Last Interview on the Left: Midnight Radio w/ Ethan Hawke & C. Robert Cargill

hello everybody how you doing thank you for joining us here on the last interview on the left we have a very special one we got talking a very too smart wonderful human beings very accomplished guys people i admire very much that's why i love my job because i just get to meet the coolest people all around um i'm joined today by ethan hawke and c robert cargill uh better known as cargill they previously worked together on sinister and the black phone series with scott derrickson uh both a blast we are big fans of the black phone series uh last podcast on the left we uh we did a special interview with uh scott when black phone 2 came out uh so much fun we got a new horror icon and i'm all about it now did you all meet on sinister you've been working in horror forever here that's where we met right cargill yeah yeah we uh sinister was my first film and uh uh ethan was our first choice when we had the script and uh he jumped on board and we worked on it and we just had such a great time that we stayed in touch and uh worked together multiple times now so between this and midnight radio you just assume ethan's like the most inquisitive man in the world i mean he's also the the the most well-read man i've ever met in my life uh you know i travel in literary circles and nobody is as well-read as ethan oh yeah what you're reading these days buddy what am i reading these days you wouldn't believe it at the exact moment i'm reading the adventures of huckleberry finn nice you know you're a little too old you missed it no it was just interesting it's interesting there's been so much talk about that book as being can't it's been canceled by the right it's been canceled by the left everybody hates this book and um i stumbled on an interview of cornell west talking about it and made me think you know what i don't think i've read this book since i was 12 years old i don't really know what i think so i decided to read it but i will say of talking about sinister where cargill and i became friends it was one of the i hesitate to say the word easy because that implies like it's not hard work we all worked really hard but it was so simple and fun and i think when when good work is happening it actually often is that way nobody made a problem where there wasn't a problem the script was dynamite cargill and scott were so exciting to talk to about the horror genre that was cargill's first film but it was my first horror film and so they were teaching me a lot about the geometry of that genre and about my it was one of my favorite characters that i've gotten to play and when i was a kid that's what i told them all about my first director was joe davidson who loved horror and had a passion for it he made piranha and the howling obviously he made gremlins yeah but so that it was my explorers right yeah but my entry point about the language of cinema was from a genre film director who happened to be brilliant and is brilliant joe dante and that's where our friendship started and then when they sent me the black phone script um it was one of the hottest scripts i've ever read i mean it was just you could not put it down and that was another time period where just making a movie was a lot of fun scott cargill and i both feel this way he's a great combination of just really a profound guy very approachable to talk to really collaborative and has a real vision and you just need that you need somebody to captain a ship and he's a really really good captain um and that allows cargill and i to do our jobs as first mates of a sort oh yeah that's a good way to put it so the grabber love the grabber great i mean well you know hard to say that you don't love him i hope yeah yeah yeah i'm not inspired by the grabber but you know i also uh i love my horror icons i love any chance of a black phone three happening i feel like you could do 12 of these things if you wanted to or you could just end it right now it's i feel like it's one of those there's definitely interest in a third one and we're interested in uh uh making one uh as i've said publicly numerous times uh i'm not i'm not going to move forward with another sequel unless we have a great idea up front yeah um and uh we recently got that great idea so we'll see what happens there's a very good chance uh the grabber may come back sometime in the future we're no guarantees yet but there's a chance hell yeah dude i want more grabber one of the things that was obvious about the second film is is that part of what i love about black phone one and sinister is the film yes it's a really scary movie but you can tell the filmmakers have something to say with the movie there's a sub there's a subconscious to the movie and if that subconscious isn't there then a sequel just becomes a money grab and it's not fun to watch and it's not fun to make yeah and so you have to have a central idea and a theme that this character could be used for right when you say cargo oh absolutely no it really is uh you know i've i've done the the painful sequel game i've done the development on sequels that didn't happen uh it just it's not fun if it if the core isn't there yeah uh so but the neat thing is is that we've got such a great team and what we're playing around with allows us to go in multiple different directions and uh um and it can be really exciting uh as as it moves forward if you get it right but yeah it's it's a slog otherwise yeah and writing horror is hard it is very difficult you know because some things may seem scary on the page but then like once you start like really talking it out it's like is that really that's actually the other way around yeah honestly my my experience has been it's just the it's the opposite you're always like this isn't scary this isn't scary and then it turns out much scarier than you thought uh after we turned in um uh the direct our first draft of sinister we were convinced it wasn't a very scary movie um you know we're like it's not gonna be that scary you know we we can we punch this up some more uh with black phone before black phone came out there was a whole big discussion as to whether we should sell it as a paranormal thriller because it's not people were like it's not really like horror scary um and then we released the movie and you know we scared the bejesus out of folks yeah and uh and and and and and it's like wait we it it turned out scarier than we thought it it really is no because it's it's it's not if you put something on the page that isn't that scary you can always punch it up with sound design and cinematography and mood and performance uh but it's very hard to do the other way around you can't you know just because something's written scary on the page if you don't have all those elements it's not going to work but for some reason it doesn't work and it doesn't punch up from the page it was it was a lot of fun and i gotta ask ethan as an actor you've played so many great characters you played so many wonderful like human beings i think you've played like great great people you've played like john brown and whatnot now you're playing the grabber does that mess with you like you gotta like you know you have to kill children so like what like how do you prepare for that does it like go home with you or are you just like i'm an actor who gives a shit i've never said the sentence i'm an actor who gives a shit that i've never said um probably to a fault um that's just not my demeanor i do i learned strangely i learned this lesson on it might sound pretentious or something but i really learned it playing mcbeth which i think is the original horror film um it's you know whenever theater companies are in trouble they always want to do mcbeth because it audiences love it because it really it's it it's if done right it's really hard to do it's really hard to do it's really terrifying but if you're playing that character eight performances a week for months it's like a guided meditation on greed evil um the corruptive nature of power and you're it can bring you to a really dark place that can leave you not fun to be near and not fun to wake up with in the morning for yourself and um i started learning how to use your imagination and let things pass through you there's like kids on sinister for example i was it was so we had a lot of children in that movie and kids love to play and let's play like this is nothing is more fun for kids than making a haunted house and one of the things that scott did really well is we were just having a good time imagining um you know okay it's 10 o'clock you have all your best friends over everybody's got popcorn we're going to have a good time we're going to tell you a scary story light the campfire here we go everybody we were going to give you the chills and kids get into it oh god and there's a sense of playfulness where it's not that you're not really imagining it you are really imagining it you're imagining it absolutely completely but you're not identifying with it i guess so for the black phone that is not a you want to bring home with you i i i felt keenly aware that the quality of the writing was such, and the mystery and the power of it was such, the use of the mask was kind of profound in its own strange way um that i tried to be like a little kid and imagine that i was the type of person that enjoyed torturing children and um and then i tried to let it pass through me yeah not and then i would go home to my own children and take them out for ice cream that's beautiful to ethan's point um uh when we made sinister we used every part of the house so the there was this huge basement as big as the house downstairs and that became our production offices and so where we had our green room where we sequestered the kids was right over next to my desk where i was working and there was one afternoon where all the kids are sequestered downstairs sitting on the couches talking and they get to talking about how their characters killed their parents and one and one kid goes how do you kill your parents and he's like oh i kill her with a kill him with a lawnmower and one of the other kids goes oh i just drowned mine yeah they were right into it i would get bummed out so we're so we're watching i'm listening to midnight radio the new podcast it's available everywhere the first couple episodes are out now please go check it out i've listened to the first two it's a blast i've definitely got some uh art bell coast to coast vibes going on here i feel like you guys are uh obviously inspired having a good time but i i will say ethan it's not your uh first time playing a radio dj i uh i'm a big fan of blaze i gotta say oh yeah yeah phenomenal movie uh it was it was a lot it was a lot of fun how is um how is ben dickie these days i where's the next album d have you heard from him what's going on yeah he's doing he's doing great i mean look you guys let's face it the music industry is tough out there it's a nightmare i mean it's it for my friends and our musicians you know the film business is following it a little bit as we watch what happens for streaming but you know a lot of our musician friends uh are struggling to get paid to make music um everybody wants everything for free and it's very very challenging environment and um it was really hard blaze came out right before the pandemic and ben had all these tours set up and an album coming out and they all got kind of crushed right that glimmering the darkness album's awesome by the way yeah i love that record and and he's a beautiful man and a great artist and he was essentially the reason i made blaze um because of just i wanted to put his lightning in a bottle and um it's just so hard i have so many friends you know cargo lives in austin you know it's it's really changed in the course of our lifetime how difficult you know the the big trees in the forest are alive but all that beautiful underbrush of smaller bands and independent labels and all these people where you could make a decent middle class living as a working musician if you were willing to work really hard and you were creative and there's just no money there for people um it's a damn shame i know i've met a lot of musicians being in the industry as well and learn how many people that i look up to and think they're amazing uh have second jobs and it's it's it's mind-blowing to me i feel so bad for the no one's buying records i know anymore everywhere it's uh almost if you are not a new york times best-selling novelist you have a second job even even if you're putting out two three novels a year you're teaching it's happening it's screenwriting it's happening it the arts have just been gutted across the board i will quick quick positive aside though did you catch ben dickey in the episode of midnight radio no yeah he's right there really which one the first one yeah the episode one he's the guy who has the clyde lang tits hey the the he is the one he is the the fake one the government made setting it up oh my god he's brilliant that's hilarious thank you for bringing him back i love my man he's he's fantastic but that's part of the the joy of for cargill scott and i we've had these film experiences that we loved and this is i love the adventure of doing something new you know i've made a documentary here and then i wrote a book about it and i've written a book about it and i've written a book graphic novel it puts you in that kind of beginner's mind and we're all storytellers that's what we do for a living we tell stories and so it's it's the same job really but now we're just using writing and voice and it's so powerful we're falling in love with this form we've had such a good time it allows for such creative freedom i love the intimacy of the experience when you're listening to a good podcast um and i love the way your own imagination can send the thing off um you know it can launch your brain a good i i think midnight radio is doing it i feel really proud of what we're doing but we've had such it's been our own adventure you know we started this thing without just as just us we just started recording it because cargo had such a great hit as a writer scott had such a great vision for what it was and yes i love art bell i love the whole dream of it the whole twilight zone aspect of it all um it turned us all on and it's been one of the most rewarding simple projects in my life in the last couple years when you say cargo oh yeah it's so much fun to when we all get in the that booth together and we're all just you know there's a you know 10 of us all like clustered around and we're working out the scene and we get people in the booth and and recording and it's just a lot of fun and the vibes are great and it never feels like work and you know we'll be there six eight ten hours recording but we'll just have had a blast and and it's really it's really its own beast in in the best way that was kind of moved sir i'll shut up in a second but the first episode we have austin pendleton playing this great part and he was kind of my first and only acting teacher and so to get to be in there you know we're both much older now and get to be like in a little studio just acting with my old professor it's so um thrilling for me that's amazing you get to do stuff like that and with um art bell i he's a you know he's a big part of what we do over here as well we we're all huge fans of him he understood something about storytelling that how do you make a completely unbelievable story seem convincing how were you able to draw from that and like create this because i you guys you did such a great job of like being art bell without being art bell you're still you're still definitely your own character but you're you're you kind of pull and you you get that you get the stories out of people just like that uh what what do you think he understood about storytelling and you guys are putting in here well i'll go first cargo is he was always arrestingly intelligent and because of the breadth of his knowledge and he asks smart questions and he gains your trust that's what art and i feel like cargo in your writing you've you've harnessed that part of his personality do you think yeah you yeah scott and i really um kind of dug deep into who he was and had a really great late night talk about it where we really kind of said well who was art bell you know beyond what we know and what we kind of came to was that uh art bell's superpower was he could tell the difference between the true believers and the bullshitters and the people who are calling just to get on the radio and and tell a fun story and and try to get one over on people and the people who really did believe in art bell and the people who are calling just to get on the radio and and tell a what they were talking about they really did have these experiences or believe they have these experiences and he knew how to ask the right questions to allow someone to unravel themselves rather than always directly confronting them uh while meanwhile making sure it made for great radio like he just had a sense of this is what people want to listen to this is what people want to hear you know they've been digitizing the old episodes and putting them up on youtube for the couple of years and it really is one of those things you can still sit down and listen to these things and they are still creepy they are still good you could just hear when he's asking those questions and you can tell the lilt in his voice when he catches someone in in a lie and you know he's always kind of he was always paying attention to it and that intelligence and and that ability to to get the the truth of what someone's saying uh out of them it was his most defining trait that allowed him to make really good decisions and and and and and and and and great radio now it's clearly thought through it's clearly you know well put together and written but did you guys uh you riff a little bit at all or do or was it just is it straight from the script the whole time we try we try to riff i mean one of the things that how i feel about riffing is you want to you don't want to uh have to fix anything you know this happens on not just on a radio program like midnight radio this happens in film work i love it when i come up with an improvisation on set and the director and the writer like yes you've harnessed the idea and it's like you're putting icing on a cake if you're coming into a creative space and having to cook the cake that's a mistake then what what happens with scott and cargo is this thing is beautifully made it's built the architecture works now the actor can come in and obscure it throw a joke in cut that line and weave this other funny thing that their grandfather said and put it on top of it and scott and cargo are really supportive of that and sometimes you hit pay dirt where somebody does a riff and it's just brilliant and sometimes people do riffs and they're terrible but you can cut them out it's okay yeah uh we essentially because of the structure of the show we stick with uh the script but yeah like like even says there's a lot of great lines that that came out of the actor in the moment uh there's a lot of there's the occasional back and forth that we're like oh we're doing that now that is what we're doing um and uh and then and and you find the magic but yeah this is the type of show that the structure is so important that you can't it's not because we we actually we talked about that early on that was uh me and ethan were like well what if we have two different ways we do this we have episodes where there are actors who need to who need the page they need to read off the page they need to you know they need a script in order to to find their character but then there's people who are really great at acting exercises and we tried that once and instantly it was like no no we need a script for this this has to be a scripted show the audience's time is too valuable one of the things that i learned on the before trilogy with richard linkletter is like improvisation like that is for the rehearsal room it's it's a great way for actors to find their voice find the character maybe come up with a script for the show and then they're like oh my god i'm gonna do this and then they're like oh my god i'm gonna do this and then they're like oh my god i'm gonna do this come up with one or two gems but the audience's time is precious and if you're wasting it they lose faith in you and you have to make everything feel like an improvisation everything has to seem spontaneous everything has to feel like real life to hypnotize the audience you know but if you're up there just saying aren't i so funny isn't everything that i think of so interesting uh i think most of us as audience members kind of roll our eyes yeah it's a lot of stand-up as well the um now i listened the first two episodes how many episodes is this going to be nine nine nine for the first season nine for the first season and i gotta say i'm two in so i you know no spoilers of course but is this all connected are we telling one full story here yes 100 the whole idea is that each episode feels anthological and then starts building on previous episodes and then by the by the time by the time you get to episode the end of episode eight there's something that happens that instantly if you've been listening you are going to be like oh my god i know what's got to happen in episode nine like if they don't do this i'm going to be upset like it's we're building to that kind of excitement and momentum nice it functions for me i think it's like a great idea it feels like a spider web like episode one just feels like one line across it's got a perfect story to him and then the second story kind of intersects in one place and then the third one in three four five six you know until by the it's starting to be this beautiful web where you see the connections that are forcing a story i gotta say it seems like we're going to be diving into uh parallel universes a little bit here and stay with us buddy stay with us we dive into truth be told we dive into a little bit of everything the real the real fun of this show is that we're digging up a lot of the favorite old school um uh storylines that you know from not just art bell but all of that am radio sphere and the you know um i was i was one of those weird kids who in high school i was going to head shops but not to buy you know uh tobacco water water pipes for tobacco use only i was going for their esoteric book sections and so i was getting oh okay i was yeah i read playboy for the articles yeah yeah i was no no i was grabbing stuff like high weirdness by mail and i was like oh my god i'm gonna be like oh my god i'm gonna be like oh my god i'm gonna be like the anarchist cookbook and just all the great conspiracy edgelord stuff of that time i think you're supposed to tell people you have the anarchist cookbook but yeah so i like marinated in that so this is this is my chance for me and scott to like pull out our favorite conspiracy theories and drop little bits and pieces there and little bits of esoterica here and there one of the fun things about it is half the stuff we talk about in the show are very real uh uh either a more than half cargo more than half you most of everything you're working with has a seed somewhere in reality you know don't you don't you feel oh yeah yeah but but we touch on so many of the things so if you have your favorite thing from uh you know do you like some area 51 do you like some shadow people do you like time travel we've got a little bit of everything sprinkled in uh into the the first nine episodes for you nice that that area 51 call that went off the off the air for art bell is legendary it's so much fun the um so i i guess so parallel universes i want to go back because you also wrote um or part one of the writers of the first dr strange film so there's definitely something parallel interest parallel universes is something you're very interested in you have to be uh do you believe in it at all in reality uh you know i don't i don't know um you know i believe parallel universes are a lot like uh god uh in that you know you can be a true believer but we have absolutely zero evidence you know there there's you can work it out on paper and go well the math says this could be right and it's like yes but does does it really exist i don't know um but i do you know the the the the quantum physics of it all is interesting but what i do love about it is it makes for great storytelling um you know there it offers it offers the ultimate thing that you talk about in storytelling which is possibilities uh and what are those possibilities and um what we're what we're hoping to do with this is do something just a little different because we have done a lot of parallel universe stuff in the you know over the last decade um it's become much more mainstream and easy to talk about which is great it's kind of like a time loop movie you know up until groundhog day nobody really understood the mechanics of a time loop and now it's a whole sub-genre of film well parallel universes have kind of gone off and become its own uh side part of science fiction and fantasy and uh um and playing with that is is an awful lot of fun i really loved what the movie midnight special was able to do with it it was a blast now so what conspiracies do you guys feel hold water what kind of uh spooky uh things that may be a subject you're covering in uh midnight radio you're like actually i kind of believe that like what's something you guys that kind of gets you guys well there's some things we'll end up talking about in the next part of the show but we'll get to that in a little bit um but we're going to get to that in a little bit but we're going to get to that in a little bit um but we're going to We get into a lot of the more supernatural conspiracy theories in the show. So whether we believe those or not is, you know, what are the shadow people? you know who knows um but uh uh let's i'm trying to think if there's one we have in the show that i'm like oh yeah no that's that's legit real um do you have any personal experiences maybe you'd like to like to share something spooky maybe you've seen a ghost i mean i've seen some shit you know like uh like you know there's got to be things you don't understand i mean you're both world travelers you you've talked to every being in the entertainment industry i always say is like having a backstage pass to the world i'm sure like you guys meet some guy who works at nasty he's like i'm gonna show you some shit you know so uh we would you know off the right you know not off the record completely obviously i'm staring at you but uh the uh just between us and the millions of people listening at home well you know it's probably 20 000 but the uh what do you guys think my take on all this is that we have a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of reality. And that's a base. None of us know why we were born, why we have to die, why we're on a star hurtling through space. There's all these questions, monumental questions that we kind of have to turn a blind eye towards to go shopping and pick our kids up from school and go to a game. If you think about it all the time, why is everybody we know going to die? Why does that have to be? And when you start meditating on that, you start realizing that you really don't know very much at all. And so ideas like other realities and ghosts, nobody does know what happens when you die. There's been, you know, tons of confirmed accounts of nuns levitating and all kinds of wild things that we have no logical answer for. And my brain loves that because I I think it helps change the way that you look at your life and helps you be in the present moment and understand. We don't even understand time, you know, and how it works. And we're obsessed with it. We measure everything by this thing that we don't understand. And so one of the things I've always loved about science fiction is helping me see how little reality I actually do understand. And, you know, I've had my share of spooky experiences in my life, some of which are, but they're better, they're not well told on when, in not dialogue with direct human beings, you know, because it wants a conversation. But I've definitely had my share of things that make me feel like I'm not sure I understand. understand the planet i'm on yes i've heard some interviews with you you're very interesting man ethan i uh i'm personal i'm a professional skeptic i don't really believe in much but i love a good story you know it doesn't mean you know just because i think it's phooey doesn't mean i don't love hearing about it um now that being said staunch atheist but i've heard you talk very intelligently about your faith ethan and so i i'd love to hear what what is something that keeps you going what makes you keep like staying uh religious um mystery um you know faith is uh it's such an interesting word because you know it has doubt in it it's kind of the opposite of certainty and you know i think sometimes the word atheist has this um idea of certainty to it um and it's a beautiful thing you know when you're kidding me when a kid is born you know that you didn't do that like you know yeah i has i had some agency involved in the actual messy human work of it but giving breath of life to a human being and watching something that's created from from the magic of people falling in love uh is very very powerful and you know i had it as a kid even just an absolute um joy of the gift of life that i i know i i'm not responsible for and it the next question becomes who is responsible what is responsible what is the source of light what is the source of energy what is the source of love why is there evil why is there darkness what you know are they two are life and death two sides of one coin it's it's kind of easy to say i don't believe it's very difficult um to say i believe i i like kind of saying i have no beliefs okay i have faith you know um and i'm i'm putting myself forward in the world in an attitude of faith um does that make sense to you absolutely um and i think i'm down with religion i'm just not i'm not it's not a faithful person myself i grew up in catholic school i kind of live on the theory of whatever makes you not be a monster please believe in that and i'm not a faithful person myself i grew up in please you know make that make that make that what you do um now but uh it's very interesting because you've covered so many dark subjects and i imagine it's gotta it's gotta be difficult for you like doing a movie like sinister and then going to church on sunday you know no it's not it's not difficult at all i mean you know there there is an unbelievable mysterious force for good in the universe you wake up in the morning you see the sunrise you watch the leaves turn and the wind blows and the leaves are blowing and your kids walk into school and their hair is tussling and they're giggling and you feel this unbelievable uh joy that exists in the universe and to turn a blind eye to the kids being bombed and the injustice in the world and terrible things that happen to good people and uh the unbelievable wealth beside that gets attributed to some terrible people you can't believe the world is not just there's these powerful mysterious forces at play in our daily life and we have to decide what how we're going to participate yeah and and and that participation requires an attitude of some kind and you know of what what wolf are you going to feed you know the wolf of greed and injustice and vanity and ego the benevolent um caring compassionate um truthful dignity you know those kind of words um and and so so that's where the religion comes into play and i have met some extremely religious people in my life that are extremely inspirational the discipline the care for others uh and i believe in the power of storytelling right i mean cargo and i've dedicated our life to it and i think giving people an imagination gives them strength that we can imagine and we can imagine that we can imagine that we can imagine a better world we can imagine things we we we have immense power creative power inside of us that is what i think why we're here to share with each other and and so i've dedicated my life to it and to your to your initial core question eddie um you know that as my good friend joe hill says that the guy who wrote the short story black phone um we've interviewed a couple times he wrote the short story black phone um it's about extreme sadism it's about extreme empathy so when you're making horror you're you're always empathizing and empathy is the core of any great religion uh and so they do go hand in hand i mean hell i was raised catholic as well um and you know the horror stories that were told every week i mean we go into church and we hear about a guy getting nailed to a cross yeah like you know there's a reason why catholic horror is its own subsection of horror because they just gave us a whole uh whole section of horror and they just gave us a whole book full of crazy stuff to to mine from so it really isn't hard to go from you know being someone working on this dark material yeah to to being that person of faith pretty ironic way for a carpenter to go i'll say that um the uh guys this has been a blast but i just want to ask i'm a fan oh man i'm a fan this is great you guys are wonderful i really appreciate you but i i gotta ask a couple questions do you think just because i got you here and i i never going to talk to you again um what as a comedian uh what what did you learn from robin williams what is something you learned from him spontaneity yeah present moment he was a um overused word is the word genius but he was a comic genius um his ability to prepare and then exist and be creative when you were with robin you weren't getting a reheated he was alive in the present moment and once you kind of feel that vibration he wasn't practicing his lines in front of the mirror he was responding to the given circumstances that were in in a given scene almost like you know the way these dogs would like a living human that it was very very powerful thing to witness as a young person that level of spontaneity yeah oh so who improved more him or white fat the uh i'm just the uh i watched white fang every day was a child thank you very much for that by the way if i could step in for one second we had a like week week two of sinister we have a scene where we have five kids standing outside we've got fog coming in and we've got a dog and scott yells action and the dog is supposed to growl at ethan and instead licks its chops and sits down and and uh me and scott just burst into laughter and we're laughing and ethan just walks up and he goes enjoy the laughing on this take i've done this before wait till take three and then the white fang stories came out oh my god i imagine that was so much hell the uh now john brown phenomenal i thank you for playing good lord bird that was one of my favorite series i've ever seen uh i thank you for playing good lord bird that was one of my favorite series i've ever seen such a good time you you were like at 13 you know you were way past 10 and somehow it was still believable uh playing someone like john brown in a time like this there's so much responsibility to that were you nervous or were you excited like how did it feel uh all of the above i understood what was at stake those when you're talking about this nation's history um it brings up a lot of feelings for a lot of people a lot of contrary feelings a lot of difficult our nation's history is extremely difficult to talk about um i was really lucky for those people that don't know james mcbride is an award-winning novelist he wrote the novel the good lord bird and he is one of the funniest most passionate loving you know you hear these stories about oh i don't know meeting tolstoy or something you know about you have this idea in your head what a great novelist would be like and his powers of empathy his education and his the depth of his character he just gave me so much confidence um he believed in me a hundred percent and he backed me a hundred percent and uh there were a lot of dangerous scenes in that show um and he really kind of believed that no good comes from not talking about these things and it and also you know he was telling the story of john brown as it would be told by red fox or richard pryor or something yeah yeah so it's not nobody you know he was telling the story of john brown as it would be told by red fox or richard pryor he he knows how to um put more than a spoonful of sugar in the medicine you know he he he knows how to deliver a story and make you see it new so that you're not being preached at you're not being talked down to you're not being told you're a bad person you're gonna absorb this story and john brown is a you know a really pivotal figure in american history and it's shocking to me how many people don't know who he is i know that's why i was so happy to see the series and thank you for having me on the show thank you for having me on the show thank you for having me on the show for being a big part of it and giving that much to the character. That was fucking awesome. Before we go, I just want to make a statement that horror is in a renaissance. Horror is on top. You guys are helping lead the way. And I thank you very much for keeping, in my opinion, the most important and prolific genre at the forefront of everyone's mind. This show that is available now, Midnight Radio, is a blast. I can't wait to finish it. I never listen to narrative podcasts. It's such a rare thing for me, but this is on the money. It's legit. It feels good. I really want everyone to go and listen to this. Art Bell ain't around no more. This is it. We're having some fun here. Good in there. But before we go, I have another podcast that I do called Movie Stories, and we're covering David Cronenberg right now. And you guys are inspirations to all of us. I would love to hear your favorite David Cronenberg moment or movie and something to kind of, you know, what gets you going about the Cronenberg? Well, my favorite, I'll jump in, Cargill, is that I was a young, aspiring actor. I was first falling in love with acting when Dead Ringers came out, you know, and Jeremy Irons was so. Do you remember that movie, Cargill? Oh, of course. I mean, what a great performance. And it started opening my eyes to about. How genre films could have unbelievable acting in them, you know, and. And I remember when Scott and I were first having our meeting about Sinister, it's kind of what Cargill was saying about empathy, about horror. And empathy is so interesting because Scott was telling me actors love to play vulnerable. Actors love to play sexy. Actors love to play tough, confident. Nobody wants to be scared. It's not a it's not a sexy position to take as a performer. And he was showing me he's talking about the here's Johnny scene in The Shining. And he was imagining that scene of Shelley Duvall didn't play fear. It's her it's her performance that makes Jack Nicholson great in that film. It's her response to here's Johnny. That makes here's Johnny so powerful. Right. And talking about the value of having empathy for those of us who experience fear. And most of us go through our life experiencing a tremendous amount of fear. And if we don't have empathy for it, we don't have empathy for ourselves in in a very profound way. And I don't know. I don't know how that directly relates to Cronenberg. But it makes me think about the power of those stories. I'm excited about Dead Ringers. Mine is it happened recently. I watched Videodrome for the first time for the first time. Well, here's I mean, that's part of the story is that I had it transposed in my head with another movie that I grew up with. And so I was always convinced that I had seen Videodrome and I was convincing it with the movie Looker. If you remember that I've never seen it. 1981 Michael Crichton movie. Really crazy bananas movie. But. Deals with a lot of the same themes as Videodrome. And so in my head, I'd seen Videodrome. And then I saw a scene from it in a in a YouTube video. And I was like, wait, I've never seen this movie. I've got to watch it. And I sat down to watch it and was so taken by how prescient a film it was where he was talking about the dangers of us like sinking into television and and media. But what he really did is he laid out about the brain rot that was going to happen in the future with the internet. And if you watch it as an allegory for the internet before the internet exists, it is such a profoundly amazing look at exactly all the things we're wrestling with right now that they're talking about in the movie just openly. And it's watching a guy essentially go down a QAnon rabbit hole and come out the other side completely nuts and not understanding what the ending of his own story is. Like, is he going? To die there? Or is he going to live on in Videodrome? We don't know. It's so interesting to see how Cronenberg took this philosophical idea and turned it into a perfect horror movie that here we are 45 years later, and it is absolutely relevant to our absolute everyday life. And so I have to see that as you're saying that I also just have another favorite Cronenberg moment. Do you guys remember when Jeff Goldblum in the fly, he's turning into fly and he, he spits up, he pukes in his hands. And he eats it. And then he goes, that's disgusting. He's like, is that gross? It's such a great moment. Oh man. Well, thank you fellas for coming by. Midnight Radio is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure you put your ears on it. Go watch Sinister if you haven't done it. Check out Sinister 2, the Black Phone series. We got the new Freddy Krueger in front of us. We're having a blast. Thank you so much, fellas, for coming by and talking to me here at the last interview on the left. Good luck to you. I'm not that you need it because this is sure to be a success. And thanks. We're really proud of it. Thanks for having us on your show. Hopefully I get to talk to you guys again sometime soon. All right. Bye.