Soft-spoken and charming, Birbiglia owns his niche as a comedian-storyteller.

Fresh off the release of his second (and first non-autobiographical) film, Don’t Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia brings a new stand-up special to the usurping regent of filmed comedy hours, Netflix. Like Birbiglia’s other stand-up, especially the special My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Thank God For Jokes softly allows the comedian to barge non-threateningly into his audience’s hearts like an old roommate that you’d never thought you’d see again.

Birbiglia’s self-awareness of his own niche appeal, a sleepy introspectively intellectual goofball, is a hallmark of indie success. You have to know yourself before you know your market, but you have to know both to move forward. Birbiglia, a self-described niche comedian and independent filmmaker, has these two ends of an industry-wide production chain wrapped up. His comic anxiety and curtain-parting come from a place of professional savvy as well as personal aptitude. He really understands and enjoys talking about the comedy process. It helps that he’s found a way to do it that reaches an audience that enjoys it.

He’s aware that all jokes are offensive to someone and he goofs around with the tease of a volatile behind-the-scenes story from his hosting gig at the The Gotham Independent Film Awards, and well, we stay focused because we don’t quite believe him. He doesn’t seem to be the person that pisses anyone off. Even his stories about disagreements with his wife are fun and charming. But that’s just it, it’s charming because they’re his story. Jokes, he says, are just your side of the story. All those contributions to This American Life have rubbed off. He’s begun to adopt an Ira Glass style of storytelling, explaining jokecraft like a story designed to keep you idling in your driveway, listening to the radio long after you’ve arrived home. That same potent structure: a hooky set up, the punchline, the reconsideration and application.

Birbiglia’s delivery is often more winning than his actual content. He’s so low key, a human ASMR machine that has you giggling to yourself while you get NPR-style goosebumps, that his self-aware jabs at his lack of fitness or inopportune cursing when opening for The Muppets warm you so slowly and surely that you’re not even aware of how utterly charmed you’ve become or how loudly you’re laughing. His is a quiet, thrumming intensity — an efficient scooter rather than a roaring, sputtering sportscar.

The funniest part of the set is an unscripted collision of two energies. Birbiglia steps off stage to discuss his speeding ticket arrest with another former criminal in the audience. When the guy, in lieu of admitting his crime, describes himself as having been put in a headlock by a “woman cop,” Birbiglia’s skeeved-out reaction to the phrase spikes the show’s blood pressure by 100%. At first he’s speechlessly taken aback mad at the guy’s sexism but then he’s more gigglingly outraged by the man’s lack of storytelling clarity: where is the detail? The setting? The stakes?

Birbiglia dabbles his routine in politics but seems uncomfortable with the whole idea of it. He’s clearly got strong opinions that he enjoys sprinkling into his bits, but the heart of all his humor is, like the best comedians, his life. He’s a party comedian, the guy telling stories to the younger brother of the host trying to get laughs. Even then, they sometimes fall flat — like when a more commonly explored experience (going to church at a young age and being starstruck by the whole production) fails to reveal anything as unique as the other narratives in the show. But whether he’s talking about his life earlier in his career being both broke and low to the ground, and the correlation between the two, I get that.

I also get his stories about having an uncommon job in the real world. Comedians always complain about being comedians off stage, how they get questioned and prodded and requested for humor. They then take these stories and turn them into jokes. It’s similar to being a film critic outside of these reviews, being hounded by cab drivers for recommendations, except I don’t get to turn those stories into film reviews because that’s just not how it works. I picked it all wrong.

Birbiglia takes this common thread — the comedian’s plight of constantly being “on” and having jokes demanded of them — and weaves it into hilarious hypotheticals about terrible office co-workers that ruined the phrase “I’m joking” and Larry the Cable Guy’s (and also Fozzie Bear’s) catchphrase parachute. A masterclass in callbacks, we get a “wocka wocka wocka,” a “get r done,” and some excellently low-effort cat puns to tie the set up in a neat bow before he finally, finally makes good on his Gotham Awards promise.

He’s like if Bob’s Burgers was a person: sweet, weird, and always on the brink of obscenity or outburst. His comedy is just too calm and funny to be completely benign. It has the sense of danger that simmers behind the eyes of an old pro who knows they have you in the palm of their hand, whether they be a Game of Thrones villain or a seasoned storyteller. So when he brings out the painfully hateful David O. Russell speech he quotes from in the joke he told at the Gotham Awards, we’re shocked and elated and somehow not surprised at all. We’ve been won over by this low-threat, understanding, trustworthy crowd-dad. He zinged Jared Leto and we felt like his neighbor. Mike Birbiglia may not be revolutionizing comedy but he’s surely mastered what he came here to do.

Review — ‘Thank God For Jokes’ Cements Mike Birbiglia As Comedy ASMR was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

A poem-inspired romp through misogyny.

“As I go toward the escalator/a young fellow and girl get on/ ahead of me./ her dress, her stockings are skin-/ tight./ she places one foot above the other/ upon the steps and her behind/ assumes its position./ the young man looks all/ about./ he appears worried./ he looks at me./ I look/ away.”

Thus begins “girl on the escalator” by easily the most romantic poet of the 20th century, the late great Charles Bukowski.

Okay, so maybe Buk wasn’t a romantic as much as he was a romancer, and yes, what follows in the poem is an undoubtedly misogynistic and thus controversial summarizing of a woman’s entire character based on how she wears a dress, but that’s what we expect from Bukowski, who by his own admission was a lousy drunk and only a slightly better human being. Though in his brief encapsulation of this woman, nee all women, Bukowski is actually revealing more about himself: his insecurities, his fatalism, his inadequacies, his fears, and yes, his inherent misogynistic tendencies, which permeate throughout his work.

Director Kayhan Lannes Ozmen has highlighted Bukowski’s flaws by adding comedic flair to his words in the following short named for the poem, Girl on the Escalator, in which actress Nicole Della Costa portrays the woman of Bukowski’s imagination in all her histrionic and hysterical qualities. Not a supporting work to Bukowski’s, Ozmen’s film instead seems to reclaim it for women, without satirizing the poet. That’s a delicate, deft balance but Ozmen and crew nail it.

And in case anyone misunderstands me, Bukowski is one of my favorite poets, not for his content but for his unabashed sense of self and the unapologetic way in which he lived his extremely, extremely flawed life. Girl on the Escalator, I think, feels the same way.

Bukowski Comes Alive in ‘Girl on the Escalator’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

SXSW Interview — ‘68 Kill’ Is Not Your Dad’s Trailer Trash Porn

“All money’s got blood on it, one way or another.”

“You shovel shit for a living. I suck dick. I’m tired of it. What do you want out of life?” — Liza in ‘68 Kill’

68 Kill is a straight whiskey flick with a whiskey chaser. Trent Haaga (writer, director) is not playing about when it comes to his characters. They’re wild, authentic, and painfully mean. For all intents, he’s made a female exploitation film but gender-swapped nearly all the characters. It’s a story about two victims of abuse trying to find their way in life. Well, trying to find their way to $68,000 and then, maybe, life. There’s a lot more than surface level violence for fun’s sake going on here. But, from the get-go, you need to understand that you’re in for some grindhouse nastiness.

“This is a conversation that is not for the weak at heart. So if you’re weak at heart, you need to go somewhere else. I’m not weak at heart, I’m a motherfuckin’ warrior. And I will go to the dark depths of despair and disgustingness. And I will dive into it. And I will love it.” — AnnaLynne McCord

There are NO spoilers below! So proceed ahead, unafraid.

It’s a rock-n-roll roller-coaster of a movie punctuated with deranged human beings doing awful, awful things. And I loved it. I had a chance to chat with Trent Haaga, Matthew Gray Gubler, AnnaLynne McCord, Alisha Boe, and Sheila Vand about their take on the movie.

Chip (Gubler) is a down-and-outer whose only ambition is to make his girlfriend Liza (McCord) happy. Liza is done taking shit. She’s ready to dole it out, big time. That extends to Chip. The opening sequence segues from a fly trapped in honey, to Chip day dreaming about his beautiful girlfriend, to Liza punishing Chip with some slap-happy choke-sex. Along the way to that $68K, Chip and Liza run into Violet (Boe), an escaped sex slave ready to take control. They also encounter Monica (Vand), a presumed crystal meth enthusiast who also happens to be the leader of a trailer park gang of violence-loving party animals.

“Yeah, I was down to fuck people up.” — AnnaLynne McCord

How do you get some (mostly) decent human beings to sign on to play such dirty roles? 68 Kill has your people-in-danger and exploitation moments, but that isn’t all the film is doing. For Haaga, physicality or the ability to perform a scene really wasn’t what he was looking to find out. It was about pitching the subtext and whether the actors really latched onto their roles in the film.

When you’re creating art that walks the fine line between exploitation and social commentary, that mental approach has to be 100% in sync. Once you’ve found your cast of ‘degenerates’ who truly get what you’re going for, well. Then the circus can really begin.

“Trent didn’t want this to be trailer trash porn. He grew up in a blue collar family and he wanted to honor that and not be taking advantage of his own background.” — Sheila Vand

That tightrope walk over exploitation is definitely reflected in the choices the actors are making on screen. It’s a fair generalization that your typical exploitation film features a lot of exaggerated sexual interest. Not so in 68 Kill. Okay. Wait. Stop. Let me rephrase. There’s loads of sexual interest in this movie. However! It’s 100% authentic. That’s one of the things that Vand called out as something that appealed to her. Despite all the sex, there really weren’t any obscene caricatures of sexuality on screen. Everything was grounded in reality. One thing that surprised the heck-fire out of me was that despite the filthiness of the characters and a plethora of sex scenes, there’s practically no nudity. And where there is, it isn’t gratuitous.

So, why choose a grindhouse styled, mean cinema? Basically, it comes with a certain liberty. From Vand’s perspective, it gave the actors the freedom to embrace the nastiness of their characters and take bigger acting risks in trying to bring that to life. You guys, just wait until you meet the characters these bunch of lunatics came up with. They’re amazing.

Haaga’s approach was definitely a hit with the actors. Gubler’s take was that Haaga knew how to get the best out of everyone on set. “He’s a seasoned veteran who’s in a lunatics body.” Which I took to be the highest of compliments, but maybe I’m just partial to lunatics who know what’s up.

“I’m a Persian-American girl and I don’t get asked to play ‘white’ roles all the time. I get overlooked, people look past me when it comes to playing just a straight Caucasian part. Especially a girl like this who’s really trailer trash or white trash, and it was wonderful for me to get asked to do the role. That somebody could see past my ethnic identity and my ethnic background and just say she’s a great actress, she should play this part.” — Sheila Vand

You should know Vand’s previous work in the wonderful A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night where she plays The Girl. But, among other things, she’s also in Argo and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The through line there is she does get cast based on her ethnic identity. She crushes it because she’s a terrific actress. But, this is a slice of Hollywood’s problem with representation. Actors with an ethnic background other than white tend to get cast in roles designed for their ethnic background and not what they can bring to the screen. I can’t imagine the hole that would exist in this movie if Haaga had looked over Vand. Instead, he found a person perfect for the role. And, god damned if she doesn’t just perfectly capture Monica, the down-and-out drug addict from New Orleans.

“I read the script and I was immediately drawn to it because I love the role reversal of the women actually having power. Violet was such an interesting character because she’s not a victim even though she should act like one.” — Alisha Boe

Picking the right people is an essential part of making a movie where most of your characters are deliberately playing with the gender roles typically assigned in this style of movie. I don’t want to give the impression that the women are chomping cigars and scratching their crotches to create a caricature of men. You know, there’s the famous commentary where the part of Ripley in Alien was originally written for a man, but Scott flipped it for a woman in the role instead. Well, that part was written for a person. Scott cast a woman in the role. You can feel that vibe in 68 Kill. Haaga captured some amazing humans to bring to life the characters in his mind.

Chip is the focus of the story. His definition of a happy life is whether or not the pretty girl he’s with is happy. And he makes some terrible decisions. Actually, he makes no decisions for most of the movie. He goes along with Liza’s machinations because he sees that as his role. As a human, he’s pretty ineffective.

If you need an ineffective person who needs their face smashed in Hollywood, get Gubler! … It was also, in a lot of ways, a sort of dream scenario being surrounded by exceptionally talented brilliant beautiful girls that just beat the shit out of me. It felt a lot like my childhood.” — Matthew Gray Gubler

Gubler brings an earnestness to the role. And his success in that endeavor is paramount. Despite Chip being such an ineffective human, with practically no personality, the audience has to root for him to succeed or the movie doesn’t quite work. Gubler’s version of a dopey approach to life is aces. At one point in the movie, amidst a bloody and violent murder scene, Chip sees a new pretty girl. As the new character is — quite reasonably — panicking, Chip gives the best dopiest, wide-eyed “Hi” I’ve ever seen. And in that moment, you know everything about Chip.

Vand shares that “the people in this movie do some really deranged things, but it’s all out of desperation for money.” Liza may be an emotionally abusive, terrible human being, but you can see how she came by it honest. The actors really find the heart in their characters. They’re all trying to be human in this movie. McCord started out our conversation by sharing that she is “no newbie to the world of psychopathy; I like my psycho-lady characters”. And, yeah. That’s clearly true! But, she segued into something which is imperative to good story telling. “The truth is, every villain has a heart and every good person has a villain waiting to find themselves.”

As we were chatting about the stylized violence in this movie, McCord and I transitioned into a larger conversation about the lasting effects of violence. I enjoy a good movie, full of stylized violence. I do. I love seeing a hero bash and slash their way to a gory, blood-soaked victory. And we agreed that there’s no shame in watching a movie and enjoying it on those surface levels merits. That’s okay! However, both of us are fans of deconstructing movies like pieces of fine literature. The cinema is a prime storytelling medium of our generation. And even in the grimiest pulp fiction, the creators can explore humanity through those fantastical or hyper-real stories. It’s silly not to dive into these works to see what they’re doing.

The reality of violence is that it makes for a destructively easy catharsis. And once you engage with it, well. Violence begets violence. Whether that’s something that we internalize on ourselves and allow to be done to us because that’s what we’ve come to expect or whether it’s something we do to others because that’s how we’ve learned to cope, it has a legacy.

“Coping mechanisms for people who have been through abuse tend to either become more abusive or to be susceptible to abuse in the future. Those are the cycles of it. I think for Liza, she experienced a lot of early childhood abuse — trauma, sexual assault, incest, all these things in my mind — that lends her to going one way or the other. She said ‘Fuck this, I don’t want to be the one getting hit anymore. I’m gonna hit you.’ And she attracted someone who went the other direction, someone who attracts the abuser. I think there’s a much bigger conversation there than just focusing on whether this is a violent film.” — AnnaLynne McCord

Switching the gender of the roles around puts the emotional abuse in this film in stark relief. Liza brutalizes Chip, emotionally. He’s cajoled, forced, and outright abused into every action he takes. He is broken. Chip looks at his bruises in the mirror. And it’s disturbing. Maybe he’s admiring them as signs of love? Disgust is not all over his face. He defuses arguments by immediately deflating any criticism he offers. All based on even a glance from her. The acting between McCord and Gubler is really phenomenally nuanced work. All of it feels very deliberate.

We emotionally abuse our partners, our people, all day everyday — all the time — in relationships. And, people are broken because of this. The physical aspect is just another way that we show it on a more base level. … The emotional scars that I have are the ones that are my biggest triggers.” — AnnaLynne McCord

It stands out that the emotional abuse in the film seems so huge to me. I think part of that has to do with not being desensitized to that portrayal. Another part has a lot to do with what I’m sure are deeply internalized ideas about what is common and uncommon in relationships. And the direction that these types of abuses go. As a culture, I think we (especially men) are accustomed to seeing that type of coercion originate from men towards women. And it’s shocking to me to see it depicted from Liza to Chip. Regardless of whether I’ve assessed this ‘correctly’ in the moment, I spent about an hour talking about the flick with my wife. And another half hour talking with the cast about it. It got me thinking.

Should you see this movie for the boisterously fun ride that it is? Hell yeah, you should. 68 Kill is a roaring good time. It’s one of those films where I can see the joy the actors are taking in their role and the lines they clearly relish delivering. But, if you want to, there’s a little bit more going on under the hood. It’s worth taking a serious look at this movie to see what it’s doing. And maybe this conversation isn’t for the faint at heart. I know this much, though. If someone asks if you’re a mother-fucking warrior, you say yes.

SXSW Interview — ‘68 Kill’ Is Not Your Dad’s Trailer Trash Porn was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Plus: Jordan Peele makes history, a couple new trailers, and perfect shots.

In 1970, renowned auteur and wine lover Orson Welles began production on a film entitled The Other Side of the Wind about a legendary director who’d been in European exile for a number of years but had at last returned stateside to make his masterpiece, which bears the same name as this film. John Huston was cast as the director alongside such talents as Peter Bogdonovich, Susan Strasberg, Lili Palmer, Cameron Crowe, Dennis Hopper, Natalie Wood, and Edmond O’Brien. It was, naturally, meant to be Welles’ own comeback film, a send up of Hollywood, art, and the myriad struggles to unite the two. Shot mockumentary style over a six-year period, the film became more famous for its struggles, and even though principal photography was completed, financial and legal issues resulted in the negatives being impounded; Welles wouldn’t live to get them back.

But being as all that’s necessary to complete the film is a dash of post-production editing, for the last 40 years there have been several attempts to get it in the can and in front of audiences. In 2002 Showtime announced it was going to finish and distribute the film, but a lawsuit from Welles’ daughter killed that. In 2015, filmmakers Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the paltry two million required to edit, but again, nothing came of it. Then a year later uber-producer Frank Marshall announced at CinemaCon that he was negotiating with Netflix to finish the film, to which moviegoers replied with a shrug. We’d heard this all before. But now, Marshall has proven true to his word as Netflix has indeed ponied up the cash necessary for completion in exchange for exclusive distribution.

There’s no release date as of yet, but the work is apparently underway. There’s also no word on who’s doing the editing, but as Welles was working on the project, at least mentally, until his death in 1985, there are copious notes from him on exactly how he wanted the project cut.

This might sound like a small story, but it really, really isn’t. Welles started his career in the metaphorical penthouse and finished it in a floor-level apartment, along the way infamously leaving a lot of projects in various stages of unfinished production, but The Other Side of the Wind is far and away the most famous, and by all accounts of those who’ve worked on it or seen the raw footage, it did stand the chance of resurrecting Welles’ star. He’ll never know how it turned out, nor will a lot of his cast, but with any luck by the end of the year the rest of us will have seen this classic-in-waiting.

In other news and points of interest…

…Thanks to Get Out, Jordan Peele has become the first African-American writer-director to have a $100 million debut film…

…Damien Chazelle, Best Director winner for La La Land, just sold The Claim, a script he wrote back in 2010 that will go into production for a 2018 release…

…a certain actor from Blade Runner has revealed they’ll be joining Harrison Ford in reprising their role in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049…

…the first trailer for Dave Chappelle’s first standup special in a decade dropped a week before the Netflix premiere…

…and HBO revealed the new trailer for Veep season six at SXSW.

Over in our corner of the internet we’ve had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including Danny Bowes look at why “we made it for the fans” is a bullshit excuse, Rob Hunter’s Blu-Ray/DVD Pick of the Week, Ciara Wardlow in conversation with Toby Oliver, cinematographer of Get Out, Christopher Campbell’s look at animated films that could be re-made live, and Meg Shields’ look at sci-fi food trends.

And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.

Netflix to Resurrect One of Cinema’s Lost Treasures: Orson Welles’ ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The French filmmaker on his Personal Shopper collaboration with Kristen Stewart and what he hates about contemporary film criticism.

Amidst all the press for Personal Shopper, I think we’ve finally cracked the case of What Makes Kristen Stewart So Good — she’s a director in an actor’s agile body. This works marvelously well when paired with French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, because he began as a film writer who’d studied literature and art — making him a curious scholar in a director’s competent frame.

Assayas often speaks of the collaborative chemistry between himself and Stewart, and it’s easy to note the pair’s similarities. To begin with, Stewart is 26 and Assayas 62, a numerical palindrome. During our interview, Assayas writhed enthusiastically in his chair, combing the room with his eyes, restless though never disinterested (or so he led me to believe). Spit flew from his mouth when he spoke. He never once let me finish a question before beginning to answer (as though he could intuit where I was going, and wanted to get on with things). Both he and Stewart have a habit of sputtering out partial sentences, apparently searching for an earnest thought in place of a careful, promotional one. And they’re cool — I’ve seen Assayas rightly described as “hawkish” and “slippery,” and Stewart as “understated” and “beguiling.” They are casual but intense, loose while cerebral. They defy conventions set in place for actor and director, blending roles and mixing genres and creating together, as equals.

Like its director-actor team, Personal Shopper cannot fit inside any genre box. It is simultaneously a gothic ghost story, a murder mystery, and an eerie meditation on the isolation of grief. Stewart plays Maureen, an American in Paris who works as personal shopper for some elusive, demanding celebrity. Maureen lingers at this shitty job after losing her twin brother Lewis to a heart defect (a defect she shares); both siblings are mediums, able to commune with the departed, and Maureen hopes her brother will send a signal from beyond the grave. She assumes his presence still haunts Paris, so she’ll be likelier to find him there. Unfortunately, Maureen’s talents summon a much nastier spook than intended, and she begins receiving strange iPhone messages. Are these texts from Lewis, or is a more sinister force at digital work?

At the Cannes premiere in May, Personal Shopper was booed — perhaps for being so maddeningly elliptical. Viewers were also driven nuts by Valentine’s sudden disappearance in Assayas’ 2014 hit Clouds of Sils Maria (Stewart played Val). But Assayas assured me anything having to do with “genre filmmaking” doesn’t perform well at Cannes. He isn’t concerned with audience distress over ambiguity, either. “I’ve become bored with the process of writing screenplays,” he said. “I think recently I’ve been experimenting. There’s so much filmmaking that’s so conventional — so many boring rules about how to tell a story. I don’t want to deal with that, it’s no fun. I’m trying to move from one interesting moment to another without dealing with interconnections. I’ve been calling this film a “collage.” In terms of how movies end, the problem is not how they end — it’s how they echo. I need the viewers to get out of the theater still processing the film. The more questions they have, the more the film, to my view, is successful.”

In Personal Shopper, Stewart is on her own. The role requires the actress to be on-screen for nearly every perilous second; her undereye circles pronounced, hands trembly, dark hair slicked back. With no co-stars of significance, Stewart is stranded, just as Maureen is adrift in misery, that most solitary of feelings. In her personal life, Stewart is pretty ghostly too — at least when it comes to public and press. She has no Twitter handle, posts no Instagram selfies, and plays coy about who she’s dating. Despite her lack of digital imprint and insistence upon privacy, she remains in high demand. Stewart’s fans are notoriously rabid — legend stipulates that if you post a tweet with her name in it, they’ll find and retweet you within the hour. I suspect her withholding nature makes people crave details all the more. One of the PS publicists told me she hoped the rash of headlines about Stewart’s recently shaven head would benefit the film’s coinciding release.

Assayas didn’t “discover” Stewart, who has been acting since childhood — but he certainly aided her career mutation from tween-franchise mega-star to respected indie darling. Stewart became the first American to ever win France’s César Award (an Oscar equivalency) for Clouds of Sils Maria. When someone can steal the show from Juliette Binoche, you take note. There is something magical about Stewart’s appearance in Assayas’ two films; he frames her in doorways and aboard rickety trains, lets her chain smoke in grungy clothes, and though she fairly cowers beneath your gaze, slinking through literal and figurative shadows on the outskirts of scenes, you can’t take your eyes off her. Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey compared Stewart to a cat that waits — not asking for attention, but knowing you’ll come around to stroking her eventually. Kelly Reichardt, who directed Stewart in Certain Women (2016), has praised her technical skill: “She sort of knows when to throw a glance, and when she doesn’t even have dialogue, it’s almost like she might be anticipating where a cut might go, and she’s giving you a movement to cut on,” Reichardt told NYLON.

I asked Assayas what he gives Stewart that other directors don’t. “I give her space and time,” he said. “The logic of European filmmaking is much more adapted to the talent of Kristen. What I brought to her when we were doing Sils Maria — I hardly realized it at the time — the message was that it’s OK to be yourself in a film. You don’t have to invent. It’s not about acting, it’s about being yourself.”

Accusations of “no range” have been hurled at Stewart for years; she selects characters with experiences and mannerisms wholly similar to her own. Does that count as “acting”? When Stewart speaks about her roles, you can tell she’s also referring to herself. She doesn’t try to pretend otherwise. This is what Assayas seems to relish. “What’s really great about Kristen is she needs to believe in the reality of what’s going on,” he said. “She has to be 100 percent like real life. She goes through those emotions. So when I say I give her space — I give her space to build up the emotion to the point where she feels it’s completely genuine. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds, sometimes it takes three minutes, and I’m fine with that. There are some pretty long scenes in the film that were a few lines in the screenplay. I think she’s really creating that character.” This might sound “method” at first blush, but as Stewart told Wonderland last year, “I can’t be one of those method actors who totally ‘lose it’ and don’t know where the camera is. I always know where that fucking thing is.”

Generously, Assayas has long referred to his actors as “co-directors.” His collaborative efforts with Stewart on PS were far more pronounced than on Sils Maria. “I didn’t realize when I was writing or preparing the film how tough it would be on her, because of what it deals with,” he said. “She was much more lucid than I was. When we first discussed the film, I said, ‘Let’s do it right away.’ We were talking about the spring. And she said ‘No, I’d prefer to do it in the fall.’ And I said, ‘But why? Let’s do it!’ She was supposed to do the Woody Allen film in the summer. I thought we had plenty of time and I was like, ‘What the fuck is she saying?’ But once we got going and started making the film, I realized that no way after Personal Shopper could she move on and do Allen’s film. She was right! I should have trusted her.” Plenty of directors have actor muses or repeat co-workers — but few give their actors so much influence over a project, let alone share the credit.

Not all actors want to co-direct. Some have small interest in the kind of improvisation Assayas enjoys; like Jean-Pierre Léaud, whom Assayas says will work so determinedly on a screenplay, you can’t even change a line on set or all hell breaks loose. (They’ve worked together twice, and Assayas calls him “amazing.” Every actor demands a varying technique.) “I don’t direct actors,” he clarified. “I work with actors. It’s a completely different thing.”

Like a few humble French filmmakers before him (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer) Assayas used to write for Cahiers du Cinéma. In the ’80s he did some criticism, more essays, and conducted interviews with directors he admired. Since he never went to film school, Assayas learned filmmaking history and practice through journalistic methods. But don’t get him started on the state of film criticism today. He’s famously expressed disgust with the “rating” system, awarding films with stars. “It’s always been one dimension of film criticism, but now it’s kind of taken over,” he said. “There’s too much of it. It freaks me out when I see stars… it’s so the opposite of however I imagine the relationship of anybody to a film. It’s like you’re in a museum and you look at a painting, and you start giving it points. It’s ridiculous. There have always been two trends in film criticism: one aimed at the audience, meaning I’m writing, ‘This movie is good for you, you will enjoy it.’ That’s completely legitimate, like food criticism. Then you have more serious or relevant forms, where ultimately it was about having a dialogue with the filmmaker, giving him an opinion on where he stands in terms of the evolution of the medium, what’s going on in the film culture. I suppose I’m more sensitive to it in the context of French film criticism, because that dimension was vital — and now, not so much. Now in France you have a third form of film criticism, which is film critics writing for film critics.” I promised him we have critic-for-critic writing in America, too; you’ll notice it in the form of listicles or rankings that dictate a director’s best, second best, and worst film. Who cares? Only other film critics, usually because they want to argue with your grading. “Exactly,” he replied.

Film criticism might run on a parallel track between France and the U.S., but Assayas can’t say the same of film production. We spoke about his struggles with “pitching” a movie to studio execs. “I’m dreadful at it,” he said shamelessly. “I don’t know how to do it, and I get away with that in the European system. I hate it, it’s a fool’s game, everybody knows that’s not the film. The reality is when I approach a film, I’m not sure where I’m heading. That’s what exciting. Pitching a project is like pitching wherever the screenplay is at, and to me that’s just the starting point. I hope to go much further than that. But I’m not exactly sure where. The kind of conversation I can have with anybody financing a film is, ‘I’ll do my best to make a great film.’”

So it’s easier for Assayas to sell and produce films in Europe — what’s the difference overseas? “The status of a director,” he said. “It’s not as simple as that, but at least in the European system, you’re recognized as an artist. They listen to what you have to say. They know if you’ve been making interesting films before, there’s a chance that in the future you also will be, and eventually you’ll make some money. There’s a certain trust in the idea of filmmaker as auteur. Here [the U.S.] you’re an employee. Even if they love your work. They think they know better than you. Ultimately, they’ll package the film and you’ll come in and direct it. It’s a much more corporate and industrial way of making movies. It hasn’t been around that long… I was watching again some Robert Altman movies from the ’70s. How could he get away with that in the studio system? Those were studio movies! They are so fresh, you can watch them again now and they’re lively, luminous, exciting. You just feel the freedom in those movies. They were invented on the set.”

On every talk show Stewart appears to promote Personal Shopper, she’s asked about her belief in ghosts. Assayas gets the same treatment in press junkets. A trite, annoying query to wrest from the film — still, I couldn’t help but ask a comparable question about whether he’s spoken to any mediums or psychics. “I’ve always been interested in those things, but I think what’s happening inside myself is complex enough,” Assayas said wisely. If you seek out Stewart’s answers, you’ll hear more of the same; she won’t talk about the likes of Casper the Friendly, but she’ll muse about other invisible things, like the energy between human beings. “I feel people, fucking intrinsically,” she said at NYFF. (There’s an implied comma between ‘people’ and ‘fucking,’ just for the record).

If mediums do exist, Assayas and Stewart qualify — but instead of spirits, they communicate intuitively with each other. Both seem vastly more concerned with connecting to cinema audiences in this fleshy realm than in contemplating the unknowable afterlife.

The Supernatural Chemistry of Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Get behind these lessons from the man behind the mouse.

What would Walt Disney have thought of the new live-action Beauty and the Beast? What would he have thought of the 1991 animated version? While there are so many questions we’d love to have answered about the man’s take on the modern world, it’s best to look at what we can still learn from such an iconic figure 50 years after his death.

Disney remains an inspiration for students of business in particular, but a lot of his words of wisdom originated with and still speak to the art of filmmaking and creators in general. We highlight six such tips for writers, directors, animators, and more below.

Set Your Goals Early

Disney was still just a child when he figured out what he was good at and what he wanted to do with his life. At 14, he was already in art school. At 18, he was a professional illustrator and cartoonist. Within another 10 years, he’d created Mickey Mouse. If you’re in your 20s, you’re already too late to follow his lead, apparently, but you can still give this advice a shot.

Firstly, start with where Disney did, with a tip he received as a boy from a neighbor who’d be his first mentor, Doc Sherwood: “Don’t be afraid to admit your ignorance.” And don’t be afraid in general. Be confident, and go for all your dreams right away. In the 1966 book “Magician of the Movies,” he’s quoted as saying:

When I was young, I always knew what I wanted to be: a cartoonist. I was curious about everything that would help me achieve that goal. Later, I set out to achieve other goals, and I sought them with the same intensity with which I had pursued cartooning.

It seems to me that’s what young people need: a sense of direction. If they know what they’re aiming for, they have a reason to seek knowledge, a reason to be curious.

They may not reach the same goal they start out for. They may be like the Princes of Serendip, who set out for one destination, then found better places to go. Many of our greatest discoveries in science have been serendipities, found by scientists who were actually looking for something else.

A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something else that is even more rewarding. But in the end — no matter what the outcome — he will know he has been alive.

Here are some other relevant quotes (via Wikiquote) that are heavily circulated as representing Disney’s daringness to dream and do:

“All our dreams can come true — if we have the courage to pursue them.”

“Do a good job. You don’t have to worry about the money; it will take care of itself. Just do your best work — then try to trump it.”

“I suppose my formula might be: dream, diversify and never miss an angle.” (The Wall Street Journal, 1958)

Get Kicked in the Teeth

One of the more difficult to source quotes that still probably did come from Disney (it’s one of his most famous) relates to the fact that he had hit some heavy obstacles in his early years but overcame them through persistence:

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

You could say he took the idea to storytelling, too, as he believed audiences need a little bit of pain in their entertainment. “For every laugh, there should be a tear, and for every tear, a laugh,” he famously stated.

Don’t Go Through a Middle Man

One way Disney got kicked in the teeth was to depend on a middle man, specifically producer and distributor Charles Mintz. Disney often told the story of how he got screwed over on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character only to turn around and create Mickey Mouse (with Ub Iwerks). Afterward, he made sure he owned his creations and handled their business himself.

Here’s one version where he turns the story into a lesson for others to learn from, spoken in a 1959 radio interview for Voices of Hollywood Past:

I was contracting with a middle man for my films, and they were being released through Universal. And he was a rather unscrupulous character, and he thought he could move in, cut in a little better, and I pulled away from him. I was left alone, and he happened to own, he had a right to the character. So that was one of the big lessons I learned, and from then on I said, ‘There’s no middle man.’ He contributed nothing. We did everything.

Keeping Breaking New Trails

“You can’t top pigs with pigs!” That’s a famous quote that people seem to use these days in response to much of what the corporation Disney started is doing lately. Yes, he made sequels, but he didn’t like it, preferring to advance all of his areas of art and business toward new ground. And if he did remake something that already exists, he tried to do so in a fresh way.

The following quote is lifted from an article titled “Hello Dali,” which accompanied a recent special exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum. It’s originally from a 1940s interview about Destino, his collaboration with the always original artist Salvador Dali.

The thing I resent most is people who try to keep me in well-worn grooves. We have to keep breaking new trails. We were panned for Fantasia, yet its audience keeps building each year. When the Three Little Pigs made a hit, exhibitors clamored for more pig films. We made three or four, but I’ll bet you only remember the first. You can’t top pigs with pigs!

And here’s a quote found at the end of the 2007 animated feature Meet the Robinsons:

Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Don’t Pander to Your Audience

This tip is mainly about not pandering to children, as it is Disney we’re talking about. But if you seek advice from Disney, you probably want to make kid-friendly product. Ironically for a man whose name has become synonymous with a level of moral wholesomeness that excludes certain adult-oriented material, he didn’t believe in shielding young people much.

This quote is found in the 1997 book “The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life”:

I don’t believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn’t treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should. Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature…The American child is a highly intelligent human being — characteristically sensitive, humorous, open-minded, eager to learn, and has a strong sense of excitement, energy and healthy curiosity about the world in which he lives. Lucky indeed is the grown-up who manages to carry these same characteristics over into adult life.

And here’s a quote from 1938 on why he doesn’t patronize children, as heard in the 2007 documentary The Pixar Story:

Over at our place, we’re sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.

Like What You Do and Be Happy

“The secret of success, if there is any, is liking what you do,” Disney told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1933. “I like my work better than my play. I play polo, when I have time, and I enjoy it, but it can’t equal work!” In the same article, he’s quoted as saying, “Work is the real adventure in life. Money is merely a means to make more work possible.”

When asked what he’d do differently if he had to do it all over again, he says in a 1963 interview that he wouldn’t change a thing. It all led to a great satisfaction and happiness with what he was doing. He goes on to share what happiness means to him:

Happiness is a state of mind. By your own doing, you can be happy or you can be unhappy, it’s just according to how you look at things. I think happiness is contentment, but it doesn’t mean you have to have wealth.

All individuals are different. Some of us wouldn’t be satisfied with just carrying out a routine job and being happy. Yet I envy those people. I had a brother whom I really envied because he was a mailman. But he was the one who had all the fun. He had himself a trailer, and he used to go out and go fishing, and he didn’t worry about payrolls and stories and picture grosses or anything. And he was the happy one. I always said, “He’s the smart Disney.”

What We’ve Learned

Odds are pretty good that there’ll never be another quite like Walt Disney. But his tips for creating and for running a business may suit anyone, whether they’re just looking to make animated shorts or wish to eventually run a giant entertainment enterprise. Disney’s advice collected here basically boils down to recommending people have a plan for work they love and a determination to be successful at that dream, through its ups and downs.

He’s a just do it kind of guy, as in acting rather than talking about it and getting the job done yourself or being in charge of those who get it done. He believed in and suggests innovation over doing the same thing over and over, and he believed in treating all of his audience, no matter what age, the same. From the first bit of advice he was given as a child to the last idea he’d offer about life really sums up together as this: don’t worry, be happy.

6 Filmmaking Tips from Walt Disney was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When there’s nothing left to say, this gets said. A lot.

Screenwriting is a road wrought with potholes where other writers have come before you. These potholes are clichés, they are contrivances and other such overused facets of dialogue-driven storytelling that in their day might have been novel but in ours are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. I’m thinking of phrases like: “I was born ready,” or “I have a bad feeling about this,” or “I’m just doing my job.” These are all examples of pointless exposition. No one is born ready to do anything except poop and cry, bad feelings are obvious from facial expressions, and just doing your job isn’t special or exceptional, it’s expected. Lines like these are lazy space-fillers and in fact do more to detract from a story rather than inform it.

One of the more egregious of these is, “let’s go home.” You know it because you’ve heard it time and again, usually in the very final scene of a movie: the plot has resolved itself in the favor of our protagonists, and with nothing left to say or do, one looks at the other, maybe throws an arm around their shoulder and says, “let’s go home.” It’s the closest a character can get to saying “all’s well that ends well” without breaking the fourth wall, and at this point is has been used so many, many times, that editor Matt McGee was able to construct a seven-minute video made up of nothing but various examples of the line as spoken in a variety of movies and TV shows including Gilda, The Room, The Wire, The Big Sleep, Aladdin, Battlestar Galactica and many others.

As you watch, notice the different implications the line carries; sometimes it’s hopeful or relieved, other times it’s a statement laced with regret, dread, or even menace. But in every instance it’s cliché as all get out, so appreciate this video, but never, ever, EVER mimic it in your own writing. Now come on, let’s go home.

“Let’s Go Home” — The Supercut of a Cliché was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

No, but Netflix can. Our streaming overlords buy themselves some Orson Welles.

Movies need money. They can win hearts, minds and lay the ground for thousands of little websites like this one to talk about them, but ultimately they need someone with bags of cash behind the scenes. Netflix, proud owner of one thousand hours of original content among other things, just dumped some of their cash bags on a movie called The Other Side of the Wind. It was filmed by Orson Welles in the early ’70s, stared Susan Strasberg, John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich, and was never fully edited or released to a general audience.

Welles’ movie had been initially funded by a mysterious Spanish producer (rumored to be Andrés Vicente Gómez) who, in turn, embezzled the money. It was then funded by Mehdi Bushehri, brother of the Iranian Shah, whose assets were seized after the Shah was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution. Then, in 1999, Showtime agreed to pay to finish up the thing. It took, however, until 2014 for a cabal of producers, that included Bogdanovich, to finally able to get their hands on the 1,083 reels that Welles shot from the cold, dead hands of his heirs, after most of them had died. But, by then, the only executive at Showtime who remembered the project had retired. Bogdanovich, at the time, took that news in stride: “I think it would amuse Orson to have the fans able to contribute to the completion of the film,” he told the New York Times after launching a campaign on Indiegogo to get Welles fans drop the needed cash. They only needed two million dollars. Then they only needed one million dollars after outside investors promised to double the amount raised. The people gave them $406,605. The people then wanted their money back.

Back in the early noughties, crowdfunding presented itself as an obvious vehicle for funding film. Unlike most novels or paintings, movies are almost always collaborative projects; there’s a reason why a small crowd always swarms the stage to collect a Best Picture Oscar. And the notion behind turning to the vox populi instead of old and risk-adverse producers strikes an earnest chord in our liberal-valued democracy. Give the people what they want. But the track record of platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter has been spotty.

Neither of Kickstarter’s two highest-profile success, Zac Braff’s Wish I Was Here (2014) and Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars (2014) were incredibly forward looking: the second vanity project of a network TV star and a two-hour reboot of a canceled television show. Ditto Indiegogo’s most-well funded film, Super Troopers 2, which is still in production. And both Wish I Was Here and Veronica Mars were flops at the box office, validating whatever Hollywood studios didn’t lay down dough in the first place. While crowdfunding has found some success funding smaller scale indies, both Dear White People (2014) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) were able to use Indiegogo to raise around $50,000 each, more recent and larger scale efforts have failed to financially interest enough of their niche audiences. A campaign to adapt the video game Dragon’s Lair into a movie raised only half of its goal back in 2015 and that same year critical pariah Uwe Boll went on an infamous rampage after failing to get funding for a third movie in his Rampage series.

An even more recent report on the failure of crowdfunding platforms came earlier this year from the video game world. Back in January, we reported on what we felt was an interesting way of utilizing Kickstarter’s proclivity for nostalgia: a group of video game designers assembled by Frances Ford Coppola turned to Kickstarter to fund the development costs of adapting Apocalypse Now! into an immersive RPG. We were excited. “Optimistically, the project will prove that it’s less a question of rival storytelling mediums being incompatible then one of believing in and genuinely caring for the integrity of your story’s vision,” our own Meg Shields wrote. It raised $172,503 out of a $900,000 goal. The designers quickly shut down the project, writing:

We made a mistake. We forgot that many of you have been disappointed by overreaching games and overreaching promises. We had stopped paying attention to the Kickstarter world.

Since then, they have raised over half of their development costs from an investment by Malibu Road Pictures LLC. Elsewhere, Indiegogo projects are viewed with the skepticism of requests from Nigerian princes. “Indiegogo scam or viral marketing stunt?,” reads a headline on The Daily Dot from last year.

On the other hand, a company like Netflix makes perfect sense. Not attached to things like box office returns, Netflix has pursued a countless number of remakes or unoriginal original material aimed at the kind of niche audiences who would pay money to fund a Veronica Mars movie but who were not numerous enough for it make any moviegoing sense after 2010. In that fabric, throwing Orson Welles’ unreleased work appeals to another version of the same audience.

Lou Lumenick, writing for the New York Post, suggested that the inability to conventionally secure funding for The Other Side of the Wind could be traced to what might well be a potentially poor product. “The fact is that with the possible exception of Chimes at Midnight, Welles’ work as a director after his last studio film… is considerably less than genius-level,” Lumenick wrote at the time. Welles’ Don Quixote, which was also incomplete at the time of his death, was panned when Jesús Franco stitched together Welles’ footage into a complete film in 1992. “Welles [had]…a tendency in his post-studio period of walking away from projects he thought weren’t going well,” Lumenick concluded. A very rough cut of the movie had been shopped around in the early ’90s to the likes of Oliver Stone, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, all of whom turned down the offer to finance finishing it up after viewing it.

But that’s Netflix’s problem now. Not yours.

Can Crowds Fund Anything? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Warner Bros. takes some more red pills and wants to bring the franchise back.

Warner Bros. really wants to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. According to THR, the idea to reboot The Matrix is now being tossed around. I know what you are thinking; how could they possibly do this! Apparently, there has been some talk with screenwriter Zak Penn about writing a treatment, so this could still very much fall apart. There are even rumors that Michael B. Jordan is being considered for the lead. What was once a groundbreaking Sci-Fi film that defied expectations, will now be mined for new entries and destroyed.

What was it about The Matrix that made it so fresh? Specifically you could point towards the stunning special-effects that were imitated for years afterwards. Inspired from Hong Kong martial arts features, The Matrix used a technique known as Wire Fu in order to capture its most thrilling action sequences. Nevermind the original concept of ‘Bullet Time’ that also was a signature element of the film franchise. There were countless imitators who tried to ape what The Matrix did, but often it came off as parody.

Perhaps it was the Wachowski siblings, who wrote and directed the original and sequels. They had this idea of a ‘chosen one’ who would change the world. The only problem was that the world as they knew it was a computer simulation. The machines had taken over and there was seemingly nothing a human could do to stop them. The Wachowski siblings mixed what inspired them from Japanese animation and hacking subculture to create an original concept in science fiction. They captured a very specific feeling in the world at the right time. It was right before the turn of the millennium and people were fearful of the internet. It was a new frontier.

Then who can forget the cast, specifically the trio of Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Laurence Fishburne. Keanu Reeves, who was best known at the time for Speed and Bill and Ted, had a role that was perfect for his talents as an actor. His preparation for a role is unparalleled, but when given too much heavy lifting for a character, he often misses the mark. Playing the character of Neo gave him all the fantastic action moments, with little dialog. That is what works best for Keanu Reeves. The Matrix also helped Carrie-Anne Moss fully launch her career after having been in TV for many years. Laurence Fishburne had been established for quite sometime, but no one else could’ve possibly played Morpheus.

What was once an original film, will now be part of the reboot machine. Building new properties is tough work, work that Warner Bros. is not in the position of doing. It was once the studio that would be willing to take a risk with The Matrix, but now it sees the dormant franchise as a familiar name to get people into theaters. Warner Bros took a huge risk financing the R-rated film and releasing it in March 1999. Make no mistake about it, original science-fiction is just not happening in 2017. One of the most anticipated films of the year is a sequel to a thirty-five year old film with Blade Runner 2049. For every success story like Arrival, you get something from Warner Bros. like Midnight Special.

The Surprising Failure of Midnight Special

There is just too much risk involved with tackling original properties.

Rebooting The Matrix is a terrible idea all around. It was something of a miracle that the first film is as good as it is. Few of the people involved with The Matrix have gone on to do anything received nearly as well since the original eighteen years ago. The Matrix was a concept honestly only worked for one film and even the Wachowski siblings couldn’t victoriously continue it. What makes Warner Bros. believe that with the Wachowski siblings and original cast involved that this could be a success? There is a good chance that it doesn’t even happen. There have been countless projects discussed, but never fully realized, especially at Warner Bros. If The Matrix really does get a reboot, at least Keanu Reeves has John Wick as his original franchise.

ATOMIC BLONDE (2017) JOHN WICK (2014) Both shot by Jonathan Sela. Clearly, successfully stamping his aesthetic on a genre.

 — @TheGeoffTodd

They’re Rebooting ‘The Matrix’ and Now I’m Dead was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We talk to Frank Oz and the other original Muppeteers about creating characters, watching them evolve, and giving them sentience.

After a few moving documentaries about individual puppeteers, this year’s SXSW debuted a new documentary directed by Frank Oz called Muppet Guys Talking: Secrets of the Show the Whole World Watched. The film is an hour-long free form discussion with Jerry Nelson (The Count, Mr. Snuffleupagus), Dave Goelz (Gonzo, Bunsen Honeydew), Fran Brill (Zoe, Prairie Dawn), and Bill Barretta (Pepe, Tree-Face-Guy) loosely moderated by Oz. Because it features so many of the key personalities that have been only briefly touched upon in spotlight docs on Big Bird or Elmo, it’s a must-watch for any Muppet Show obsessive who wants to hear about what it’s like being buried in a room under a fire pit so they could perform a song with John Denver.

You wouldn’t know it from the way they talk, but these cohorts hadn’t seen each other for five years before they filmed the movie. We got to sit down with Frank, Fran, Dave, and Bill to talk about the creative process of making a muppet out of anything (even a candy bowl!), how teamwork and communication is important, the secrets behind the Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem live show, and — finally — a question they’ve never been asked before.

Dave Goelz: So, I gotta ask you before we start-

FSR: Yeah?

Dave: About Film School Rejects.

Sure.

Dave: Who started it? How many of you are there? What is it?

[Da7e explains what Film School Rejects is in a rambling way that you don’t need to know, because you’re here] … and I grew up watching the Muppet Show reruns, so when this opportunity came up, I was like: “I want this interview.”

Dave: So are you all based in one place or -?

We’re from all around, I’m from Denver, Neil [Miller] is based here in Austin, which makes SXSW and Fantastic Fest stuff easier, we just did a live podcast about Game of Thrones down at the J.W. Marriot too.

Dave: That’s cool, did you go to film school too?

I did go to film school.

Dave: What school?

I went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for Screenwriting.

Dave: No kidding. My son just graduated from there last May! His focus was cinematography.

Nice! Yeah, I was one of the few people who didn’t get to do an internship at Sesame Street, I did my internship with (producer) Ed Pressman. Because he had just done Thank You For Smoking at the time.

[Frank Oz enters]

Bill Barretta: Did Pressman do the Ninja Turtles?

No…he did Street Fighter? And The Crow movies, and, like American Psycho, but I don’t think the Turtles are his property.

Bill: I thought he did the second one or something.

The second one did have a Pressman, but not Ed Pressman.

Frank Oz: So this is — what? — industry talk?

Bill: Maybe we were discussing you. Just give us a minute, Frank.

[Everyone laughs. Frank sits down]

We can actually get straight into puppeteering talk if we’re ready.

Dave: Ready.

You talk about creating characters in the film in different ways. Frank talks about the button in Fozzie’s head that makes the ear wiggle becoming like a crutch eventually, but then you have a character like Kermit where his expressions are about the shape of the actual hand of the puppeteers. So what do you look for in a puppet that you feel makes it easier to create a character? What draws you to a new Muppet.

Bill: Well — hmm.

Dave: Character comes from the body and vice-versa, so if you pick up a puppet that exists, it might suggest a character to me and I might do it one way. It might suggest a different character to Bill. Frank would just refuse to do it at all because he’s “too good.” You know.

Bill: I like the idea of finding something that looks like no one would want to touch, or hasn’t been played with for a long time, and see what I can do with it.

So are you all the type of people that find faces in knotty tree trunks? While you’re walking around?

[Fran Brill laughs]

Bill: I actually do see faces in things.

Fran Brill: Yeah.

You know what, this can is looking especially sad today —

[Rotates soda can so it is “frowning”]

Frank: I’ve seen some faces, but not really.

Bill: Sometimes it’s just a fur ball with no [inherent] expression and you just pick it up and see what you can do with that. The harder, the more fun it is, then if you get these people laughing with it, you think, “well, maybe I’m on to something.”

Sure! So —

[Dave grabs a candy bowl and shoves it over to Bill]

Dave: Can you make a character out of that?

[Bill dumps all the candy out on the table, raises the bowl to his face, immediately]

Bill (in light voice): Uh, excuse me.

[Everyone laughs]

Frank Oz: You’re tree-face guy from now on.

[Dave picks up two candies and balances them on his knuckles like eyes to make a puppet]

Dave (in a voice that sounds like Beauregard): “Someone tipped over this bowl.”

Frank Oz: You guys are so clever. So Clever.

Dave: I’m available for birthday parties.

In the film, Fran, you were talking about how important improv is to developing a character, but has there ever been a situation where some solo mirror time was needed before the improv? Or work with yourself?

Fran: For me there was, this particular character Zoe came out of nowhere, which had never happened before. Usually it was a puppet that already existed and you’d do something with it, but there was nothing to base her on at all. I was just told “come up with a 3-year old character who could be a buddy of Elmo’s. Period. And of course they wanted her to be a good female model, meaning spunky and, you know, not a little shy — not that Prairie was shy — but sure of herself and spunky and that sort of stuff. So, I just had this outline. I ended up going to pre-schools and was watching children, just to feed me, I’d never really studied a three-year old, really, and what they did. I had a friend whose kid would say “don’t joke me” and I just ripped that off, so I had her going [Zoe voice] “Don’t joke me!” until everybody on the set was like “that’s it, alright, enough of ‘don’t joke me.’” So that was probably more difficult. What’s easier, or what is for me is just to look at a drawing and pick up the puppet itself. And, I dunno, I think we all [the muppeteers] have the ability to do that, to see something inanimate and just put it on — then something comes out of you. It’s just the creative process and you don’t really puzzle about it too long.

Is over-thinking it your enemy in that case?

Fran: Maybe? But I think it’s more the tools we have, which is why we’re pretty good at what we do, just a quality or a skill you have of picking up a cup, or a glass, or a bowl and making a character out of it.

Dave: Not a lot of people do this candy eye thing. [references his hand]

[Frank laughs]

Bill: We do several things at once when we’re performing. We’re watching a monitor, we’re helping compose the shot — obviously the director is actually composing the shot — but we’re helping the composition based on where our characters are, their size and scale, and then we’re also…I thought that memorizing lines was an important part of being an actor.

[everyone laughs]

Bill: But, we put our lines — because we’re doing so many other things at the same time — we’ll tape our lines up on the monitor. So we’re bouncing around to three or four different things, as well as reacting in the moment off of each other, working with other people who are under there assisting us, trying to do all these things, and I think-

Fran: And not letting your head in the shot.

Bill: Yeah. Keeping your head out of the shot.

Dave: It’s multi-tasking. Like somewhere between eight and 23 different things at once. And I think that’s actually part of that process of finding your character too, because they…you figure out how they live in that space. Like I could stand in front of a mirror and talk with a puppet, but it’s not the same for me as if I just see that character isolated by himself on screen or talking to another character.

That sounds like a trial by fire you can’t train people for.

Dave: That’s a good point. You mention working the mirror, or that it’s mirrored, which is something we might teach at an early phase, but the whole thing is so unnatural, so unnatural.

Right, like trying to do this while I talk (makes hand mimic mouth movements).

Dave: And that’s only the beginning of it! You’re working with your hand up in the air, on a set with two or three cameras, or maybe just one. There’s lights, obstacles all over the place, and the whole thing is just completely unnatural. We don’t even rehearse much, we just got to the studio and we block and tape. We figure out what the shots are going to be, director may come up with a plan and we refine it, and then we eventually rehearse it a few times and then we start shooting. If we met in a room the day before and tried to start rehearsing just that scene, it would be so hard to actually do.

And would it come off stiff?

Dave: I mean, no, there’s just so many elements to be dealt with when we’re shooting that if you idealize some rendition of a scene, then went in the next day to shoot it, you’d have to make a bunch of changes anyway, you know — the door hinges this way and not that way, that would change the blocking, so we might as well just go in and block and shoot.

Bill: Sometimes we block with just our hands, without the character, because it’s somewhere being prepped.

Fran: And also the monitor is flipped, and that’s another skill you have to learn, so your hand is going this way, but it looks like it’s that way.

Frank in the movie says that no one wants to be in the full-body suits. I was briefly Bugs Bunny at a Six Flags, so I have an idea of that, Frank.

[Fran laughs, Frank smiles]

But then later in the movie, you’re describing shooting the Muppet Show John Denver episode where you had to be buried under a campfire all day and had to pee in cups, which sounds so uncomfortable…so…what’s so bad about the suits?

Frank: You know the worst thing about a suit, for me? When Master Jim told me to do it?

Bill: What suits were you in?

[Frank cocks an eyebrow]

Bill: Well, he may not know.

Frank: The worst thing is communication, because you’re in this thing and nobody hears you. They’re like, having lunch or something and you’re like: “What about me, guys? Guys?!” There’s no communication. If we’re in a a pit, we can at least talk to each other, we know we’re alive. It was the lack of communication that drove me insane.

When the Muppet Show was just starting, were the celebrity guests immediately tuned in to what you guys were doing? Or was there an initial resistance to it?

Frank: No resistance.

Everyone was ready to be silly?

Fran (quietly): There was one person.

[Frank looks over at Fran and they start whispering to each other as Dave picks up the question]

Dave: The puppets are really compelling. First of all, they’re big enough that they look the same general size as a person, and they command your attention. They’re so brightly colored, you can’t look at anything else. Their eyes are slightly cross-eyed so the pupils converge about four or five feet away, like where the camera is. So if a character is right here, right, his pupils will be converging on one spot, between your eyes. It’s just compelling.

It instantly becomes interacting with the character.

Dave: Yes, the actors come in and rarely had any trouble.

[Dave and Fran and Frank exchange looks]

Bill: I can’t think of anybody that has — did not have a good time. They wanted to engage in them and forget us for sure.

Dave: There was one.

Sure. Given the period of time in entertainment you were active, I’m sure there was at least one, but we don’t need to —

Bill: Mostly they want to engage and play. Like on the Muppet show, you had Peter Sellers, who wasn’t a muppet fan, but he came on and did it. To have someone like Peter Sellers who hadn’t really experienced the muppet “thing,” came on as a guest to play.

Frank: Well, with Peter it was okay, because Peter couldn’t be himself. Peter could only be characters, so for him it was a perfect situation. And remember, The Muppet Show, another reason the people all do it is they’re the only human being in the entire show.

Oh, yeah!

Frank: And they have the spotlight.

Dave: And it’s a trip to London!

And maybe Piggy busts in on your dressing room because you took hers! In terms developing modern American puppeteering…what’s something that you guys developed that you think it’s important to pass on to the new puppeteering generation? Just all of it?

Bill: Listening. I think that’s really important.

Fran: Yes.

Bill: It’s important to listen to your collaborator and respond, but in terms of technically? I dunno, I think it’s just a matter of doing it and doing it and doing it, either in front of a camera or at home.

Frank: You can spend years and years and years developing a craft, and THEN you can play.

Where do you guys see the future of the Muppets? I always thought the internet shorts were good and that’s where the characters need to go.

Dave: We kind of pursue all things at once. Film, television, internet, life.

Frank: We got MuppetGuysTalking.com, we’re going to have stories there for people who had never heard the stories, so MuppetGuysTalking.com is one way we’re moving on the internet, but for this thing. For the other — I’m not really involved in the Muppets anymore — but for this thing.

For me, growing up with the Muppet Show re-reruns and the first films, I feel like the Muppets are the embodiment of the same joy we get from cat videos and memes, so I’d just love to see that translated.

Dave: We’re lucky that Disney is supportive of us pushing forward in all media. This summer, we performed like at the Outsidelands Festival, and we were really uncertain if we can pull that off, because they wanted us to do a half hour and, you know, we can’t hold our arms up like that for half an hour. How do you design a show that facilitates that? We didn’t know a) if we could do it or b) if people would like it. We got there and there was 60,000 people that went nuts. We did get through it fine, because our workshop built these waistband harnesses that held our arms up.

Nice! Like an arm Steadicam.

Dave: Afterward, Rolling Stone listed the top five acts [of the festival] and we were in that group, and what was the other one? Variety had the top ten and we were number 1.

Bill: That is crazy.

Dave: And we didn’t even know if we could do that.

Bill: Right, because it’s 60,000 people listening to basically recorded music, the band isn’t actually playing anything.

Dave: But it was done really well! And the vocals.

I know Dr. Teeth is hard to operate, did you modify the puppet to make it easier to operate live?

Bill: Well we had the arm rig, and some video pieces between every two songs, so it gave us about a minute break in between. But it was pretty amazing, it was so well received.

Dave: And Disney put huge resources behind that, I have to give them credit, they did an extraordinary job. And afterwards we thought, gee, 25 minutes was easy, we could do an hour this way if it was designed right!

Fran: It was great.

In the development of the whole Muppet process, it seems like from The Muppet Show to Dinosaurs, Jim was honing in on messaging. Muppet Show is variety and goofy, and you can go all the way down to Fraggle Rock which has some more thematic messaging. Is that a result of writing rooms or all of you guys maturing as you made characters?

Frank: Number one has to be the writing.

Fran: You have different writers for all these projects.

Right, so the Sesame Street writers have to make an educational curriculum entertaining.

Fran: Exactly

…and Dinosaurs gets to be crazy.

Dave: Yeah, Jim and Jerry Juhl (head writer, The Muppet Show and many other Muppet projects) weren’t big on talking about the creative formula or talking about what they wanted to do, they just wanted to be having fun and doing something that was worthwhile. But underneath the Muppet show, some of the agenda is about the celebration of diversity, all these crazy characters who have come together, supporting each other like a family. And there were all these things that were evidenced in the way they behaved around each other that we never talked about at all, but it was obviously part of the agenda.

Do you guys feel like your character grows or you grow?

Dave: Everything.

Both at the same time?

Dave: Sometimes the character grows with us, sometimes it stays static. A good example is Animal who is played by Frank stays absolutely static, knows five words, et cetera. In Gonzo’s case, he grew. I think it was because of my friendship with Jerry Juhl, he would see me changing as I grew and he would accommodate that into Gonzo. We never talked about it, it’s just one minute Gonzo is blowing himself out of a canon, the next minute he’s Charles Dickens!

[Fran laughs]

Dave: It gave us three levels of that character that we could, after that, draw upon. You can use the pathetic loser, you can use the energetic crazy man, and you can use the soulful guy. And those are all aspects of his personality, but they weren’t all there in the beginning.

And it seems very specific, because you couldn’t have, say, Animal grow into the Gonzo spot over the years.

Dave: Yeah.

Bill: What would happen if Animal grew?

Frank: He wouldn’t be Animal. If he says too much, he’s not Animal.

Bill: That’s my problem with Pepe [the King Prawn] is they started to give him too much dialogue.

Frank: You can’t.

Bill: I’d pull them aside and say “You guys are giving him too much to say.” Part of what’s fun about him is the simplicity of him.

He’s always got the loose Jell-O again.

Bill: Yeah! And if they like him, they say, this character, let’s put that in more, but how do you put it in more, that’s…

The trick. Is there a time when that happens when it has just been easier to create a new character than warp an existing one?

Bill: I think there are times where you just have to say “that’s not the character”

“This is not a Piggy story”

Bill: Yeah, we try and maintain the integrity of the characters as much as we can.

If you were to gift a Muppet with self-actualization, which one of your characters would you gift to know about being a Muppet, about being co-dependent with you?

Dave: A gift? How do you mean that?

Like, if Pepe got sentience and knew the story that you [to Bill] created him…

[Everyone bursts out laughing]

…would you give that to Pepe, or do you give that to another one of your characters? Is there a character that is especially suited to the existential dread that he’s a muppet?

Fran: Oh my God!

Dave: I like you, you’re sick enough to stay around.

Bill: I don’t know.

Dave: Like if a character could find out what he was…

Fran: …who would you…

Frank: …I’m trying to go through my characters here.

Bill: I have something for that, and it may not answer your question, but Bobo (the bear) in my mind, he’s just so glad that he is out of the zoo. Like if somebody were to catch on that he’s pretending to be a guard, you know, that’d ruin his day. He’s like, “Thank god, nobody told them and I’m allowed out, let’s keep it that way.”

He wouldn’t want to throw away his wardrobe, that’d be a shame.

Bill: Yeah. But I don’t know about identifying as a muppet.

Frank: The only character who I can think of that could actually handle any kind of existential exploration would be Bert.

Fran: Oh man! [Fran belly laughs]

He’d just be like [knits eyebrows] “Of course.”

Frank: He’d be looking into it, thinking about it.

Thank you guys so much. Just in general.

Fran: You did great.

I’m taking Dave’s eye candy as a souvenir.

Frank: I don’t think anyone has ever asked that before.

No one asked about sentience?

Frank: I think that’s a completely original question.

Dave: We’ll have to let you know if we come up with better answers.

Please do! I think I’d just pick Scooter, because, you know, he’d be like: “Well, okay, but I still have responsibilities.”

[Everyone laughs, Da7e’s inner child dies of happiness]

A Delightful SXSW Conversation with Some ‘Muppet Guys Talking’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Before I said I was going to do Finian’s Rainbow I should have read the book.”

Finian’s Rainbow (1968)

Commentator: Francis Ford Coppola (director)

1. Regarding the film’s opening frame featuring the word “overture” onscreen, he says it’s because this was what was referred to as a roadshow production. “They were like a night at the theater. You were given a program, it was an event, and as you came to your seat there was an overture playing.” It’s a long absent format, but Quentin Tarantino recently revived it for some screenings of The Hateful Eight.

2. He says a benefit of 70mm productions was that “the soundtrack would be in six-track magnetic stereophonic sound and was very high quality.”

3. The Warner Bros/Seven Arts logo reminds him of his time spent at the latter company working as a staff writer when they bought WB. “It was quite a coincidence related to my directing this film.”

4. The opening scene of Petula Clark singing in the field, the city, and elsewhere is one of his favorite parts of the film. “It was a part that I had not participated in very much.” The studio required him to shoot the film on their lot — “on the old Camelot sets” — so he asked his friend Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion) if he could find doubles for Clark and Fred Astaire and shoot footage across the country for him to use in the opening credits “to tell the story of this Irish immigrant from Ireland.”

5. “This was before the era of the helicopter shot,” he says before recalling his idea to attach a camera to a crop duster plane and simply fly it over the pair as they walked in a field. He planned thirty takes with the pilot hitting a switch to start filming when he believed the pair were in view as he couldn’t actually look through the camera to confirm. He printed up all the takes as he was unsure if any of them caught the performers. “I had heard a story that one thing Jack Warner, the old man, hated was when a director printed more than two takes. He thought it was a waste.” When Coppola sat down to watch the footage after printing dozens of takes he was disappointed to see nothing but corn fields — and then surprised to discover Warner sitting beside him when the lights came up. “He never said anything. He just got up and left, but my god my heart was in my mouth.”

6. He realized his challenge was “how to take this clunky, left-wing piece and set it a time when there really was going to be some progress in our country.” Sounds like the time is ripe in America for another remake!

7. The original Broadway songs and lyrics were kept intact although he felt the book — the narrative details — “had to be massaged a little.”

8. He began his directorial career with a desire to be “more of a European-style auteur director.”

9. His first film, You’re a Big Boy Now, was released theatrically even though it was his thesis film out of film school.

10. WB was looking for a “young director” to helm a big-screen adaptation of the musical, and to them that meant Coppola or William Friedkin who they liked from his Sonny & Cher film, Good Times. “The first thought,” he says, when he received the call about the job, “what I should have said is no.” He said yes though knowing it would make his father happy.

11. Coppola got along with his cast and crew “with the exception of Don Francks.” Francks plays Woody, the young male lead, and Coppola felt he had a chip on his shoulder. He realizes now though that all the actor was doing was “giving me for real the character.” The director says he wasn’t sophisticated enough at that point of his career to recognize what was happening.

12. He felt too many Hollywood musicals “ruined” adaptations by over-orchestrating the musical numbers beyond their original stage presentations. “I really tried to adhere to what I thought were the great, great songs of Finian’s Rainbow.”

13. Astaire’s dancing scenes make him nervous because he realized too late that he shot some of the scenes with the man’s feet just off-screen or dangerously close to the frame’s edge.

14. He wishes he had trimmed some of the dialogue scenes to make them more terse. “The film is pretty long, and I think it would have been better served had I cut it down to be a little more tight.” He left the editing to others though as he wanted to leave the “artificial” nature of the production behind as quick as possible to return to the real and gritty filmmaking he desired.

15. The pot of gold does not impress him. He had asked for a better prop, but this was all they would give him.

16. Og the leprechaun is supposed to be a shy character, but the studio cast a new sensation of the moment named Tommy Steele “who was the opposite of shy, he was brash and a real vaudevillian.”

17. Coppola added Howard’s (Al Freeman Jr.) subplot about his attempts to crossbreed mint with tobacco. “This was just a silly idea that I came up with to try to have a little subplot to justify this more contemporary African American character.”

18. The sequence where Howard acts as instructed in delivering the refreshing drink to the senator (Keenan Wynn) made audiences howl with so much laughter that they added the fade to black at 59:41 so as not to step on the next scene.

19. He thinks most movies, good and bad, have an equal number of flaws. “The difference isn’t that the good ones don’t have the flaws, the difference is that you don’t care about the flaws. You don’t look at them, you don’t notice them because you’re so caught up in the life of the people.”

20. Coppola’s sons Roman and Gian-Carlo were supposed to take part in the scene where the children come dancing and singing over the hill, but Roman was having none of it. When he watches it now “all I see is Roman and Gian dressed up in their little bib overalls and Roman just crying and crying.”

21. He continually beats himself up over dialogue scenes that he should have trimmed. The problem, he acknowledges, is that he spent his time thinking about set-pieces and how to structure scenes as opposed to thinking about the scenes themselves. “In a way I would love to just take the film, look at it and cut all the parts that I would cut out so that the movie would have kind of a dynamic forward movement. Maybe when I get older I’ll just take a copy of it and cut it down.”

22. Warner had a standing policy that directors and producers in production would eat meals in the studio’s executive dining room a few times per week, and those who skipped it would get a note from his assistant saying as much. “He sat at the head of the table, and where you were seated was the pecking order, and of course this was Warner’s way to berate whichever director was going over budget or doing something that he didn’t like.” A room to the side holding all of Warner’s awards was where you’d meet him after the meal and “where he’d really give you hell.” Coppola was pulled in when Warner heard he was resistant to the studio-picked editor. He fought it and won, but he thinks the film would have been better had Warner won out instead.

23. Astaire’s preferred choreographer, Hermes Pan, cameos in the film at 1:32:00 as the man shining Finian’s (Astaire) shoes.

24. One day during the production he noticed a young man in a sweater and a beard standing off to the side watching the filming. He had won a contest to come experience a real production at WB, and when Coppola asked what he was looking at the man said “Well, nothing much.” It was George Lucas, and the two became fast friends.

25. Coppola initially offered the role of the senator to George C. Scott.

26. Astaire invited Coppola to a popular new musical one time when they were both in New York City because the aging performer didn’t quite understand it and he wanted a younger person’s take on it. It was Hair, and Coppola wasn’t a big fan of the story either although he loved the music and songs.

27. Susan the Silent (Barbara Hancock) gains her voice at the end of the film and contributes to the final song, and Astaire thought she was a poor singer. Coppola defended her saying “but she couldn’t speak and magically got her voice, so it’s okay that her voice was untried.”

Best in Context-Free Commentary

“My request to shoot Finian’s Rainbow on location was denied.”

“So here’s the very unlikely plot device.”

“It was a source of great embarrassment to me that in a number of scenes when Fred danced his feet were cut off.”

“I like this sequence though with the tree.”

“I thought I knew how to stage musical numbers.”

“I look at that and I just see sod.”

“I actually had never met an African-American person in my life until college when I met a fella at school named Doug.”

“You can’t make a movie without flaws.”

“At this point I had no choreographer. At all.”

“What is that Volkswagen doing coming through the frame? Hmm.”

Finian's Rainbow (1968) [Blu-ray]

Final Thoughts

Finian’s Rainbow isn’t a great film, but for the standards of the time and the genre it seems competent enough. Its biggest issue is its excessive length, and it’s there where Coppola spends a good amount of his commentary’s focus. There’s quite a bit he would do differently as a more seasoned director, and much of it comes down to trimming numerous dialogue scenes in part or in whole. It’s an interesting listen and a rarity too as most commentaries don’t occur with several decades of hindsight between their recording and the film’s production. Warner Archive’s new Blu-ray ports over the track onto a vibrant and sharp picture.

Read more Commentary Commentary from the archives.

27 Things We Learned from Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Finian’s Rainbow’ Commentary was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Exploring the director’s fascination with spying.

The cinema of Steven Spielberg is one that’s built around fascination and a need to understand. As a director he is an explorer, but not one interested in unearthing grand artifacts, rather one in search of intimate treasures, an explorer of explorers, so to speak, someone to whom the process of discovery is much more interesting than the discoveries themselves.

As such, his films are rife with surveillance, characters spying on or otherwise surreptitiously watching other characters, tracking their behavior, their actions, their being, for the purposes of gathering information, good and bad. Think of the Nazis on the trail of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark peering over newspapers, or the future crime detectives in Minority Report scanning time for illegalities, or the government scientists after E.T. creeping about suburbia.

Spielberg is constantly exploring surveillance and the various mindsets behind it, and in the following, equally-fascinating video essay from Daniel Clarkson Fisher, the director’s history with the subject is very thoroughly and eruditely examined. Pretty much every Spielberg film is in the mix here (I’ve provided Fisher’s list of sources below the embed and you can visit his Vimeo page for links) and seeing them all together like this reveals surveillance, or at least the discovery of hidden information, as one of the director’s most prevalent and often-explored themes.

The timing of this one, what with CIA leaks and microwaves that can record our every thought on the market, is especially poignant. So give it a watch, but make sure it isn’t watching you, too.

Films by Steven Spielberg (in order of appearance):
 — E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)
 — MINORITY REPORT (2002)
 — 1941 (1979)
 — BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)
 — CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
 — CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002)
 — THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS (1974)
 — INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
 — RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
 — LINCOLN (2012)
 — SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)
 — MUNICH (2005)
 — THE TERMINAL (2004)
 — WAR HORSE (2011)
 — JURASSIC PARK (1993)
 — JAWS (1975)
 — WAR OF THE WORLDS (2005)
 — THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (2011)
 — SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993)
 — INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)

Other Footage:
 — PRISM: SNOWDEN INTERVIEW (2013) by Laura Poitras
 — “How the Government Tracks You: NSA Surveillance” (2013) by Fight for the Future
 — “Forget NSA Surveillance — Police Are Keeping Tabs On You Too” (2015) by AJ+
 — AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER (2002) by Jay Roach
 — SPIELBERG ON SPIELBERG (2007) by Richard Schickel
 — “The Making of THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL” (2012) by Laurent Bouzereau
 — “‘It’s a Bloody Good Story’: Steven Spielberg on BRIDGE OF SPIES” (2015) by BBC Newsnight
 — STRANGER THINGS (2016) by The Duffer Brothers

Music Added:
 — “Jaws” by John Williams from the soundtrack of JAWS
 — “The Raiders March” by John Williams from the soundtrack of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
 — “Invading Elliott’s House” by John Williams from the soundtrack of E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
 — “Sean’s Theme” by John Williams from the soundtrack of MINORITY REPORT
 — “Bridge of Spies (End Title)” by Thomas Newman from the soundtrack of BRIDGE OF SPIES
 — “Catch Me If You Can” by John Williams from the soundtrack of CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Someone to Watch Over Me: Spielberg and Surveillance was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

This life is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it experience.

Death awaits you at every second. How’s that for an opening?

But it’s true, we’re never fully aware of the mortal peril surrounding us with every breath, no matter how vigilant we are. Fate is a fickle mistress prone to flights of menacing fancy and with a mere blink of her eyes existence as we know it can go black and fade to nothingness, taking us with it.

The reinforcement of this would seem to be the central aim of Coda, a nine-minute animated film from director Alan Holly for and maps and plains, an Irish animation studio out of Dublin, that starts with — no spoiler — the death of the central character following a drunken stumble into traffic. In the aftermath, his soul (still a little tipsy, nice to know inebriation transcends this mortal coil) wanders the city blindly until it encounters Death in a park, who has a thing or two to show him.

Coda is vibrantly animated and subtly fatalistic, not to mention expertly crafted to be a cautionary meditation on life and the disregard we all too often show it. Holly and co-writer Rory Byrne have told a chilling story that their animation, with help from Eoghan Dalton, brings to haunting life (pardon the pun).

Every second is precious, but find 540 to spare for Coda; it just might make you better appreciate all those minutes, days, months and years that come after it.

‘Coda’ is an Animated Meditation on Existence and Everything After was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Expect a Best Supporting Actress nomination for “Chapter 6.”

Two things have happened with Legion that surprised me. The first is that it’s only gotten weirder and weirder since the pilot episode, when I’d assumed it would level out and be clearer and have at least a slightly more normal narrative by midseason. The second is that Aubrey Plaza has gotten better — no, absolutely amazing — where I’d kind of written her off as an annoyingly overplayed internal voice for the main character, like “a batshit crazy Jiminy Cricket,” as Collider’s Haleigh Foutch perfectly described her.

Last night’s episode, “Chapter 6,” did actually clear some things up as far as confirming part of Plaza’s role as being an incarnation of The Shadow King, a villain from the X-Men comics Legion is based on, albeit without directly calling him/her that. We at least got clarification, after a return full circle to the mental hospital from the pilot where all the main characters are now patients and prisoners inside a subconscious plain, that he/she is a parasitic being living inside the mind of David (Dan Stevens), whose consciousness is ultimately locked away so it can take full possession.

Ok, so that’s probably still kind of confusing, even if you did watch. Yet “Chapter 6” is nevertheless a delightfully strange trip of an installment for viewers enjoying Legion primarily for its visuals and who just go along with the unconventional narrative for stuff like Plaza’s incredible (and very GIF friendly) dance sequence set to Bassnecter’s remix of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and more One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest homage, this time complete with Katie Aselton wonderfully going full Nurse Ratched, as well as the continuation of last week’s dive into peak Nightmare on Elm Street territory.

And of course, the episode was owned by Plaza, taking over the focus of the series like she’s possessing it, too, after previously just showing up as a randy mental patient, then a misremembered-as-female representation of an old junkie friend combined with a basic hallucination/imaginary friend/conscience. As she explains in a revealing The Hollywood Reporter interview, all of the personas she’s been playing, including more recently the haunting “Devil with the Yellow Eyes” in disguise, culminate in the climactic moment opposite Stevens when she outs herself as the deep cover villain.

“Essentially, I’m playing four different characters in one scene — or at least that’s how it was in my head. This scene is kind of the big reveal. You’ve seen drug addict Lennie. You’ve seen overalls Lennie appearing as these hallucinations. You’ve seen Lennie in a suit that’s kind of this crazy Beetlejuice character who has some other agendas. You’ve seen therapist Lennie. So that scene was very complicated for me, and it was really fun and really challenging. It’s Lennie’s biggest moment in the series.”

Plaza’s work on Legion had already begun interesting me lately after I learned the role had been written as a middle-aged man, her lewd behavior becoming all the more understood from the perspective of the page and all the more appreciated in that context. She talks about that in the THR article, and divulges that she’s had a lot of freedom with the part since her casting. The dance became something more than it was written as, and the interpretation of the character(s) have been pretty much all her own.

It’s a challenging gig for the actress, who has until this point been pigeonholed and typecast as the same kind of sardonic and apathetic yet sometimes wild character she broke out as on the sitcom Parks and Recreation. And for those, she’s mainly been known for having a deadpan style of acting. Her Lennie/Shadow King on Legion is a whole new thing for her, and for us following her. I still don’t think it always works, but she’s clearly having fun as a manipulative evil queen, sometimes going for a camp performance, sometimes something more reserved. Just in that one scene.

Following in the wake of two tremendous and heavily honored seasons of Fargo, Noah Hawley’s new series could be under pressure to also be recognized at the Emmys, but it hasn’t been easy to tell who might be a contender outside of Stevens in the lead role until now. Rachel Keller could be a possibility, though the TV movie/miniseries arena is full of strong lead actresses lately (especially with two of them surely coming from fellow FX series Feud: Bette and Joan). All of the other supporting cast members are great, including Fargo Emmy nominee Jean Smart, but none have stood out.

‘Legion’ is An Evolution in Superhero TV

Part of the reason for that is that they’ve been upstaged by the look and structure of the show. The thing about that is, all the actors involved with Legion deserve awards for doing such an amazing, seemingly simple job given the difficulty of working with material that’s so incomprehensible on the page from episode to episode. And even when it is ever clear in an overarching sense, these are challenging performances to achieve with the amount of sudden shifts in setting, both physically and narratively.

“We worked really hard. We rehearsed a lot. We would live as those characters in a way together. We were all up in Vancouver, dealing with these insane and confusing scripts where we didn’t know what was happening half of the time. We only had each other to lean on and I think in a way that energy and confusing, trippy ride we were on, it was all kind of helpful because we were able to use it and make choices we otherwise wouldn’t have made.”

The cast better get whatever ensemble accolades they’re qualified for, too, I guess. But Plaza is the only sure thing or must-thing for Legion, acting-wise, and hopefully she doesn’t face too much competition and can actually win the Emmy and the Golden Globe and the SAG and whatever else, if only so she doesn’t have to keep playing the same crass and cynical women in mostly bad comedies. She’s finally had this opportunity to show what else she can do, and I believe she has even more in her. And she doesn’t even have do it all in one scene in one role like she did last night to get my vote.

Aubrey Plaza Just Secured Her Emmy Nomination on Last Night’s ‘Legion’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The director opens up about how his fears inspired the heavy metal infused homage.

It’s hard to adequately describe The Devil’s Candy, Australian director Sean Byrne’s follow up to 2009’s The Loved Ones. The film, which premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and was eventually picked up by IFC Midnight for U.S. distribution, is a pastiche of occult horror, demonic possession, and religious mania, while also offering viewers a truly poignant family drama. It’s a pure treat for horror fans but above all else, it’s metal as fuck — literally.

The Devil’s Candy follows the not-so-ordinary Hellman family who move into an isolated but spacious Texas farmhouse, which may be a gateway to something sinister. Ethan Embry stars as Jesse, a struggling painter, who bonds with his daughter, Zooey (Kiara Glasco), over their shared love of heavy metal music. Shiri Appleby rounds up the family as Astrid, the straight-laced wife and mother who holds the family down financially, while Jesse works from home on commissioned paintings and takes Zooey to and from school. Although Zooey struggles to fit in at her new school (it must be said that her first day of school ensemble is badass: purple streaks in her hair, a red Flying V stick-on tattoo and a Slayer t-shirt), Jesse provides her with the encouragement she needs to stick out the rough transition. In just a few short scenes, we sense a truly deep admiration and love between the two that transcends music.

The use of heavy metal was an obvious choice for Byrne. “I’m a big metal fan. It’s adrenalin-charged and heroic and in my opinion incredibly cinematic and emotionally cathartic. So just on a sensibility level, I tend to gravitate toward metal because I like my films to have an edge and metal helps sharpen that edge. But it’s also used in an ironic sense in that the hero and his daughter listen to what’s often referred to as ‘the Devil’s music,’ so I wanted to subvert that antiquated idea. I wanted to show that being true to who you are and sharing your passions with your family can be a wonderful, bonding thing.”

As we get to know Jesse and his family, we’re also introduced to Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a troubled man hearing voices — voices he attempts to drown out by blasting chords on his Flying V guitar — who once lived in the Hellman family’s new home. Unbeknownst to them, but seen in the film’s opening scene, the elderly couple they were told died peacefully in the home, were in fact murdered by their son, Ray. Inevitably, the two stories intersect as Ray turns up at the house and eventually fixates on Zooey, while the same voices driving Ray on his dark mission start speaking to Jesse. The voices gives him a sinister new inspiration for his work, transforming his work and attracting a lucrative and exclusive art dealer in the process. But the new work also disturbs Astrid and Jesse, who is unaware he is painting both the past as well as a very dark future, which hints that his daughter’s life is at stake.

For Byrne, the idea was also borne out of his experience with fatherhood, particularly the fear he felt when his wife became pregnant with twins and the world instantly felt like a more dangerous place in light of this new responsibility. But in addition to this, The Devil’s Candy was influenced by horror classics and by Byrne knowing the kind of horror film he didn’t want to make. “I didn’t want to make a film about zombies or vampires or any of the more overt horror sub-genres. My references were more quasi-religious, films that depicted a kind of hell on earth, like The Omen, or a seemingly inexplicable hell within, like Rosemary’s Baby, but treated in a modern, metal-injected way. There are echoes of The Shining in the way a location can wreak havoc on the mind and the twist owes somewhat of a debt to Poltergeist. Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” planted the seed we could all be “designed and directed” by a higher, dark power.”

We certainly see these seeds being planted in The Devil’s Candy, in both Ray and Jesse, although their experiences are different albeit dark in their own disturbing ways. While the voices each man hears seem connected to their shared address, lending the film a “haunted house” vibe akin to The Amityville Horror, Byrne takes this one step further. “The idea some humans can be vessels, called upon to carry out the darkest of deeds in the name of a higher power is more possession movie in nature. Ray’s inability to function in the world makes him an easy target for manipulation as does Jesse’s burning ambition to be the best artist he can be. Even the act of painting itself is a kind of a possession. I’ve always been fascinated by dark artists like Goya and Francis Bacon. Where does this compulsion to expel a nightmare from the system come from? What are they tapping into?”

Whatever Jesse does tap into inspires him to create dark new art that attracts the head of a mysterious art gallery, who offers Jesse a Faustian deal but at the expense of neglecting Zooey, whom he has already forgotten to pick up from school once due to his fevered painting. “One reading is the gallery exploits Jesse’s weakness — his ambition, and serves as test of his allegiance and finally a time-consuming distraction to ensure Zooey is exposed and ripe for the taking. In a less literal sense, the gallery’s interest in Jesse’s paintings could be seen as genuinely self-serving and indicative of a wider satanic web. Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan used to send elegant notes to those, like Marilyn Manson, he thought were furthering the cause. The note would randomly arrive in the post and simply say, ‘Satan Approves.’ So there’s the possibility the gallery seeks to recruit Jesse right up until the moment he chooses family over ambition, light over darkness. At that point all bets are off and Satan conspires though all available means to ensure Jesse can’t reach his daughter in time.”

When Jesse fails to pick up Zooey, she falls into the hands of Ray, who has decided to offer her up as a sacrifice to the voices in his dead. But underneath the demonic voices and the creepy serial killer vibes, The Devil’s Candy offers a new twist on an old trope. While horror movies often show a mother’s love overcoming the odds and vanquishing evil, Byrne flips this to explore the bond between Jesse and Zooey, offering viewers a chance to see a father fight the odds to protect his daughter, even at the cost of his own career. “Daughters look to their fathers as protectors so I wanted to take that inherent trust and expectation and put it to the test. The father-daughter relationship may be the emotional cornerstone of the film but career versus family is a universally relatable theme. We all think we have our priorities right but professional ambition is a hard thing to suppress and despite what we’re told it’s borderline impossible to have it all. In many ways Jesse’s arc mirrors the classic crossroads mythology: would you sell your soul for personal gain even if it meant jeopardizing all that you hold dear? So the story’s a warning parable about the dangers of losing sight of what’s important.”

Although it’s been eight years since The Loved Ones, Byrne has made the wait worthwhile with The Devil’s Candy, which has something for every horror fan. It’s a superb nod to the genre’s classic films, while still offering a fresh story that, without spoiling the origin behind the film’s title, is rooted in a truly creepy exploration of occult possession. Embry truly shines as Jesse, disappearing behind the character’s tattoos, long hair and beard and giving off serious True Detective/Matthew McConaughey vibes. His chemistry with Glasco invests the audiences in the father-daughter relationship and helps the film’s fiery climax completely pay off. It’s shaping up to be quite the year for horror already and The Devil’s Candy only continues this solid streak.

The Devil’s Candy hits theaters and is available on demand beginning March 17.

Sean Byrne Talks ‘The Devil’s Candy’ and Its Dark Spin on Occult Horror was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A comparative video pits reality against cinema.

When it comes to recreating history in film, the medium finds itself in a precarious position: on the one hand it needs to portray the events and people in question with some degree of accuracy, while at the same time, straight facts are for documentaries and narrative filmmaking requires a little more subjectivity and personal filtering for the sake of story. It’s a spectrum, this position, and one in which directors can lean closer to or further away from verisimilitude depending on their intentions. Oliver Stone is a good example of a director who does both: in films like Salvador, Nixon, or Snowden he leans towards historical objectivity; in films like World Trade Center, JFK, or W. he uses history as a basis for a more subjective study.

In the following, really quite cool video from our friend Vugar Efendi, scenes from films depicting historical persons and events — including La Vie En Rose, Catch Me If You Can, Man on the Moon, The Doors, The Fighter, and Jackie — have been paired side-by-side with the same scenes from historical records to reveal just how closely or disparately the former recreates the latter. Some are naturally more accurate than others, but in every case you can see the inspiration taken from real life for our cinematic edification.

This is top-notch stuff, and knowing Efendi’s penchant for video series — he’s also done a few depicting visual art inspirations in film — I for one am hoping this isn’t the only time he broaches the subject.

Films are listed in the body of the video, as well as historical sources.

When Film Recreates History was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Who doesn’t want to be inventive and weird?”

Hans Zimmer is one of the greatest, most prolific film composers alive with a plethora of scores so recognizable he’s taking them to Coachella. Anyone whose themes are so powerful they can be appreciated under a music festival’s haze has to be remarkable. He’s also willing to piss off his publicist by digging into goofy questions long after his schedule has told him to move on. And by God, I respect that. Zimmer sat down with me to discuss his new online MasterClass, trading coffee for car chases, and musical memes.

Hans Zimmer: I’m excited that you are Film School Rejects because I am definitely a music school reject.

Q: You’re doing the DIY thing and putting on your own school.

HZ: Something like that. I know so many people that wanted to make a movie — that needed to make a movie. And they didn’t go to film school, they just made the movie. Same with music. You stay in it because you’re basically unemployable in the real world.

That seems to be true for a lot of aspects of moviemaking: directing, cinematography, writing. It’s either movies or making commercials.

HZ: Right, And I would rather make movies.

Tell me a little about the class and how that came to be.

HZ: They’re incredibly cool people and they wanted me because I came with a bit of a different point of view from a lot of composers that they asked. When we started making the class I realized how incredibly hard it was. Everything I’ve learned over the past 30-odd years, I learned by doing. By hanging out by directors, by hanging out with musicians. I had to put that into words, these things that were instinctive. Things that came naturally, I had to actually explain [in the class’s videos and assignments]. I learned a lot because I had to figure out what my system of getting through a movie was.

Everybody has to go through that kind of articulation as they get older though. I mean, for example, you’re talking to a German in English when really my best form of communication — certainly my most successful form of communication — is playing a tune. This is all is a translation of the essence of what I’m really about. And everyone has to do that. Does that make sense?

Yes, especially when you’re constantly collaborating with other specialists that speak different artistic languages. Has learning this skill been applicable to your composition work?

HZ: Sure! I have a studio surrounded by young assistants and a lot of these assistants have become great composers in their own right: Harry Gregson-Williams (Chicken Run, The Martian) and Junkie XL (Mad Max: Fury Road, Wonder Woman) to name two off the top of my head. Everybody’s learning just like I did.

Starting out, I got my first job in film because the composer on The Deer Hunter (Stanley Myers) had bought himself a very beautiful and very expensive Italian espresso machine and he had no idea how to use it. So I made coffee, he taught me about the orchestra.

That’s a good trade, I think.

HZ: It was a good trade! It was a good trade for both of us. He hated writing car chases — I got good at writing car chases.

His incredible generosity, his giving me credit almost straightaway and including me in all the meetings, well — I didn’t go to film school. I’m not even a film school reject, but my first jobs were with directors like Stephen Frears and Nico Mastorakis and I would be in the room. Something happens when you’re in the room with great filmmakers. You just keep your mouth shut and try to learn something. You see where the real problems are.

I try to bring a bit of that spirit into any of my mentorship. It’s not just war stories. It’s about why certain things work out and why certain things don’t. But hey, at the end of the day, we all work the same anyways.

We all work ridiculous hours, we are obsessed, we are relatively asocial, and we are completely passionate about this thing called film.

In this business we’re all, to some extent, workaholics-

HZ: Here’s the thing. I’m gonna stop you at the word “workaholic.” Here’s where musicians can teach the world because the operative word in music is “play.” If you manage to go through life with a certain amount of playfulness — and you have to take your playfulness with a bit of seriousness — life becomes a different thing.

I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be a workaholic. Look at it this way: no kid wants to go to bed. They always want to carry on playing. Why is it we are always up in the middle of the night? Because we’re still having ideas. People are still playing, the music is still happening. Why would you want to go to bed? The amount of time you’ll sleep when you’re dead is much higher in relationship to the time you have on this earth. So go play.

I was a trumpet player for about twelve years, so I know what you mean. We’d play before school, after school, during school. And then we’d only ever hang out with other band kids.

HZ: Exactly! It’s this weird thing where, I would hang out with Djivan Gasparyan who’s the greatest duduk player in the world and he’s Armenian. He doesn’t speak a word of English and I don’t speak a word of Armenian, but it didn’t matter. As soon as we started playing — because that was the only thing to do — well, two weeks later we were still inseparable. That’s what you’re describing. The best time is when everybody makes a noise. It’s irresistible. If you put that in front of an audience — you know this, you’ve played shows — they become a participant. It’s different music for different audiences.

I’ve had music be different for the same audience at different times of the same day.

HZ: Yes! All these little subtleties in music — and in film in a funny sort of way — that’s the stuff we’re trying to hunt down. If there’s a subtext to the subtext of my MasterClass, I’m trying to hunt that down. What are those little differences? If you’re in a room with musicians, you can make music. If you’re over the internet? Impossible. It’s not even about eye contact, you don’t even need to look at each other. There’s something happening when you’re in the room.

You have to feel it.

HZ: You have to feel it. So how do you bottle that idea? One of the main requirements of a musician is that you need to learn to listen to other people. It’s only ever good if you listen to the other players and learn to support them in the best possible way. For me, that’s a sort of philosophical thing because I wish the rest of the world was a bit more into that, that people would listen a bit more.

Another thing musicians do is you don’t have to describe things like timbre or tempo changes — if you listen, you can pick it up.

HZ: Absolutely. And a lack of formal training, that can be an advantage. Instead of throwing Italian terms at an orchestra, I can say “can you make this sound a bit more intimate,” or “is there a way we can make this sound more internal?” Everybody seems to know how to make that sound.

Or an action movie. You go, “hang on, this is the big action scene.” It’s not about “play fortissimo,” it’s about describing the action. Involving them as actors. Smart directors know that the musicians are the last actors they’re hiring. And they better know the story.

Are there any other composers out there with a similar outlook? Is that a common approach?

HZ: Oh I’m sure. Music is shifting. I think Jonny Greenwood (We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Master) nails it. He’s brilliant. Jóhann Jóhannsson (Arrival), he has it. Look, watch any Scandinavian television series like Borgen or The Bridge or whatever. The music is such a character…they get the storytelling. Listen to Miles Davis, he tells you a story with every note. Any of the great musicians, they’re storytellers.

One movie last year that I think had music which told the story sometimes better than the movie itself did was Swiss Army Man. Did you see it?

HZ: No, but I now will!

It’s very inventive and strange, really characterizing.

HZ: Inventive and strange is great! If you’re making records, if you’re making popular music, all you get all the time is, “can you be commercial? Can you go ‘verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge?’” In film music they go “can you be inventive and strange?” And who doesn’t want to be inventive and strange?

Listen, I’m supposed to tell you that I have to go but I like us chatting — ask me a last question, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

How do you feel about people playing with your work? There’s been a trend of internet videos involving your theme from Interstellar whenever something is spinning like that film’s spaceship docking sequence. Have you seen any of those?

HZ: No! But I’ve been watching people going crazy with the Wonder Woman theme. The Interstellar thing is great, I’ll have to find those.

You know another thing I loved? Something that influenced all my movies that came afterwards? We saw a school orchestra play Pirates of the Caribbean. And they sounded good, but they also sounded like a school orchestra. No vibrato, nothing fancy, none of that. But I loved it.

I played it for [director] Gore [Verbinski] and we tried to emulate that sound for Pirates 2 and 3. We’d play the video for the orchestra and they’d look at us like we were crazy but we wanted that spontaneity! That youthfulness and vigor.

That could’ve been me! I was playing Pirates of the Caribbean in high school. It was a formative score for people my age.

HZ: There you go! Could’ve been you and I love it. I love people taking the ideas and messing with them, I love that they’re never finished. You just throw it out there to the world and it’s really interesting what comes back. Two cellos doing “Mombasa” [from Inception] is pretty exciting. Look that up and I’ll search the Interstellar things.

So much for answering your last question in a quick way. Oh well.

Hans Zimmer’s MasterClass officially launches on March 16th and can be found at www.masterclass.com/hz

Musical Memes and Trading Coffee for Car Chases with Hans Zimmer was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘The Devil’s Candy’ Blasts Genre Thrills and the Devil’s Music Into Your Heathen Soul

The director of ‘The Loved Ones’ returns with another intense and suspenseful thriller.

Writer/director Sean Byrne’s debut feature, The Loved Ones, blew festival audiences (including us) away back in 2009 with thrills and suspense born from seeing a character we truly cared about fighting for his life against increasingly twisted and violent odds. It took three years before it actually opened in the US, but it was worth the wait. Now Byrne’s equally intense follow-up film is finally being released… after premiering at film fests nearly two years ago.

Once again though, The Devil’s Candy is a blistering, intimate, heavy metal-tinged horror/thriller worth waiting for as it drops a loving family into a devilish nightmare where each violent chord brings them closer to a grim and grisly fate.

Jesse (Ethan Embry), Astrid (Shiri Appleby), and their teenage daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) leave the cramped hustle and bustle of urban apartment life behind and move into a remote farm house offering all the space they could possibly want. The barn becomes Jesse’s art studio for his paintings, and the lack of neighbors means he and Zooey can express their love for heavy metal tunes as loud as possible — unlike its inclusion in most horror films where it’s used to connect with the devil, here a shared love for head-banging binds a father and daughter together. They know the house came cheap because the previous owners died there, but the shifty realtor neglects to mention one detail — the elderly couple was murdered by their unstable son Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince).

Ray hears a voice in his head telling him to do terrible things, and the only sound that drowns it out is the amplified thrashing of an electric guitar. It’s not long before Jesse starts hearing the same voice, and as he channel’s its verbal undulations into a new, nightmarish painting he and his family find themselves in immediate danger.

Crazy Ray is heading back home again.

Byrne accomplishes a lot in a tight 90 minutes as he introduces the family, reveals the approaching danger, and builds it towards an intense crescendo of fiery violence. The film’s horrific elements are a double-barreled blast of demonic influence — there’s an Amityville Horror-like vibe at times as Jesse’s behavior grows worrisome — and a human madman. Both add to the film’s atmosphere, but it’s the latter that leads to the film’s most terrifying sequences as Ray is a truly frightening character.

Vince gives a disturbingly effective performance in part because his killer is no brilliant, well-spoken tactician like any number of cinematic serial killers. Instead he’s a blunt tool wielded by madness and possibly the devil himself to commit unspeakable acts of terror. He moves through obstacles like a death-dealing bull in a flesh & bone china shop leaving only wet and screaming carnage in his wake.

The various and plentiful genre beats are executed beautifully throughout and punctuated with man-made slaughter and satanic touches, but as is true of The Loved Ones Byrne’s greatest strength here is in creating a protagonist (or three) that viewers desperately want to see survive. Too often horror films invest all of their energy into the darkness — the killer, the gore, the acts of terror — but Byrne gives equal time and attention to the light.

He’s aided by a trio of actors who feel immediately as if they’re actually the close and loving family they’re portraying. Their chemistry, particularly between Embry and Glasco, convinces without question leaving viewers certain of their love for each other. That visible connection adds emotional weight to the trial by blood and fire that they’re all about to face, and our very real concern only amplifies the already strong elements of suspense and tension. Embry’s often shown an ability to find the human pain in his characters, and he shines here as a study in conflicts — he’s a ripped and tattooed head-banger, but even as the devil whispers demands and promises in his ear Jesse’s fierce love for his family refuses to go down without a fight.

It’s an intense thrill-ride, but Byrne and his crew — including cinematographer Simon Chapman, editor Andy Canny, and composers Mads Heldtberg & Michael Yezerski — ensure it’s also an attractive one too. We see Ray approach through a blood red, stained-glass cross, a montage of blood and paint binds the differing kinds of human art, and the score and song selections drive us unrelentingly onward towards the unknown.

Great horror films come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties, but sometimes the best ones leave you feeling as if you’ve barely survived the terror alongside the character(s)... or at least come close. The Devil’s Candy gets that and plunges viewers into the abyss with little chance of escape but an abundance of hope. The things we value often require sacrifice, or to put in the parlance of our heavy metal friends to the north…

“Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight”

(Barenaked Ladies, “Lovers in a Dangerous Time”)

Review — ‘The Devil’s Candy’ Blasts Genre Thrills and the Devil’s Music Into Your Soul was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our new podcast channel is coming soon and we’d love for you to help us test it out.

Hello beautiful subscribers. I’m here with a quick update on our upcoming podcast venture, One Perfect Pod. Next week, we’ll be launching this new One Perfect Shot-based podcast channel with three shows.

• The Big Idea, hosted by yours truly. A weekly show in which we wrangle some of the industry’s most talented minds and discuss what’s on my mind as the biggest topic in the world of pop culture.
• Shot by Shot, hosted by Geoff Todd and H. Perry Horton. A weekly deep dive into the brilliant cinematography we’ve celebrated for years via One Perfect Shot. Including discussions of films we love and chats with some of the cinematographers whose work we admire.
• After the Credits, hosted by Matthew Monagle. A new kind of movie review show that explores our expectations and how they impact the way we feel about what we ultimately see in theaters.

All three shows will be part of the One Perfect Pod channel, which will very soon be available via iTunes, Stitcher, and wherever else you get your podcasts.

For now, we’d like to offer our subscribers a chance to listen to a test episode of After the Credits, in which Matthew brings in Rob Hunter to discuss James Mangold’s Logan before and after seeing it. This episode will not be made available to the rest of the public, so consider yourselves our test audience.

Click here to listen to the test episode of After the Credits

Once you give it a shot, let us know what you think. We’d love to hear your feedback via email: pod@filmschoolrejects.com. We’re very excited about what we’ve got planned for this podcast channel and with your help, we’ll continue to get better and better as time goes on. You can also follow us (and send us notes) on Twitter: @OnePerfectPod.

Thank you so much for giving our first episode a listen! We look forward to many more in the future.

We’d Love to Get Your Feedback: One Perfect Pod was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How the robots of ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Ex Machina’ chart our changing perspectives towards artificial intelligence.

The title of Alex Garland’s 2015 thoughtful psychological thriller Ex Machina derives its name from the ancient Greek phrase deus ex machina, meaning ‘god from the machine.’ By omitting the deus from the film’s title, it’s clear Garland wants his audience to question both the roles of God and man. There’s the godly referencing and positioning of Oscar Isaacs’s secluded genius, Nathan, the creator of Ava, a robot with consciousness played by Alicia Vikander. And Ava’s emotional existence itself goes against the idea of the natural in God, since she is a manmade creation. Meanwhile, the natural world of Ex Machina — the trees that blend Nathan’s perfectly rectangular home into the forest — acts as a direct juxtaposition to the technological imagery that fills the rest of the film.

The film’s concern with the inner workings of its human and non-human characters and clever seduction of the audience earns it the title of “a classic film.” This (rightful) praise allows Ex Machina to be placed with the great films of the science fiction genre, like Blade Runner (1982) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And with these classic films comes the comparison with and influence of the first feature-length science fiction film, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). To compare Metropolis with Garland’s debut feature can seem contrived; Metropolis’ longevity has been proven with the test of time, while Ex Machina was only released two years ago. Moreover, both films are trying to do different things, with Lang’s film presenting a conflicted utopia (one where the very world some call a utopia is seen as a dystopia by others) and fear-of-the-other through a robot. Meanwhile, Garland ensures he subverts the typical representation of the robot as a source of evil by establishing a contrast between Ava’s lack of knowledge against Nathan’s constant surveillance.

However, the central themes of both films (the idea of utopia and how the robotic is an inevitable part of the utopian world, for good or bad) remain the same. Exploring the differences between both Metropolis and Ex Machina through these themes allows audiences to view the shifts in representations of robots, utopia, and nature.

“Utopia” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “ a real place which is perceived or imagined as perfect,” and it’s clear from Metropolis’ two central locations — the underground of the workers and the aboveground of the established people — that the film’s utopia lies solely on perception rather than a fair society. With its symmetrical Expressionistic buildings and emphasis on height over width, the city Metropolis is not afraid of its ability to be seen; instead, it wants to be seen from the highest point beyond the clouds. Unlike Ex Machina, Lang omits nature from the city of Metropolis until the dénouement of the film. When the threat of the robotic Maria, a clone of the protagonist’s (Freder, played by Gustav Fröhlich) love interest, is at its height yet nearing its conclusion, Lang reintroduces the natural elements of fire and water. Nature works against the robotic Maria (played by Brigitte Helm, who also plays the human Maria) rather than working as an intrinsic part of her world.

However, when viewing the subversions of various science fiction tropes Garland creates in Ex Machina, Metropolis’ lack of nature can be seen as more of a reflection on mankind than on the other-ness of the robot.

The brief opening of Ex Machina — that can be seen as more of a prelude rather than an introduction — shows the protagonist (Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb) texting his friends the news that he has been accepted onto Nathan’s program. Audiences first meet Caleb through the computer screen, his face recognized by the computer’s sensors while his friends remain invisible through their mobile phone-only existence. Whilst we aren’t provided with much scenery, with the minimalist background emphasizing the strive for perfection through technology, what is provided tells us that Caleb’s world is far removed from the natural and instead in the middle of a quest for artificial perfection.

By contrasting this opening void of minimalism to the forestry of the natural world where Nathan’s hidden experiment resides, it becomes clear that Ex Machina is not necessarily an exploration of nature, utopias, or A.I., but instead an exploration of ideas that are explored through these science-fiction conceits. Garland questions the role of society and inclusion vs. seclusion through Nathan’s home, with the role of the observer complicated by the three main characters; there’s Nathan’s omniscient, god-like stance enabled by his technology, and Caleb’s observations of Ava in order to see whether she can pass the Turing Test are complicated further by Ava’s subtle but deductive observation of everything that surrounds her.

Importantly, however, Garland does not create a film that is paranoid about A.I. In an interview for the Guardian, Garland describes the sense of possibility in Ex Machina, saying “whereas most AI movies come from a position of fear, this one comes from a position of hope and admiration.” As one lecturer states, the machines, the robots, “are projections of us. They’re dreams or metaphors for our own anxieties” — ideas externalized in controllable and malleable forms.

However, the controllability of Ex Machina’s Ava results in a different conclusion to Metropolis. Where the former concludes with the A.I., the New Human, finding her place in the world, Metropolis assures its audience that “the status quo is going to be preserved.” In terms of utopia, this means the world and people of the underground and aboveground have the chance to become one, with the biblical imagery of the flood and the heart mediating the head and hands cementing this. The threat of the Other represented through the robotic Maria, whether that’s femininity or leadership itself, has gone; its characters come to be relocated in a new, semi-utopian, world.

Meanwhile, Ex Machina uses Caleb’s character to seduce the audience. According to Garland, “if the film functions, something is happening to the audience which is equatable with what is happening to the protagonist… So as he’s being seduced, we’re being seduced. And as we’re being confused, he’s being confused.” The film has no concern with providing answers or relieving anxieties, instead unsettling its audience by unravelling the carefully constructed world as each “session” with Ava moves the film along. Ex Machina’s construction can be seen as both manipulation as well as another series of ideas. For example, the wide windows in the opening of Nathan’s home suggests a sense of freedom and connection to the natural. But, of course, the windows are merely more transparent barriers between the technological worlds, linking with the transparency of the mesh that makes up Ava’s body.

What’s more, when audiences are first introduced to Ava, Garland places her within a one-dimensional triptych of layers of nature. There’s the first triptych in the far background of the forest and stream of water, the second holds the possibilities of new technology, of Ava, and the third the disconnectedness of humankind. Ava’s curiosity also plays into the sense of nature that surrounds her, with her understanding that she is alive, and therefore impermanent, allowing her to explore questions about art and the outer world.

Ex Machina is a film that asks questions rather than providing answers to them, and its questions and curiosities are extracted from its robot rather than the human characters. In a masterclass at the National Film and Television School, Garland described how the noises of Ava were purposefully made to sound like the heartbeat, stating that these noises “make you feel she is alive.” And it’s Ava who often feels more alive than the two humans that fill most of the film. Even after seeing another A.I., Kyoto, tearing the skin from her torso and face, the blood that pours from Caleb’s arm or the red stain that spreads across Nathan’s plain white shirt feels more alien than the magnetic body of Ava.

Metropolis concludes with nature ridding its city of the robotic, which comes both in the form of Maria’s robot as well as the workers of the underground, who are often stuck in a repetitive trance-like routine. Importantly, the robotic Maria is never referred to as a woman, with characters instead using the pronouns “he” and referring to the robot as “The Machine Man.” By ignoring the gender off of which the robot Maria is based, this “machine man” does not speak to the anxieties of what the robot can do, but instead the anxieties of what man can do, since it is was Rotwang who created this invention.

Freder also has a journey with nature, with his beginnings in the pleasure garden — a juxtaposition of the natural and unnatural — journeying him down into the “looking glass,” to quote Caleb’s character in Ex Machina, of the machine world. Where Freder travels from the natural to the dark or unnatural, or from his constructed utopia to a nightmarish hell for the people beneath him, Caleb journeys from his hollow world to the contrasts of Nathan and nature’s creations. The nature of the semi-utopia in the end of Metropolis exists for its people, while the natural world of Ex Machina, and more specifically the forestry that conceals Nathan’s home, concludes by existing for Ava; the natural (the nature of the world) and the unnatural (a manmade “machine”) work together in these final moments.

However, it’s clear once Ex Machina reaches its dénouement that these contrasts aren’t as juxtaposing as once thought. Like Ava, Caleb and Nathan use their ability to lie and manipulate to gain what they want, and Nathan constantly refers to the programming of humans by nature or God in comparison to his programming of Ava. While Nathan does this to further cement himself in his egotistical self-view that he is a god, the programming of humans and A.I. creates similarities between the two.

The conclusion of Ex Machina furthers this search for the similarities between humans and A.I. rather than the differences. Ava’s body is seen in a reflection of a window, mirroring the opening shot of the reflection of Caleb’s coworkers. The comparison immediately relates the human and the non-human, while the moving bodies that walk through Ava’s still reflection make her seem like a ghost or a specter. No answers are provided as to whether Ava is free, but the important part of this ending is that Garland ensures the concentration and the questions created are on Ava’s feelings, on how she feels, and that should be answer enough.

The Nature of Robots was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.