, I'll do it in the intro here, that there's a big spoiler for the movie, but he gives her, gives the Anderson the pass.
• 19:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: and like I haven't actually thought about this there is a funny version of the film where he doesn't where the end is just like no she lost her life and you know that is you don't want to end a 90 minute action film with a punchline but it's funny I was just on a guest podcasting with properly Howard which is one of our affiliates and Steven Anthony are doing this bacon rap season where they're
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: they're going from movie to movie using Kevin Bacon as this interstitial tissue and they invited me on to record the fugitive with them, which was Harrison Ford jumping point.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's interesting because the, oh, no, sorry.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Harrison Ford, I think goes into the next one.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They came into this from no country for old men, which was, what's his name?
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tell me, Lane Jones.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, thank you, Tommy Lee Jones.
• 20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's a similar thing with Tommy Lee Jones's character.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: all the way through the movie.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't care.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't care.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't care.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then at the very end when they get in the car with, you know, and he does his handcuffs.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says, you know, I thought you didn't care.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he says, don't tell anybody.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so that's his little same judge dread sort of two degree arc of character development.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and definitely like that level of development has a reward for the audience.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: It does feel like a payoff.
• 21:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: I guess a bizarre kind of curly to this is Captain Holt from Brooklyn, 99 as a character who is so straight, so setting his ways.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: That when he does occasionally break from that character, it almost feels like a little treat.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: particularly because Brooklyn, I'm not just a comedy, but the way that he will break is explaining that he was holo hooping and things like that.
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, right.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: For one out for Andre Browner.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, fantastic acto.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Homicide Life Institute was one of my favorite television shows while it was on air.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've been sort of, I
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're so busy with so many other things and I'm like, I just would love to go back and dig back into those.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then I could not podcast about it.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I can watch them and not be podcasting about it.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you know, that's the the curse of being a podcast host.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about the raid in this whole tweet.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, the raid.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you haven't seen it, go watch the raid.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like we'll be waiting.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can pause this.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's 90 minutes.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, it's funny.
• 22:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe I maybe you built it up for me as I was listening to.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you want to think of fan.
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so just skip the story and gotten straight to action.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would have been more happy with with the raid.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just didn't need the character back story stuff.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just needed to do that.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: But there's some little of it.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: You weren't missing out.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It even slowed it.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It colored my ability.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, oh, come on.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, let's get back to the action.
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I will know that too is not for you.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, really.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can I just take the good bits out?
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I will say I will say the fight choreography is some of the best fight choreography.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's phenomenal, yeah, I love a good action movie and one of the things that I hate about the the modern crop of films is I just get lost as to who's punching whom where are they?
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: What part of the room are they in and who got knocked out of the window blah blah blah?
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just so fast cut and yeah, it's a mixture of fast cut and shaky cam that I just can't handle it.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: but the geography of the action in the raid because the raid does cut really fast and it's shot on a fig rig so it's not hand-held but it is relatively unstable cinematography but just the way that everything unfolds is so well put together that you're never confused about who is fighting who at any point like in the raid too there's a fight you know mud pit essentially.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: and it would be so easy to lose track of who these guys are as they're just absolutely slather than in mud, but you can tell you are aware of what's happening as it unfolds, which is just like excellent action filmmaking.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: and you talk a bunch about this, you actually start to break down the process that they went through to film the raid in your episode.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they had a very, so basically the two stars, I suppose, you would call them depending on how you define this does.
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, eco-wise, who is undisputably the star of these movies, and then also, yeah, you're interested in it.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, he was in all of Ed Evans, rather, Garth Evans, Indonesian films.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he was a penchaxolat fighter.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: He did a lot of demonstration fights.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he came from that background and he also worked with Yanyan Rihian, who was another penchaxolat demonstration fighter.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: So those were the two action choreographers across the raid and also previous movies.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But they would essentially choreograph all of the action scenes with Garif Evans, the director, with a hand account.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they would pre-plan everything down to the shot size, the shot length, they would have pre-cut the action sequences to make sure that everything flowed.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they use that as a template when they're actually filming to ensure like, if they were cutting on the day, they put it together.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: they were dropping it into the existing template and a cut didn't match, then they'd be able to pick it up.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So for them, it was partly a security method of where relatively new to action filmmaking we've got quite a low budget.
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: We can't go back to a set once it's been struck.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like we need to keep moving, we need to know exactly what they're doing.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we can make sure that we can still factor out of the mall divs or the south of France on their film set and fly them back here at the drop time.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, or more a case of, well, we broke down that set and we can't afford to put it back together, but yeah, so it was for them a way to ensure that they actually knew what they were doing and by going in with a handicap beforehand, making sure that everything would actually work and it works so well.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: that there is an argument, this is kind of how some second units and action units would work, but the way that they stuck so closely to it and that Evans was actually involved in the planning of the action scenes rather than getting a demo reel and deciding we'll do those shots, we'll change it up here.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just a really cohesive filmmaking method and the result is merit, the results speaks for itself.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: do we see that you know other film productions have picked up that specific method all it's really common for your action units to shoot previous like this actually you know not to cross-promote but David Leach and Chadster Helsky the directors of John Wick were kind of at the forefront of doing that they used to do a lot of previous with their company 87-11 and that was sort of what they were known for for a while.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to side plug your ballerina episode as well as definitely
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so they kind of started doing that when relatively like early in digital, so they were actually able to shoot digitally at it digitally, send that off, give an example of what the action scenes that they wanted to do and how they wanted them to look.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it's really common for your action guides to do that.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is less common for the director to be the one in there with the handicap.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, on the crash mats, working with your lead actors, slash choreographers.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, I honestly don't think that you would get that degree of cohesion unless it was maybe with early to help skin-leach.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: These days, they're quite established filmmakers.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure that they'd honestly have the time to get that close and personal to their action choreography, and they really rely on all of the guys they've trained up, like they have essentially university of action filmmaking.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's not that you don't see the adoption of this.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's that it was already an existing method, and it just hasn't really been utilized to the same degree, and even Garth Evans more recent films don't use it to the same degree to their detriment.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, I was winged on 80s action, you know, cinema, I was a teenager during the 80s and so what did we do?
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: We went saw the movie and then we rented it on videotape when it finally made it around.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this was some of the cleanest, best, most interesting, fight choreography that I'd ever seen.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Especially when you have the final fight with Rama, his brother and then the main
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so Mad Dog is played by Yanyan Reheat and who is the other fight choreographer.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you haven't seen the raid but you have seen John Wick 3, Yanyan Reheat and Titip Arif Rafman who is in the raid too, they both appear in John Wick 3, they're the chatty Indonesian guys who are sort of talking to John between the rounds of the fight and John Wick doesn't kill them.
• 28:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: He actually respects them enough to just be like, I'll be seeing you.
• 28:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: They
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so then we have this weird convergence of these two films in parallel production and then the really and the read made it on screen I went wide first.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the right and red have essentially the same plot.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're both about a police raid on a tower block and the progressive move up that tower block that is controlled by a drug lord.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: They are like.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: There are strange convergences within them in terms of like, oh, this is how you introduce your villain.
• 29:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, you're going to have a fight scene with this.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of that is just coincidence or logical storytelling choices if you are setting a fight in a building.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: The raid begins production after Dred has wrapped.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: But because the action scenes were so tightly pre-planned, the edit was, it's not even that the edit was relatively fast, it's that they kind of got fast tracked by their distributors.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they were pushed to make a really tight turnaround, essentially the film premiered at Toronto, about a year after they started work on it.
• 29:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, Dred spent 18 months in post-production, partly because it was shot in 3D, partly because it had issues in its post-production, but as a result, Dred, which had been in the work since about 2008.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: came out about six months after the rate.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the instant comparison was, well, the rate is so good.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: This isn't as good as the rate.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Had dread come out first, I think it would have been a slightly different story.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it would have been, oh, the rate is so good.
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: The rate is a better version of dread, as opposed to dread is a worse version of the rate.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you think, would you, would you argue that the raid actually took some wind out of the sales of dread?
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And dread just going to always have a mediocre.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think dread was always going to have some issues in that it is not a huge budget, but a relatively high budget adaptation of a British comic that never cracked it in the States.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that there was
• 30:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: writing on the wall in terms of audience there.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: there is possibly a better release for dread, but honestly, I always, you're always in the shadow of Stallone in that Institute.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you are absolutely contending with the adaptation.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I suppose it's kind of like trying to do a dark tower now in that there is, you know, the dark tower as a text is huge and sprawling and it's got a lot of very fervent fans.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: There has been a very lacklust to film adaptation of it for a lot of people that film adaptation is what they might have heard of.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So if you're going to do, if you're saying we're going to do a sprawling duck tower television series, it's going to be 20 out of a long episode, it's going to really get into the little most people will be like, oh, did that have Matthew McConaughey in it?
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, what comes to mind for me is Dune and God bless him David Lynch and Kalman Gawflin and then the sci-fi version.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, so there's the cultural space for a given property is always going to be affected by anything that is an antecedent to it.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so it's it's it's John Wagner who was the co-creator of dread the character judge dread He was involved with dread.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was not at all involved with the Stallone movie apart from a one-point Basically collaring one of the writers at a party and be like you better not fuck this up.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've heard how much you're getting paid But he's like reaction to everyone saying that this was a remake of the Stallone movie was that no This is a proper make of dread
• 32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: proper make right that's what it which is such a Scottish way to put it and you mentioned that the dread was filmed in 3D but we can't as an audience see it in 3D let alone even get a hold of a
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: 3DI's diversion of it, even if we wanted to sort of do a dock brown set up on our own home basements and try to, you know, give ourselves a 3D treatment.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: I did, I did get a message from a friend after the episode went out being like, I think my parents still have a 3D TV.
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you can find the blood race sometime, but yeah, it is this sort of
• 32:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: like largely dead technology.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the only other example that really brings to mind of you cannot watch this movie the way that you could in cinemas is kind of an expansion on 3-day it would be Spy Kids 4-day where it came with a scratch and sniff like panels and it's certain points in the movie it would tell you all right now you can smell what the movie smells like.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but dread, you know, it put an awful lot of eggs in the basket of shooting in 3D, and it was relatively a claim for doing something new with the 3D, and I would love to have seen it in 3D, but I just didn't, and a lot of my favorite films I didn't see during the initial cinema run.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And we were talking about this with the Superman and Jurassic Park, the aspect ratio of the first Jurassic Park is, it's called Academy Ratio, it's 1.85 to 1, so it's quite boxy.
• 33:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there is something nostalgic about that, I think, because not just because it's Jurassic Park, but also because a lot of us grew up watching for 3TVs, and that aspect ratio works much better on that sort of
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, an understanding that we used to make stuff that was designed to live past its cinema release and dread might have been banking on 3D TVs being really popular as well, but essentially they created a movie that worked really well in a technology that it is no longer exhibited or available in for the most part.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one of the things that you often key in on in your podcasts is how the technology of filmmaking affects the creative process and then what ultimately.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: we see is a finished product or a finished piece of work.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and so Anthony Dodd-Mantel, who was the director of photography on dread, he's a fascinating guy, but with dread, he really, with he says that he was horrified by the 3D camera rigs, because to shoot, to shoot two cameras next to each other for 3D.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, not digital, but film, right?
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, no, digital.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they were digital, okay, at least you didn't have two
• 35:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so part of the reason that 3D kind of came back around this particular era was digital because it was more possible to be able to do good 3 days.
• 35:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: So just like super basic to do 3D native shooting, you need 2 cameras next to each other shooting, essentially the distance of human eyes, cinema lenses are normally prohibitively large for doing that.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: You can't actually put 2 cameras next to each other.
• 35:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: at the distance of human eyes, so that will often be shooting into a mirror.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: They've kind of got like a perpendicular camera set up.
• 35:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're big, they're bulky, and that really restricts the way that you can shoot.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, Dodd-Man told actually worked with the film rental company to develop new camera rig so that he could shoot handheld, and he could shoot really closely on dread.
• 35:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: But that was a case of like,
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dodd-Mantel for any big nerds was the cinematographer on festin' like he's deeply embedded in avant-garde cinematography, so he was probably able to flex a bit on that, be like, come on, I'm Dodd-Meter, I did, I did some dogmillionet, come on, just work with me here rather than having to work with the existing cameras.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Whereas something like the raid, they were working with what they were able to get their hands on.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: that is not a film where you're able to ring up the camera rental company.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, can we move a lot of the camera body into a separate, like, will, will outsource that, will cable it in, and I'll be able to do your handheld.
• 36:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, they're shooting with what they're able to get.
• 36:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of these days, we're going to have to do a conversation just about the technology of cameras and objects and stuff.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just, because I was on the fugitive with Anthony and Steve, I learned about Indo-Vision intro vision.
• 36:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's where they're doing backlit, but then you can do another split screen thing where you can put other objects in front of.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mm.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: An actor, so it looks like an actor is in the scene, so in the train-rex scene, it looks like Harrison Ford is running down the tracks, being chased by the train, but that's actually a back-click projection thing if it's fascinating.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like, you know, a lot of those technologies are now effectively, they're not lost, but they are completely superseded by green screen.
• 37:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: The ability of green screen, it's, you know, it's treated like the villain of modern cinema.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's true.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Last thing before we kind of switch over to talking about Alex Garland himself as a director is I just have to to shout out Lina Heddy and would Harris in love Lina Heddy.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So wasted in I mean, dread wasn't horrible, but these are too such.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Very good actors who don't have much to do.
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: they don't have a lot of room to move and what they give in the room that they're giving is just I was so because she was the her mama character was so there were so many things going on and I was like wait a minute wait no no go go back go back go back and we just had to keep moving on and yeah and sort of villainous death as you know mama.
• 38:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: On Wood Harris, like it does have to be noted as well, one of the things that has aged quite poorly about dread has got to be the cast racial makeup in the, as a movie, a lot of it is white people killing non-white people.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he is kind of the highest-build and most prominent black actor in the movie.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he is like Mama is the
• 38:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The big villain, he is a much more personal and immediate villain for a lot of the film.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's definitely stereotypical interaction between him and Anderson, who is a very blanche young woman.
• 38:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Who would they purposely keep her helmet off because they spent all this money to hire this actress and they need her on their base on screen.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you also, you know, you need her face on screen because she's the one with a character arc.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's the one who the audience are actually going to attach to, she's the one that you're going to take a photo of to the hairdresser when you're like, you know what, I think I will do the big chop and I'm going to go shorter.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, that's a universal experience, I believe.
• 39:08
  [UNKNOWN]: Right.
• 39:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let's switch gears here a little bit and start talking about Alex Garland as a director.
• 39:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: As you noted, he's a lot in cinematic news.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's having a very big moment at the mark.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we had Civil War, we now have Warfare, we now have 28 years later.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I only recently believe this or not.
• 39:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I only recently,
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: saw 28 days later recently because one of my co-hosts, Alicia, did a whole little series on our Patreon.
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have some bonus coverage of some of that material and then we have a movie review of 28 years later as well.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I saw that and I didn't realize that it was Alex Garland, and I think Alex Garland really only broke into my consciousness with Civil War, which I thought was
• 40:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I really, it still stays with me, the movie for lots of reasons, but I'm really fascinated.
• 40:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, of course, you, you throughout this comment about warfare, which we'll talk about a bit here, but I wouldn't, I definitely saw that, and he is having a cultural moment.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's this interesting idea that as a novelist, a screenwriter, to director
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've sort of had the opposite in the way back when I was first getting interested in filmmaking when I was in high school, I saw this film never let me go, which is this gorgeous
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's directed by Mark Romanec, who also did one hour photo and Garland wrote the adaptation of it.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so that was one of the first movies where I was really aware of, like, I should see who wrote this because it's so good.
• 41:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then his first film, X-Macana, came out again, like a few years later, I was very aware of film by that point.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had seen dread and I had heard that he had shadow directed it.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'd been really interested in that, but also I wasn't as bad as I am now back then.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: But watching his career X-Market exceptional, annihilation got absolutely rooted by its distribution.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: There is a really interesting story in that.
• 41:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then men is awful.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hate it man.
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it was a really disappointing experience because by that point as well, like I'd read a couple of Garland's books, I was really invested in him as a filmmaker and a hated man, I hated it so much.
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I don't think I've hated any of his films as viscerally since, but I've definitely become disillusioned with him as a filmmaker to some degree.
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I've found that journey really interesting.
• 41:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think somebody who I'm tracking in the same way as Noah Hawley, he's written books, it's a number of articles, and then now we've got Alien Earth is coming out in August and we're going to be covering that as well.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm really excited for that.
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But his work on Fargo was really interesting and I'm pretty excited for that.
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so be sad, it's alien socks.
• 42:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It will be very sad, because that's a franchise that needs the most recent film.
• 42:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Romulus gave it a little bit of life, but it still didn't quite give us that.
• 42:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: What did you feel about Romulus?
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because I was talking to someone last night who we had opposite opinions on Romulus, where I, for the first,
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: 90 minutes.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was like, this is fine.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a bit exploitative.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think it's doing anything.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then it got weird.
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was so much more on board when it got weird.
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, this made I was talking to had the opposite thing where he was like, yeah, you could cut the last 20 minutes.
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a little without without the weird in the end of with the car in the cargo bay and that kind of stuff.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is a little bit force awakens where it's like, okay, let's let's let's read objects from the previous films.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and retune you to the, what made you, let's give you the feels that that had you follow another.
• 43:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought it was an interesting blend of alien and aliens.
• 43:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, aliens is more movie.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: As much as I love alien, aliens is a movie that I could just put on.
• 43:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll watch five minutes at any given moment of any given day.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll be happy.
• 43:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and that is a franchise that is defined by a very different instalments.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: because aliens is such a different key to aliens.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But those two, you know, the two of them make it into a series.
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's always kind of intention with itself.
• 43:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And everything else after that was.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as you say, you know, when when a movie gets rooted, the third one, you know, by Distribute or more, more by the studio, got rooted by the studio.
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, there was a movie in there somewhere, but I think it got the treatment by the studios of giving notes and edits.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah.
• 44:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, I mean, no, a haulie.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think successfully pulled a fargo transition from big screen.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this goes back to that whole conversation about, you know, what size screen are we watching on is less important now than it is.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: how many parts to this thing are we watching?
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are we watching 8 episodes or 13 episodes?
• 44:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was thinking of the pit when you were talking earlier about lengths of series.
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're now because I think there is an interest in a hunger and again we're all of topic from Axe Garland.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But you don't come onto a lower-hand show and not expect the conversation to wind.
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Garland has, he has done a television series in which he was a very, like, authory will showrunner.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he wrote every episode on it.
• 44:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't think he directed them necessarily, but it was very much his show.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, devs and devs got good, you know, it's not spoken of badly.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, as far as I know.
• 45:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: But do you wait going back to Garland?
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's bringing up back around to him.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, I'm very curious for you to talk a little bit more
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Warfare because you had a very strong reaction to it.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I watched it because of what you said was like, oh, well, now I have to watch this and I I have an opinion on it, but it's not your opinion and it's yeah, and I think my opinion does definitely come at the tail end so man came out in I want to say 2021
• 45:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Twenty-two is twenty-two.
• 45:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so he's done men, he did civil war, and he's captured off with warfare, which is he has co-directed Raymond Dosa, he is the co-directer, and it is essentially Raymond Dosa's, not life story, it is Raymond Dosa's day story, because it is right.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: one specific incident, so effectively it is a single real-time rate isn't quite the right word, but it is an operation in Iraq.
• 46:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting that then that dread and the raid are both movies about movement.
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, whereas this is very much a single location.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is static while you still have these assailing forces, but rather than moving up the ladder up the building, they are fixed in a single position.
• 46:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and the single position that they fixed in is someone's home.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just found it, I found it to be a really callous film.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I found it really out of step with kind of current discussions.
• 46:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in particular, actually, I found it wildly out of step with the audience reactions to Andor, where Andor was sort of so on the side of the Revolutionary.
• 46:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was so
• 46:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: keyed into the experience of those who are subjected to empire's power, whereas warfare
• 46:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't, I'm sure that Garland would argue that it doesn't pass any moral judgment.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: But what it does is focus entirely upon the people who are committing invasion.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like there's no better word for it, it is the invasion not just of Iraq, but of these individuals home, their huskets taken over and turned into a staging point for the war in miniature.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: For this Navy SEAL operation.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: The home gets bombed the family trapped in their house as their home is turned into this staging post for a war that they are not involved in.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I also found that the film lends into the idea that actually everyone on the street is an enemy combatant and they're all going to try and kill you.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I just found it had a really
• 47:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: like Yucky almost attitude and it felt very regressive.
• 47:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: It felt very, they felt like 2002 propaganda, like it was a very strange watch in 2025.
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: But on top of that, it's technically a very excellent film.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really well made film.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is like it absolutely grounds you in the perspective of those characters.
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's uses the, it made a point of not using score, but it does use really good sound design.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's prosthetics and kind of blood and guts are really effectively, like realistic But I can't stop saying any part of the film.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like it's like it's a good film.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: You shouldn't have made it
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that was my reaction was I don't understand why you made it and why you made it now like what's the purpose?
• 48:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: I also found to be honest the way that it was not necessarily marketed but all of the discussion I had seen about it prior to release was like are they made a movie with all the white boys at the month that they you know they made a movie that has will polter and Joseph Quinn and you know all the way garden and she's like oh that's the guy from the bear you know
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I hadn't realized until we were sitting down to watch it.
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: The lead actor, and I'm going to fuck up his name, it's Deferro Wattoon.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's from Reservation Dogs.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a First Nations American actor.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's brilliant in Reservation Dogs.
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's kind of just functional in this, but he does do this functional job really well.
• 49:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I was thinking, I was like, I don't think I've seen
• 49:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: another like relatively mainstream film with a First Nations actor.
• 49:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've seen quite a few First Nations actresses in late roles, but this was one of the first times I could think of that, and that sort of got completely subsumed by the fact that the film was white boys at the month.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I agree with you the totally that technically the end in terms of action films, it's again, choreographed well, staged well.
• 49:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I always understood where I was,
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: in relationship to an even thing that's going on.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: But what is Alex Garland's purpose as a director and writer and a primary creative doing in this movie?
• 49:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't understand why he's here in his career.
• 49:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and there's sort of there's no sort of cool premise or faces like there's not
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: The strongest thing that you could say the film is doing is trying to do a realistic war film.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in doing so what it does, partly under that veil of realism, is just to find a deeply troubled and difficult war that shouldn't have happened.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, within that point of view of those affected by images, it's a movie that kind of doesn't have a point.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, yeah, exactly.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's right.
• 50:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, what's the point?
• 50:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I'm sure he'd argue that the, you know, the, your traditional wall film does have a point.
• 50:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this one doesn't have a point because it's not your traditional wall film.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's just sort of, I don't want to use the word Reddit lightly, but there is kind of a oppositional attitude that Galen takes in a lot of his more recent work that looks kind of a bit fuck you to the audience, but also it is a bit reddit and like, oh, well, actually, that was on purpose.
• 50:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: wasn't there a comment to about the read coming out was it him that said that was saying that oh the read has nothing like dread yeah he argues that the rate has very little little common with dread and that's just I would say not true I can understand where he's coming from in terms of like they you know they do have somewhat there are different differentiation between the two of them
• 51:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: but to deny the similarity is kind of ridiculous.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, it's a coincidental similarity in a lot of cases, but it reminds me of, and I know we're going off topic again, there's currently a lawsuit against the movie together, which is a upcoming horror movie starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's written and directed by Michael Shanks.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: It has been accused of plagiarizing another film, which was a much lower budget film, and kind of the nail in the coffin on the lawsuit is that that script was sent to Ellisonbury and Dave Franco's management who passed on it.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So the argument at the lawsuit is that they passed on it in order to hoard the idea and make their own film.
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I am not a lawyer.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: I am not completely well versed on this subject.
• 52:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I cannot imagine that this lawsuit will be successful because Michael Shanks, the writer, director, has a paper trail back well before this other film of him developing the film.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's an Australian.
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: We often fund development of films through government agencies.
• 52:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So there is a huge paper trail of this film existing well before this other film.
• 52:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the similarities between them go down to like a pivotal third act moment involving a blue ray of the movie Spice World or something similar to that like a degree of similarity that is absurd but coincidental.
• 52:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 52:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the rate and dread are like that.
• 52:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: There are very similar beats, very similar moments.
• 52:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Some of them are absurdly coincidental.
• 52:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of them are just what you would do if you are telling this story.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there is a well-developed arbitration process among the film guilds.
• 52:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because this is not an uncommon
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but I think for Garland to say, there's nothing in common between adults.
• 53:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's, yeah, that's a denial, like, yeah.
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, as you said, as you laid out at the beginning of the podcast, he's somebody that you have attached yourself to, well, definitely followed, yeah.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Remind me, did you say you saw 28 years later or not?
• 53:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've seen 28 years, yes.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: OK, I have not, so no spoilers for me.
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: which like again like i'll give him twenty eight years it's fun like there's there are a couple of things in it where i'm like Alex but for the most part for the most part i was like this is good and interesting and a new spin to do on this and some of that is Danny Boyle some of it is garland some of it is anti-daughter mental who's back behind the hammer on this
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And were you fan of the original 28 days?
• 53:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: I actually hadn't seen it until this year.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's really interesting to watch now because the DVD kind of aesthetics that it's going for.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I would say it looks like shit, brackets complimentary, but it's like, it's aged in a really particular way.
• 54:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, right.
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how they got those empty streets of London, like that's an absolutely incredible feat in and of itself.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is, it feels a very, a tourist movie.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it kind of doesn't look like anything else from the era.
• 54:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's, yeah, it is, it's a quite a brave movie.
• 54:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's got a lot of interesting angles and compositions, and yeah, the empty streets, that was a really interesting thing.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I believe this might be repeating this information, but I have heard at some point that the way part of the way they got those empty streets was, they'll fill me it sort of 4 a.m. in summer, so you do have light in London, they also recruited the prettiest members of their production to ask people not to walk through shot.
• 54:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: that part of the tactic was that the best-looking people, which is fielding the public being like, I'm so sorry, we're just shooting for like 60 seconds, are you okay to wait here?
• 54:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, go out and put a good girl attack attack.
• 55:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's, you get your film made.
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So where are you with Alex Garland as a tour, not a tour creative?
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think he is kind of trying to have it both ways in the way that he reacts to, or to theory, where, you know, he will point to all of the other crew members, but at the same time he does want that show run a position of creatively leading a production.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I definitely like,
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: I feel like once he was in a kind of higher position of regard and sort of, you know, man, he's the turning point in that after annihilation which was, you know, really struggle with his distribution, but was critically acclaimed and X-Macana, which, again, I will defend it's a brilliant movie.
• 55:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: but men would be kind of his blank check after that and I think man is awful.
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that many people should have intervened on men and it's you know you could argue it's really like it's a big swing I would say it's a big swing in a big mess.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it a case where they like you said is it a blank check where the studio said hey Alex what's next?
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well it's yeah it's
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can see him as a branded E24 director.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, he is very much now civil war and warfare were both A24 and he's doing A24's Elden Ring.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I guess the thing with men is that it's not necessarily a blank check because it is very few actors.
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's relatively empty locations for the most part.
• 56:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, it's like I really just think that someone should have intervened
• 56:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Edited, Edited and Mount Bethesda.
• 56:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, what even I think it needed to come in the script because I'd say, sorry, not Editing and that are Editing in the sense of like, where they always talk about this on top chef and things like that, you should have edited this.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's take a look at that dish.
• 57:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and like, the more I think about men, there's some quite nasty ideas within us.
• 57:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: And again, I'm sure Garland would argue, well, it's meant to expose that nastiness, but it's like, I don't think you need it to revel in it so much.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I think he is still a really interesting writer, director.
• 57:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I do agree with a lot of the stuff he does.
• 57:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I also disagree with a lot of the stuff that he says and does.
• 57:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So maybe you'll just be an ongoing content, just figure.
• 57:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: What would you say is your favorite is a weird term, but like if you were to take all of his dozenish or soish films here, what are you going to say critically that it should go on the top of the heap?
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: If somebody says, oh, Alex currently never watched movie, you would say.
• 57:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, definitely watch that kind of X-Maconar is just a beautiful little chamber piece.
• 57:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's
• 57:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a really smart movie in a way, oh, it's I won't say anymore, but it is it's just really smart the visual effects it I think it won the Oscar for best visual effects on a relatively small budget, but yeah the visual effects are phenomenal it's Oscar is a don't know Glyson Alicia Vicandas Sonogam is on a in one location.
• 58:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's yeah and it's a good idea.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It really plays with your own audience interpretations of what is happening and yeah it makes you part of the deception to some degree.
• 58:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, let's talk a little bit about going rogue as a product that I want to say as an advantage as a project yeah that works.
• 58:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: As a you know a curse that I've given myself.
• 58:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: You said something about the original judge dread movie and this dread movie, the 2012 as well, that it sort of has everything.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is everything for the Tanzi Garden treatment?
• 59:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Everything is probably a movie that's not good in an interesting way for a bunch of different reasons.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: I actually cut some of the things about the 95 judge
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think so.
• 59:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I joke before that I forget everything that I've ever written as soon as the podcast goes out.
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, that film was also produced by Charlie Lippencott, who I've spoken about on going rogue a few times.
• 59:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: He was this kind of marketing genius that George Lucas happened to be at university with and they were good mates when Lucas had just kind of had this enormous success of American graffiti and he was going on to make Star Wars.
• 59:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: He caught up his mate Charlie and was like, I'm making the science fiction film.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you market it?
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Charlie had just done the marketing for jaws.
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this kind of, this absolute marketing genius who then marketed Star Wars.
• 59:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's kind of responsible in many ways for the Star Wars holiday special and then he went on to produce movies, one of them being judged dread from 1995.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: So it's sort of that is part of how it has everything.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: should it become a tradition that we that there's some sort of live watch event of the the thing with the holiday special is that it's so long.
• 1:00:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is a long piece of media and it feels about twice as long as it is.
• 1:00:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And especially if you watch the one that has the commercials still in it.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's a little time capsule.
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:00:32
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 1:00:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so that and like the Stallone one is a case of ego, it is and this might be conjecture.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it is one of the movies that Schwarzenegger kind of tricks Stallone into doing in that when when one of the writers was initially like being courted to write this project part of the selling point was that Schwarzenegger would be in it and he was like, well, that's the biggest actor in the world.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, I want to do that.
• 1:00:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And also at the time it was being pitched as a Tony Scott film who did Top Gun, Ridley Scott's brother, has passed away sadly now.
• 1:01:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, like brilliant director and so all of all of the sort of pieces of a going rogue classic went into that film where there was a huge number of scripts.
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: There was an almost unadaptable property.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: There were a lot of very good directors being floated and they were not the ones who got the job.
• 1:01:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: There was ego, there was a lot of money, and there was a film that ultimately is not terrible, it's not good.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, definitely.
• 1:01:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So your criteria is for a going rogue targeted project.
• 1:01:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: is got to have these multiple layers of it.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, well, there's got to be something worth talking about.
• 1:01:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is my thing?
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Is there's always, I'm very cautious of kind of just contributing to the wind of media criticism.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's like I need to actually have something that's worth saying and worth thinking about for the audience.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: So something like Pirates of the Caribbean is a movie series that I absolutely adore.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there is a lot to unpack in there, like it's not just that like, hey, they made this movie super quickly or with the second run.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Hey, God didn't want them to make this movie, but there needs to be something else to actually talk about within that.
• 1:02:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: You don't want to be the IMDB trivia section, but out loud.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 1:02:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what does a typical, I don't know if there's a typical, you know, if you've got a sausage machine that you just put all this stuff into, or what's your wife?
• 1:02:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will.
• 1:02:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: The methodology is to go into a fugue state for a few days researching and writing the first draft and then to actually spend much longer making sense out of that.
• 1:02:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm currently in fugue state mode on our next episode.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, it is that case of just kind of
• 1:02:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: gathering this huge amount of information and then trying to wait a little bit into something that makes sense and is worth listening to.
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can you give us a hint as to, or are you keeping it close?
• 1:02:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm keeping it close just because I don't know how long it will take, but I will say that at the moment, it's looking like this will be the episode where I kind of have to contend with hardly wine stains like a sea of film.
• 1:03:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And do we need to play the fog horn sound?
• 1:03:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, yes.
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but also this is not the film that I expected to do that with.
• 1:03:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
• 1:03:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's, uh, and I'll say it's not loaded the rings because the instant assumption there is loaded the rings unfortunately it's not loaded the rings and you've already covered that one.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yes moving on there.
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So as you're working on this most recent project.
• 1:03:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have you taken stock in terms of your.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: methods and like what is it?
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're around 30 over 30.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Have things evolved much or are you pretty much into a structural rhythm now?
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've done.
• 1:03:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've done quite a lot of standalone episodes now for a while.
• 1:03:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll get your Patreon too, which you're doing bonus episodes for.
• 1:03:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so definitely like developing kind of the standalone episodes as a structure, it means that a lot of stuff that in because I first two seasons were just one film for each and so there was a lot of depth going into on those and I have actually got another season on a single film that is.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: you know, it's coming, it is coming.
• 1:04:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, the, I think the standalone episodes I'm definitely in a groove on in terms of kind of telling one story with those, whereas over a season you can kind of get more into the minutiae of a story and kind of the different characters that go into it.
• 1:04:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yeah.
• 1:04:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you working on a series and stand-alone's simultaneously?
• 1:04:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: How many stories do you have in your head and how do you do you have the series that will probably be the next series is largely written to be honest.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's overwritten.
• 1:04:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Despite being five episodes there are probably, it probably needs to be cut down by half in the script stage because at the moment there's just too much there.
• 1:05:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, definitely and like even dread like there was there was quite a long section in that episode initially about the way that Alex Garland writes his scripts versus the way he directs them because I find that as a director he's not
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: are quite different to the final cut.
• 1:05:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: But dread doesn't have that.
• 1:05:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dread is very close to its script, possibly because there was another director involved.
• 1:05:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, that section was ultimately lost for time, because I was like, this is maybe interesting to me, but it's not entirely relevant to the story.
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do your friends and family understand the The the the dragon that you're chasing what you're going rogue Because once I remember in our early days of podcasting was like, oh, I need to podcast tonight I got it on the mic, you know, there's a there's a there's a degree of understanding.
• 1:06:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, my my best mate Charlie is the story editor on the show So he is part of the research process in that I'll be like
• 1:06:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can you come around and watch the 1995 Stallone Judge Dred movie with me?
• 1:06:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And often he is kind of a backstop of sanity in that he really didn't like Dred, he had a very different opinion on it.
• 1:06:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: He saw it for the first time a couple of months ago, so obviously a very different relationship to the movie, I saw it in 2012, a beautiful time where we thought the things would be good forever.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, like, there's definitely an understanding of it.
• 1:06:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I did have another friend recently being like, hey, we were talking about this particular thing where we and I had to be like, oh, that was, that was on my show.
• 1:06:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: We didn't actually talk about that in person.
• 1:06:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, I know what you're talking about.
• 1:06:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that is my opinion.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: However, this isn't something we've talked about.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Outside of specific topics or projects, do you have a sense of where the going rogue project is going or are you just in it right now and you just got to keep turning out the get to be the little hamster in the wheel.
• 1:07:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it ends with me knife-fighting Tony Gilroy in a maccus cup, but I assume that that's like a 10-year plan.
• 1:07:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's not in the immediate future.
• 1:07:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can we get Alex Garland to film it?
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Look, we did have the discussion recently of which of the directors that we've covered on Rogue One would be best to fight.
• 1:07:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The obvious choice is of course Francis Ford Copeland because he's an old man, so he's an easy to fight.
• 1:07:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I had the very bold contention I was like, I think I could fight Chadstahelsky, who is probably the only professional fighter that we've actually covered, you know, he was a stuntman for most of his career.
• 1:07:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's done a huge amount of due jet suit and I was like, the thing is, I think I could get the jump on him.
• 1:07:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would be able to be surprised him in a fight, which is probably the most stupid thing I've said and argued, but I stand by it.
• 1:08:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's an interesting place to end.
• 1:08:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: conversation.
• 1:08:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's definitely.
• 1:08:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and Mac is a lot.
• 1:08:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's where I assume going Rogan's with either me being sued or me being like Godfather Starboard into the fold.
• 1:08:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's not a happy ending for the show, but for now it's you know, for now we're at the midpoint.
• 1:08:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fair enough.
• 1:08:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: What, so I always like to end interview conversations with this question of what three things and I'm curious as to outside of going rogue related topics.
• 1:08:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Movies, television shows, books, music, anything that three things that are holding your attention these days.
• 1:08:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not actually a recommendation.
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I've just finished the new Jason Mammower Series Chief of War.
• 1:08:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: It sounds like I'm advertising it, but again, it's fine.
• 1:09:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I find it more interesting as a project than necessarily as a show to watch.
• 1:09:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's got a primarily pollination cast, a huge amount of it is in Hawaiian language.
• 1:09:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of an unapologetically native Hawaiian version of history.
• 1:09:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, I'm like, this isn't...
• 1:09:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: a great TV show.
• 1:09:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like there's just something a bit uneven about it.
• 1:09:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's also really interesting which actors really can do a lot more acting through the language versus others.
• 1:09:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're yeah, because Tamira Morrison plays kind of the big bad guy and he's having such a good time and he's really reveling in it.
• 1:09:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he's using language so well in that role in a way that kind of draws attention to the fact that other actors are sort of struggling against the written word, which makes sense because it's a language that I think there's like two thousand native speakers left.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a language that has been almost eradicated.
• 1:10:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as a show, it's really interesting to foreground that to absolutely like sit and you know, hold that language in history to some degree.
• 1:10:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: but as an actual show, it's definitely got some flaws.
• 1:10:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
• 1:10:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And what else have I been?
• 1:10:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm just started reading, I have some questions for you, which is about a film podcast, so I think I will be called out by it.
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Also, solving a motor, which I haven't done yet.
• 1:10:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, and other than that, just rewatching 30 Rock.
• 1:10:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, is that your palette cleansers that the thing might be different?
• 1:10:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: Every now and then I remember how good 30 rockiers, and I've been so good to watch them 30 rock.
• 1:10:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there's just so much that when I over my head, the last time, even, that I watched it, like, throw away jokes about, like, Keith Herring and yeah, no other show has ever done it, like, 30 rock.
• 1:10:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think my favorite little mini arc and I'm no expert in the grandiosity of it, the span of it's it's top-excovered, but was the the whole thing about writers and the importance of writers and and being self aware of of being a writer herself.
• 1:11:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: I always think that like the biggest like the smartest thing that 30 rock did is that the show they write isn't good like I think there is a version of well there is a version of it where the show they write is good and it's Saturday night which sort of sits so much in like oh this show is so important it's comedy this will change the seat where it's 30 rock is like sometimes you work on a show where the recurring characters are called Dr. Fart and the fact is like that's still a show and that still includes a lot of people and you still got to go to work every day
• 1:11:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Did you watch any of the SNL 50 coverage?
• 1:11:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: a little bit.
• 1:11:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: I watched the Domingo sketches.
• 1:11:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you an audio file and not not to a notable degree?
• 1:11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: The SNL 50 little documentary that Questlove directed and what was instrumental in was excellent.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just as a piece of visual, what do we call it?
• 1:11:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Film TV out of it?
• 1:11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's it's a documentary.
• 1:12:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was a documentary and especially the opening music sequence where
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: visually and Auditorially the the songs into each other.
• 1:12:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the best DJ mix of this why of the widest possible range of popular music it.
• 1:12:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's really phenomenal So I would even say just that little just watching the opening of the S.N.L.50 music Look, I'm sure it boats well for quiz for quest loves aristocrats movie that he is making with Disney as a live action remake So yeah, it's good to hear that there's real directorial talent that's gonna be wasted on this part
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I'm just happy that Questlove is alive and creating things.
• 1:12:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: A him and Lynn Menwell, you know, as long as they are able to be productive in the world, I'm, there's a, there's a glimmer of hope.
• 1:12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you're keeping your next project a little bit under, right?
• 1:12:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's still relatively early stages on it.
• 1:13:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like it's, yeah, it's a vomit draft stage.
• 1:13:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's just for context.
• 1:13:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's a 20 year.
• 1:13:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: development hell that this particular film was stuck in.
• 1:13:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm still in like 2003.
• 1:13:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know we're wrapping up here, but I'm just it pops up a question for me of what does a typical typical?
• 1:13:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: What does a average project look like in terms of time span, so like with dread about how much
• 1:13:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: to let everything from, you know, consuming all the media research, watching the movies, and then actually producing, recording and producing, and the post-production.
• 1:13:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: What would you ballpark a time estimate?
• 1:13:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dread was interesting because I actually started at prior to ballerina, and the plan had been to release it before ballerina, but to be honest, I just got lazy and didn't finish it in time.
• 1:13:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, very enough.
• 1:13:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's hard.
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you're a podcast, you do a draw.
• 1:13:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and it's hard to give a sort of direct turnaround time for anything because I'm off to.
• 1:13:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sure, I do.
• 1:13:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: Working on other projects around them, like, yeah.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think Dread...
• 1:14:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: was the Easter long weekend.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: I had some time off, and I started thinking about the movie Dredge, and the movie The Raid, and that's where all of that came from.
• 1:14:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, ballerina would have started after that, and turned around faster, because there was actually a deadline for it.
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: if you were to bunch up the days and the writing part is a week.
• 1:14:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it's definitely more than a week.
• 1:14:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
• 1:14:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just even like the fact that they do take at minimum a month pretty much is kind of indicative.
• 1:14:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like part of that is because I'm not actually that good of an editor.
• 1:14:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like if a professional editor saw the way I cut, I think they throw up.
• 1:14:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: But like that's the way I edit here.
• 1:14:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Audio digital side or on the writings.
• 1:14:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: On the audio digital side.
• 1:14:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like, okay.
• 1:14:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Got it.
• 1:14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And because you're doing all your posts yourself.
• 1:14:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like quite a bit of the writing process is done through the edits.
• 1:14:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Like often the sort of often the ending will be written after the initial cuts.
• 1:15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:15:06
  [UNKNOWN]: Yeah.
• 1:15:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting.
• 1:15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 1:15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have listened to big production, you know, cereal and, you know, these kinds of things and yours and I would put you at a high level of, I would give you good marks for your execution.
• 1:15:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:15:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's why it takes so long.
• 1:15:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: We'll say that's why it takes so long and not because I get distracted.
• 1:15:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: the your audio ducking and your timing of the of everything and you're not doing any sophisticated sound effects, but you know, you're you are thinking about your music cues and wind to use the music to accentuate the the audio that you just recorded, you know, give it a a little punch to it and that kind of stuff.
• 1:15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: When I saw your episode pop up, we were on a driving holiday in Canada and I said to my wife, you know, our daughters in the back with her headphones listening to whatever she's listening to.
• 1:15:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's right now.
• 1:15:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's into the wings of fire.
• 1:15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 1:15:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Audio bucks.
• 1:16:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just don't let her look into any further drag and books like end it there.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 1:16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I said to my wife, oh, you remember the going rogue stuff, and I said, she's got a new episode out.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you mind if we listen?
• 1:16:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no.
• 1:16:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she was as drawn in to your production, she didn't care about the loan dread, you know, this is not her world.
• 1:16:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet she was deeply fascinated by the way that you construct your stories and lay things out.
• 1:16:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, I think that's the hope so that's always like good to hear because like you'd know this podcasting is a strangely one sided medium where you put something out and there's it's not even like radio where there is some degree of interaction it is this is out in the world.
• 1:16:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: I hope you guys like it and also it's different to you know, YouTube other kind of consumption mediums where there is a bit more back and forth.
• 1:16:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: and like I really like that because podcasts like you kind of can go longer form I found like you can do well just in terms of data you can do much longer edits much more easily but yeah there is there is an intention which is that hopefully any episode you can listen to if you like the films or not and it sounds like hopefully that's been achieved.
• 1:17:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's interesting, because, you know, in the lower hands, we're, we're very femoral in the sense that we're following the shows.
• 1:17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so our numbers, I can look on a graph and go, oh, yep, that's when that show is out because we get these very definite spikes when the episode drops and goes out episode drops.
• 1:17:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, and it's, because we're running concurrent with mostly television.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then yeah, for something like yours, somebody can come in and drop into your catalog at any point and swim backwards or forward.
• 1:17:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I have no idea how your numbers would look over time, but yeah.
• 1:17:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I guess, you know, that's the thing that gives me the latitude to talk about a movie from 2012 that more people have forgotten existed.
• 1:17:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, yeah, I was like, wait, wait, is this not the, yeah, I was, I had to really reconstruct for myself what this, what this was.
• 1:18:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and you have a patreon.
• 1:18:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do.
• 1:18:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, whether there's a very well priced patreon as well.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I was going to say if you've wondered what the show sounds like with a less intense edit, it's the patreon where the episodes are made far more quickly and far more.
• 1:18:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would say roughly, um, I hope it's not as notable that the audio is less considerably edited there, but.
• 1:18:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's where you're putting out a lot of bonus episodes as well.
• 1:18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: So additional conversations or thoughts that you have a little bit more during the end or you're doing some sort of quick reactions.
• 1:18:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, although for the most part, I try to sort of again kind of have a point like even talking about Jurassic World.
• 1:18:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, there is the argument of like, is this or is this not a Garth Edwood's film?
• 1:18:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it's like, I think the problem is that it's a David Kept film or David Kope.
• 1:18:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, but that's the one name that I choose not to learn.
• 1:19:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fair enough.
• 1:19:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: So are you on the internet's anywhere?
• 1:19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry.
• 1:19:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just had to.
• 1:19:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry.
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: My cat is trying to crawl onto the keyboard.
• 1:19:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's doing a really example of scale and you know, domination of the frame.
• 1:19:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: right in a little over-the-shoulder, one-er kind of thing, or whatever you call it.
• 1:19:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, we've got a dirty single on me.
• 1:19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's it, dirty single, that's what it is.
• 1:19:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now I think nothing delights people more if they're, you know, they're being interviewed for the first time than hearing that they're being shot in a dirty single.
• 1:19:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, your cap is very aware that you're being recorded, and that you're at this is going out on the internet.
• 1:19:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: My cat here was here earlier, and fortunately I have a wireless keyboard, and I was able to flick the off switch, or make keyboard.
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:19:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Lay down, and I was to paint the pets while I was talking with you.
• 1:19:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no, I think Tappy just needs some attention.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:19:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because you're not paying attention to her, so she's come to...
• 1:20:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, to demand it.
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 1:20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're confined.
• 1:20:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where can find?
• 1:20:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where can find?
• 1:20:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm on blue sky mostly these days because it feels slightly more ethical.
• 1:20:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: I would say like the show is the best version of me.
• 1:20:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's the one that's actually had time to think about all of the thoughts.
• 1:20:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, if you're curious, it's a good show out here.
• 1:20:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great.
• 1:20:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll put a link in the show notes.
• 1:20:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So thanks again for spending a little time.
• 1:20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, thanks for having me.
• 1:20:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look forward to hearing what your next project is.
• 1:20:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Your cat is giving you.
• 1:20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, she's hilarious.
• 1:20:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: What eye in the corner?
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: She's doing the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.
• 1:20:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Pretty much.
• 1:20:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Just perfect.
• 1:20:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
• 1:20:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
• 1:20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: You obviously is a fan of your podcast as well.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, no, she hates it.
• 1:20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Great.
• 1:20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks.
• 1:20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk to you again soon.
• 1:20:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Catch you soon.
• 1:20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Lower Hound's podcast is produced and published by the Lower Hounds.
• 1:20:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at the Lower Hound's.com slash contact.
• 1:21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get early and add free access to all Lower Hound's podcasts at patreon.com slash the Lower Hounds.
• 1:21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.
• 1:21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.