Latest / The Next Reel Film Podcast / Catch Me if You Can • Member Bonus
Transcript
- Pete Wright I'm Pete Wright. Andy Nelson And I'm Andy Nelson. Pete Wright Welcome to The Next Reel. When the movie ends... Andy Nelson ...our conversation begins. Pete Wright Catch Me If You Can is over. I am the second mouse. Andy Nelson Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying I'm the first mouse? Pete Wright You drowned. Andy Nelson Are you saying I drown? Pete Wright Yeah. Andy Nelson Wow. Pete Wright Yeah. I churned butter with my wee tiny feet, and I escaped, and you drowned. Andy Nelson He didn't mention that the second mouse had to climb onto the body of his dead comrade. Pete Wright Right. The second mouse. It's just a viscerally awful story. It's awful. We're still in our True Lies series. This is our second member bonus inside of the True Lies series. We're talking about films built around real people who lied, fabricated, or otherwise constructed false identities, and what movies do with those stories. And this one—well, let's be honest. I feel like at the end of the series, I'm just throwing you a bone by including this one on the list of things people could vote for. It's like everything for you. Andy Nelson And everybody voted for it. Pete Wright I know. Andy Nelson So it's a thrill. It's a thrill that we get to add Catch Me If You Can to our list. Pete Wright It was easy. Andy Nelson We didn't have to return to the Tom Hanks series to get it in here. Here it is. It's actually a great series for this film because it's an interesting one. And in the scope of our conversation about everything we've discussed in the True Lies series—with all the different liars and how difficult it can be for a film to make us identify with a protagonist who is just a terrible person—this is another one in the line that makes you find ways to connect with the character. And I thought that was great. Pete Wright Find ways to connect with the character. And the thing I keep jockeying around in my head is the fact that the protagonist, Frank Abagnale Jr.—when the movie was made, it was based on his biography. And it was after the movie came out that journalist Alan Logan spent years uncovering that just about everything in the biography was also fabricated. Andy Nelson Yes. Pete Wright I mean, he was definitely a check fraud—he was good at that. But he wasn't really a doctor and an attorney and a Pan Am pilot. And I find that fascinating about this story, that he's a fraud who had a movie made about him, and it turns out he's only partially the fraud that he made himself out to be, which by definition makes him more of a fraud. Andy Nelson Exactly. That's what's so fascinating about it—this person has become such a hoaxer by duping everybody and getting them to make this movie about him. It makes me wonder, in the conversations he had on set—because he plays the French police inspector who is there when they're arresting Frank—what were those conversations like? When Leonardo was inevitably asking him questions to probe deeper into the character so he could find it and perform it himself. Does he just recognize he's telling all of these people more lies and going along with it? It's crazy to me that all of this came out, that he is, as he says, the world's greatest con man. Pete Wright Yeah, it turns out that's his greatest con. Andy Nelson Yeah. Pete Wright Convincing everybody he's the world's greatest con man. Andy Nelson Right. Think of all the money he's made from royalties from his book, speaking engagements, all of that. Pete Wright Yeah, it's extraordinary. One thing I know about him—and one of the reasons I'm interested in talking about this movie—is that when all of this came out, and it says it in the title card at the end, he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lived down the street from my parents. And it is a great shame on my part that I was not able to reach my mother in time to talk about Frank and Frank's role in the neighborhood before this recording. I did call her multiple times. She apparently is quite busy. So I don't have that story, but I'm deeply fascinated by the fact that Frank was a neighbor. Andy Nelson That's really interesting. And now he's living in South Carolina with his wife and children. Pete Wright Yeah, that's right. Andy Nelson It's a fascinating story. And all of the real story about Frank—we just have to acknowledge that it's there, and then look at this film for what it is, because it's a fascinating film. It does make me wonder, because Frank Abagnale did come out after the film was released—inevitably people want to know what they got wrong, what they changed—and he talks about all these things, like, well, they did this and they changed that. And it just makes me wonder if he's keeping more lies going. He has to keep track of a lot of things to be able to say they changed something when in reality he probably also made that up. Pete Wright An extraordinary cognitive feat to carry around that volume of lies. Andy Nelson Oh, my goodness. Pete Wright Here's the meta question I've been thinking about. Spielberg's parents divorced when he was an older teenager, and that was a huge impact on him personally. Much of his filmography involves fathers and sons and parents and children in divorce situations—Indiana Jones, E.T., whatever. It's like parents and children dealing with the complications of family. And this movie is pretty much Spielberg looking directly at the camera and saying, I'm serious, this is important to me. So I actually wonder—given the level of fabulism going on with Frank Abagnale—whose story is this more accurate to? Is this effectively The Fabelmans, point five, for Spielberg? Or is it more Abagnale's story? I don't think we can resolve that, but I think it's a legitimate question. Andy Nelson You're absolutely right that there's a lot of Spielberg in it. But some of it is expanded because that's one of the things Frank acknowledged—he says, I never saw my father again after I left. And I think it's fair to say that's probably true, something that actually happened. He had three siblings, I think, and his mom never remarried and didn't have another child with anyone else. So I think those are things we can probably take at face value. And so it does make me wonder—with Spielberg pushing the angle of the father story and working that in, what are the reasons for that? Because this is Spielberg's first time in his lengthy career of amazing films of actually making a story about a real person, which he's done much more since then. But this is the first time. And he felt very like he had to be careful to be as truthful as possible with the elements in front of him. I think the line with a filmmaker is saying, okay, I need to be truthful with the story and the elements in front of me, but there are some elements I'm going to modify because I see things I want to pull forward and make more prominent. And who knows—perhaps that father-son connection is something that came out in the book more. Even though they never saw each other again, maybe he and the screenwriter recognized this is something clearly important to Frank, let's find ways to build that up. And knowing Spielberg's penchant for telling these stories about broken families and fathers and sons, I think that was something he really connected with—part of the reason why he wanted to emphasize those moments. Andy Nelson Hey everybody, this is Andy. You have just heard the opening stretch of our member bonus conversation about Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, part of our True Lies series, where we follow real people who learned that confidence is a currency, right up until the bill comes due. And much like Frank Abagnale Jr., this is the moment where the story changes outfits. Because what you got in the public feed is the charming version, the clean smile, the fast talk, the "I'll be right back with the rest of it." The full conversation—the stuff that goes deeper than the con, where we start pulling on the threads and asking what the movie's really selling—that's in the member feed. If you want to hear the rest, you'll need to become a member at TruStory.fm/join. Membership gets you monthly member bonus episodes, episodes like this one, including special series picks voted on by members; early access to ad-free episodes across the whole Next Reel family: The Next Reel, The Film Board, Sitting in the Dark, Movies We Like, and CinemaScope; additional pre-show and post-show segments on select episodes: the extra lists, sidebars, and tangents we keep off the public cut; access to members-only areas inside our Discord community, plus the ongoing film talk in our show talk channel. So if this little tease worked on you, congratulations, you just got hustled—gently, legally, and with your full consent. Head to TruStory.fm/join. And I'll spell it out once just to be sure: t-r-u-s-t-o-r-y.fm/join. It's $5 a month or $55 for the year. And that's where we're going to leave you. Because unlike a check from Pan Am, this sample does not clear for the full amount. To hear the rest of our Catch Me If You Can conversation, you'll need to join us in the member feed. The Next Reel. When the movie ends, our conversation begins.