‘One Battle After Another’ Is a Modern Masterpiece, With Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson!

This episode is presented by State Farm, life's full of decisions big and small, and sometimes you make movie ones, you can really stand behind. For example, I was wise enough to stick around through the mid credits during Ryan Kugler's sinners, and unlike my co-host Amanda, I got to see a very special sequence with a great buddy guy among other things. State Farm gets it. Making confident choices can make all the difference. That's why with the State Farm personal price plan, you can choose the right amount of coverage to help create an affordable price for you. Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan, like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. (upbeat music) - I'm Sean Fantasy. - I'm Amanda Davins. This is the big picture, a conversation show about one battle after another. Today's the day. Chris Ryan joins Amanda and me to discuss our most anticipated movie of 2025. It's called One Battle After Another. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by the writer, director, and star of that movie. Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps you've heard of these two men Leo and Paul, our patron saints of this podcast, a pleasure and an honor to talk to them. We talked about the long road to making the movie. Paul started writing it almost 20 years ago, why it appealed to Leo, why it took them so long to get together, how the movie evolved when they've decided to make it together, why Paul finally decided to make a movie set in the present day, something that we've talked about many times on this show. We talked about a whole lot more. I hope you will stick around for that conversation. I suspect you will, Leonardo DiCaprio now, a podcast guest. - Yeah. - So we are coming right on the heels of new heights. - Big kicks and new heights. - Very exciting programming reminder for the top of this episode. This is not the last conversation about One Battle After Another. - No, I mean, we're gonna be talking about it for the next six months, but on Monday. - On Monday, we're gonna do a mailbag, a One Battle PTA mailbag. So if you're listening right now, I assume you are going to see the movie or have seen the movie already. And if you wanna hear more about it, more about PTA, more about Leo, more about everything related to it, the box office, I think will be a topic of hot discussion for sure. Send us an email at [email protected]. - Yes, [email protected]. Can you alluded to something important, which is if you're listening to this episode, you either have seen the movie or you're planning on seeing the movie. I think we need to set some boundaries and some delineation right here up top. - We will spoil the movie in full. - Starting right now. - Yes. - So, you know, don't do the thing where you're like, "Oh, I know I'm gonna see it, but I'm gonna listen anyway." No, treat yourself, stop, pause, come back. And also if you're the person who's mad about spoilers and anyway, shape or form, take responsibility for yourself and hit pause 'cause I don't wanna hear it. - Also, even if you wanted to fast forward. - Yes, it is. (laughing) - If you wanted to fast forward to my conversation with Leo and Paul, that is also full of spoilers. And in fact, during the conversation, they were like, "We're really spoiling this, but." So, go see the movie. We encourage you to see the movie. The reason we encourage you to see this movie is 'cause this is a very special movie. And it is Paul Thomas Anderson's 10th feature film. It's produced by Paul, the late Adam Sumner, to whom the film is dedicated, the longtime assistant director and producer, and Sarah Murphy, stars Leo, Tiana Taylor, Sean Penn, Chase Infinity, Regina Hall, Benizo Del Toro, Wood Harris, Alana Heim, Tony Goldwyn, many other folks. Let's jump into it. Last night we saw it together. - Yes. - It was my third viewing. It was Amanda's second viewing. It was Chris's first viewing. - Pop my cherry. - Pop your cherry. Amanda, I will start with you. What did you think of one battle after another? - This is the movie of the year. - And the movie of the decade, probably. And I mean that both in the sense of, it is the best movie of the year and the best movie of the decade so far, but also is a movie of this moment and of these really fucked up five years that we in America have been living in in a, like a startling way, especially given how long PT has been working on it in one form or another, and how long it takes movies to make. It is jarringly, pressure and timely, and just feels like it is speaking to the things that torment us on our phone every day, in beautiful and alarming and upsetting and exciting and amazing ways. So I'm really glad everyone gets to see it now. It's amazing. - So you would recommend it to me. - I guess. - Okay, CR. So you had a slightly more challenging experience seeing the movie for the first time. You had a, a vertiginous-- - That was fun. - Those seats are there. We sat in the third row of the IMAX and City Walk and if they put those rows there, someone's gonna sit there. And so the movie has to play to the front and to the back. I will go see it again where I can get, like perhaps a different perspective, but didn't change how I felt about the movie. Interestingly, I went into this with the best movie of the decade, best movie of the year, the crowning achievement, et cetera, et cetera, various careers and it's a lot of hype to live up to and a lot of expectations to have. I don't think I've ever had that experience before. It's like, saw Oppenheimer pretty early. And I was like, that's great. I saw social network and nobody was talking about it and those terms that we talk about it now. To go into a film and be like, this better be the best film of the last 10 years is pretty impressive for it to live up to it, which it did, which it did. And I think to the specific perspective that I had on it, like in the screening, like it took me a second to get my sea legs with it. But it's just a transporting movie that transports you to where you are right now, which is an incredible feeling to have, to feel like there's something magical and amazing about real life is like the best thing movies can do. - Yeah, this is a very tactile movie made by human beings. It feels very much like a movie that could have come out in 2010 or 1985 or 1965 because there's no CGI really in this film. There's not, it's certainly very grounded in the real world, even though it has the familiar absurdist, satirical qualities that we expect from a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And it is exactly what you're describing, which is that it is a very politically salient movie. It speaks to the sort of like, how power works, right? More than anything. But it isn't only that. So it is like incredibly entertaining and exciting. And even though it is a two hour and 45 minute movie, which it is, it's a very long film. It's very propulsive and engaging and emotionally deep. - Yeah. - Which all of his films are, but very rarely in such conventional terms. And I mean that as a compliment, this is a movie movie. It's not a exploration of the human psyche. It has those components, but like this isn't the master. If you're going in expecting something. - Yeah, no, this has a mysterious, this is not as mysterious. - This has a plot, it has like a prologue and then characters and what's going to happen and dramatic reveals. And then, you know, in some lights, could almost be, parts of it could be seen almost like soap operat, adequately, but it still has room for the psychological analysis. You do wonder about every character. There are those weird, you know, flights of surrealism and horror that are also played for laughs. So it kind of has it all, but yeah, it's a movie. It's a movie movie. - It's way closer to road warrior than it is Nashville. In a great way. - Yeah. - Yes, but those are two good signposts. I think for the movie. 'Cause it is trying to accomplish both of those things in terms of its expansiveness, but also how the movie moves. Like this is a movie of literally moving from one physical destination to another over and over and over again. So to me, it's very much the culmination of the Paul Thomas Anderson project. Like this is, it being number 10 is I guess kind of interesting and being kind of a capstone on these three waves of his career that he's had. - Don't retire, Paul Thomas. - No, I don't get the impression he's planning to do that anytime soon. But, you know, we can talk about those, that what I think a lot of fans of his see as like the three different phases of his career, but he's never really attempted anything, not just this big, but in this style. His movies, if something is moving, it's usually the camera and not the people. You know, with the exception of Boogie Knights, where there's some high energy, he makes a lot of people talking in rooms films. You know, that's kind of his thing. And this is not that. This is something very, very different from that. So for him to attempt that without losing, I think those qualities in the first nine movies is part of what is so exciting to me. 'Cause one of the tenants of this show is that we like big Hollywood spectacle. You know, we like action movies and blockbusters and so for someone with his skillset and point of view, to bring his ethic to a blockbuster movie is incredibly exciting. - Yeah, but on steroids. It's not like there's just like one really virtuosic chase sequence where you're like, oh, wow, you know, you've never done that before and look, you can really do it. It is like two hours of that, of different set pieces, people in different places. And that's another, they are, in most PTA movies, they're in like a house or a townhouse or you know, and they're very nice houses and real places. But these are out in the world with like tons of extras and tons of explosions and just, you know, real actual practical giant things happening in volume. This sheer amount of it is sort of astonishing. - I was really blown away thinking about how he moves the camera in this movie. I think you alluded to it. There are scenes where really very little is happening. A character is in a convenience store and the camera is just speeding past all the stuff on the shelves and going over a shelf and then turning to see who's come in the door and then turning back to the character going out of an employee only door. And I was trying to think about like why he did what he did because I think that there's parts of boogie nights that when you go back and watch it, you're like, this guy's really fucking good. But like he's almost like, that's the point. I'm really fucking good. And I completely agree with you. One thing I feel, I don't feel that this movie is show offy. I think it does have all the moves. But, you know, those first couple of movies are real. Like I've seen every Martin Scorsese movie and let me show you how I can do it too. - Yes. - And while this movie has incredible energy, it doesn't feel like it's riffing on other people in quite the same way. I think he's very generous and says like, I was inspired by the battle of Algiers or the searchers or running on empty for this movie and that all is clear, but it's not the same as, I watched "Raging Bolt" 10 times in a row and then I made my movie. This doesn't feel like that at all. It feels, I wouldn't say it's like, oh, it's singularly his style either. I think it's because it is so generally entertaining. You're so interested in where the story is moving that you're not like, you don't have time to kind of ponder on the mechanical decisions. - What's the relationship between moving a camera or keeping a camera still in what it does the audience? And the only time in my first viewing of this like, all caveats aside, that I really noticed the camera still is when people felt safe. So it was either people in power who don't think anything can touch them or it was people who were about to be on the run in that moment of peace before their lives change. That's the only time I remember the camera ever sitting still. And then the rest of the movie is pushing these people out of the doors following them on rooftops in the cars, in all these different things. And it creates your emotionally identifying with characters who are doing things that you maybe could never imagine doing. And that's like what movies do that nothing else does. - So we should probably talk about the movies about. - Okay. - The log line is that Bob Ferguson, Leo's character, is a washed up revolutionary who lives in the state of Stone Paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited and self-reliant daughter, Willa, played by Chase Infinity. When his evil nemesis, Steve and Jay Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, resurfaces, Willa goes missing the radical scrambles to find her as both father and daughter battle the consequences of their past. Now, that description of the movie, which is sort of like the widely shared pots andopsis, elides the first 40 minutes of the movie, which is really interesting and has become more interesting as I've watched the movie a couple of times now. Because I think this is the part of the movie that people will probably love the least because it is the most impressionistic and it is not as focused on Leonardo DiCaprio. It's very much tale or story. She plays a character named Perfidia Beverly Hills, who is a radical revolutionary. I guess this is meant to be roughly 2008, 2009, 2010 when all everything is happening because the movie is contemporarily set. - Right, and it says 15 or 16 years later. - Yes, when it sprays us, yeah. - So this is-- - Wow, I can't believe that was 15 years ago, but anyway. - And I think that's kind of useful to think about too in terms of what was happening in the world at that time and why this character who is part of this radical group called the French 75, part of a wider resistance that engage in violent acts of revolution. And so this set up for the movie, and even just the very first thing that we see, which is the very first thing we see is her and him moving towards her. We see Leo's character who's known as ghetto pad and rocket man who's like a new joiner of the French 75, going to be closer to the movement, going to be closer to her, going to join whatever it is that they're cooking up. And the movie is very un-PTA, I would say. It is not as funny in the first 30 or 40 minutes as it becomes in the second half of the movie. It's much more tightly focused. It is, it reminded me a little bit of phantom threat in terms of how much time it's giving to the psychology of a woman in a movie, which is not really a signature of his work. And it's very interested in showing the how-to of revolution. The specific things that they do, blowing up banks, freeing migrants from a detention center, blowing out electric grids and dominating municipal spaces. And also like a very sensual part of the movie too, because Perfidia and ghetto pad are falling in love as they're doing this revolution. And they're fucking a lot. And there's like a thing that happens really early in the movie where you know that it's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie where one Perfidia engages Lockjaw, the Sean Penn character. And she like, embarrasses him slash, like, you know, insorceles him. - Yes, exactly, perfect word for what she does. She turns him on and leads him out. And after they have finished rating his detention center, she gets in the car and she kisses ghetto pad. And the way that they kiss, I was like, this is a PTA movie. It's like an open mouth tongue out kiss. It's not a movie kiss. And you can see that there's something really like right on the surface with Perfidia. She's like living out loud in a way that a lot of characters don't in a lot of movies like this. They're sort of like presenting the idea of revolution, but not actually showing it. And the movie then becomes this like portrait of her kind of dominating the space. You know, her kind of running the show, him living kind of in awe of her. - Right. - While they enact all of this stuff. So I mean, give me some reflections on the first third of the movie essentially. - Well, woven into all of that. And you mentioned what starts it, the initial scene between Stephen J. Lockjaw, Shod Pen, and Perfidia, which, you know, and it turns into like a site gag erection, but also with some very, very messed up undertones. And so throughout this prologue, this kind of extended montage of Pat and Perfidia being revolutionaries, falling in love, starting a family, like interwoven through, like Lockjaw keeps showing up, and Lockjaw keeps showing up, and you keep seeing his obsession, fetishization of Perfidia. And ultimately, like they do also wind up sexually entangled in a way that is like important to the plot, very upsetting, played like a little bit for, for shock value, maybe if not for laughs. I mean, there is an incredible needle drops to soldier boy when they are finally. - The charell song. - Yeah, making, doing whatever you want to call that, I don't know what you would turn into. - That's one of ideas, yeah. - Yeah, intercourse, but it's sort of like, but the question of power turns into play from the very beginning, and. - It's something Lockjaw thinks about a lot. - Yeah, and also something that Taylor thinks that Perfidia does. And you see it in Tiana Taylor's performance. Like in that first direction scene, the way her eyes kind of light up, and she realizes that something's going on, there's a bonfire scene where she has a lot, line she's talking about, like this pussy is for war. It's not for, like as she's pregnant, and then you cut to papying, like it's like, she doesn't even know she's pregnant. But so how she is both using her sexuality and how it is being objectified or taken advantage of being a generous term is also like a major part of what is going on with her and the Lockjaw. So she is figuring, and that's a different type of power, both for Perfidia's perspective, but also then what Lockjaw has on her or against her. So I, it's, I mean, it's fascinating and the way it resolves itself is not a resolution, but I think it will be like, I like it about it too. And I think it's not a, the movie doesn't present like a binary idea about Perfidia, you know. There is a lot of, there's shades of gray in terms of how, trying to understand how she really feels about certain things, whether she is actually turned on in any way of Lockjaw. - Well, I think it's also, there's, there's an element that I find fascinating, which is like, what does it take to be a revolutionary and how far do you take your beliefs and your principles, right? And so the reasons that she gives, like Perfidia has like more in common with like Neil McCauley than she does with anybody. Like, she's like, she's like, and she, when it's useful to her, it starts employing revolutionary rhetoric to be like, there's a new consciousness, you can't keep me at home with this baby, and you can't like own my, you know, like this is fragile. - Right, but she says, right after, she's talking about how, I carried her for nine months, and now he has this person to coup over, and it's like, I'm not even the number one in the world. - She feels jealous over her child. - Yeah, she says, you know, it's like insightful, and, you know, but like another complication in terms of the power dynamic, and she got power from being like the, the number one woman in charge, and then there's someone else on the scene, who's very small and demanding. - Yeah, and I think, I don't think the movie judges her, you know, I think, and I think the decisions she makes because of the position that she's put in, and you know, as the movie goes on, we see her trying to kind of break free of the expectations of any woman, especially a woman who's had a child, where the expectation is that she stay home and take care of her family. And Pat is very comfortable, even at, let's say he's in his early 30s, entering into like a more domesticated phase of his life, and she's not, she doesn't want that, and so she continues to go out into the world, and she goes to rob a bank, and something terrible happens, and she shoots and kills someone during this bank robbery, and it leads to breath taking chase sequence. - Yeah. - I think one of the most accomplished things PC has ever done, he's talked about the French connection, huge waves of that in this movie, very exciting moment, very scary moment for the characters, and it ultimately leads to her being captured, and when she's captured, she has to make a decision about what she's gonna do, and she chooses to, she's forced to, to save her own life, essentially, rat out the French 75, and we see a lot of her cohort either get killed or arrested in a really bracing sequence, and Lockjaw thinks that he has commandeered control of her. - I guess it's worth mentioning that Lockjaw represents this like shadowy government agency called MKU, which is like a highly militarized police force that seems to concentrate a lot on immigration, but now it seems to be rolling rogue through the country and doing whatever it wants. - He uses narcoterrorism and a lot of other concerns to exert his power, and when she makes this choice to go and to win this protection, that's the moment when the movie starts to shift gears. The first 30 to 40 minutes with the exception of the funny stuff that Sean Penn is doing. - Right. - It's quite serious, and it's like kind of an exact, it's like it's a portrait of a revolutionary basically, and it feels a lot like, a lot of 60s and 70s movies that were about these kinds of figures and these kinds of ideas. Part of what is interesting about this, and I just haven't thought about this as much, but seeing it a couple times has continued to push to the front of my mind, this is an invention. We don't have a lot of examples in our culture in the last 25 years of violent revolutionary acts. There have been some attacks, like we saw how to blow up a pipeline a couple of years ago that was inspired by some real acts of. - We don't have to have a weather underground that we're aware of. - There's people who are rampaging, not rampaging, but doing their thing. - And I bring that up for a couple of reasons. One, obviously the movie has been inspired by Thomas Pinchin's Vine Land, which is a movie set in the 1980s, very much about Reagan's America, about 1960s revolutionaries kind of contending with their former lives, what they've done, what that represents to them. To transport the movie to the present time is really interesting, 'cause all of the ideas of power, the way that Lockjaw's character works, and the way that the shadowy secret group that we will soon meet in the movie operate, all feels very. Now, it just feels exactly like how we imagine decisions are made online the scenes, but what Perfidian, her group, dude, doesn't feel as now. It almost, I'm not sure if you could say, it feels like a wish, that might be casting too strong a notion, but it feels like, it's a very, it's an oddly hopeful movie about this kind of action, even though there's a lot of terrible and sad and tragic things happen to the characters throughout it. And I'm fascinated by the choice to make a movie that is about standing up to power. - Yeah, well, it's still, it does put it in the past, even though, the Perfidia section is a prologue, right? And so then the majority of the movie and the characters are dealing with the after effects, and also many of them that they're not in the game anymore, that they have failed in one way or another, or they've lost the fight as the sister of the Brave Beaver, says, so, I think. I didn't bump on it as much. I mean, you're completely right that we don't, I'm not aware of the weather underground of the current day. That's, I'm not on it. - I'm sure there are people who imagine themselves as such. - I'm not on that particular dark web, but. - You don't only come every day in here news about a bank getting blown up by revolutionaries. That's not the common political movies right now. - But the movie still does set it in, even though we can remember that past, that it's kind of trying more to deal with the aftermath than the people, the younger generations, and the people trying to make sense of something that has failed, which I would argue we are very much living in. - And also then the movie's not particularly explicit about ideology, or the ideology it's explicit about is like ideology that is like transcends like politics. It's like racism or counter like revolutionary behavior. - Is she calls about an abortion clinic? - Yes. - At some point. - In that montage, there kind of shows some ideas. - For sure some ideas. I totally understand, but I just mean like, once you move into the second half of the movie, it's much more almost mythical than it is political, I think. You know? - Yeah. - And some to me. - And also much more comic. And because of that, it feels more absurdist. Again, with the exception of some of the lockdown stuff, the first 40 minutes of the movie is pretty grounded. - Mm-hmm. - In terms of the tone. - The opening scene is Tiana Taylor on a bridge overlooking a detention camp at the U.S. Mexico border. - Yeah. - And it's like, we have seen those images, you know, very recently. And there is a lot of it in the first 40 minutes of like the, you know, militarized police in major cities. I was trying to figure out like which city is this that is being overrun right now, that I have also seen on the news being overrun. So it, yeah, it is very much, if not pulled literally from headlines, then reflective of the news. - The second and third acts of the movie are fascinating, very crowd cruising. The movie jumps, as you said, 15 years into the future where Willa and Bob, which are the new identities of Ghetto Pat and his daughter Charlene, they move to Backton Cross, California. - Which is supposed to be like Eureka, like Northern California, yeah. - I think, you know, some of this movie takes place in Sacramento, some of it takes place in kind of like the middle of this state. Again, it's a part time sentence in movie, it's a California movie in many ways. The movie is all about the topography of California. And they're hiding out, and they've been hiding out for 16 years, and trying to avoid becoming discovered. And then of course they become discovered. - Yeah. - This is a movie, this is my opportunity to say, this is very much a dad-daughter movie. And that is not surprising. Paul Thomas Anderson has three daughters. I think all three of his daughters are teenagers. You can feel a lot of the inspiration of this movie being about the conversations that fathers have with their daughters. And you see that up front at the beginning of the second act, because one of the, to me, one of the most entertaining and affecting scenes in the movie is Bob and Willa, Willa, coming down hard on her father after a long break, in which he's been going out drinking with the boys. - Trying to achieve steely Dan sound with some, yeah, he's trying to get those tubes. - And then she, and she's also, she has a school dance to get to. So her dad is, you know, trying to, they're trying to pair in each other. - Let's do the math on that. So do we think he just slept till 6 p.m.? Like what happened? - Well, I did notice the second time that this school dance is happening during, or happening during daylight hours. - Yeah, right. - Like even when, - But could it have been like 5 p.m.? Like it seemed like he slept pretty late that day. - Sure. - It's possible. - It has a long hours. - Yeah. He got home around three or four, he said. So, you know, but like the bathroom is a lifestyle, not just a time of day thing for him. So. - That's a good point. In that scene, you know, chase infinity, we saw her in a presumed Dennis at the TV show. And this is her first movie. And her job in this movie is to go toe-to-toe with Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, and Sean Penn. So that's a tough job. - She's also has to be an action star for some of it. Has to credibly hold the gun, has to credibly run away, has to credibly fight grown men. - Got to figure out how to get. - Zip tied hands. - Out of like the zip tied thing, which I was really ingenious. I was like, wow. That's, this is. - She knew right what to do as well. - Where do the Amanda Dobbins drives a Dodge Charger with zip tied hands challenge? - It just really, really turned me into the real lot there at one point. But yeah, no, just the leg reversal thing. I was like, this is practical knowledge. I'm glad I have this now. - One of the things that we don't get explicitly clarified, but that you can assume is that Bob has shared his ideology with his daughter, not just the information about how to keep her safe and keep her anonymous, but like how they see the world or at least how the French said about it. - This is the running on empty influencer, whatever. But this idea, we're off the grid. There's like a really, I think, lovely bit of this movie that's about how, just because you're not on the internet, doesn't mean you're not connected to a community. And like, Bob, obviously, even though he's something of a hermit, like goes to bars, knows the Beniciel del Toro character. Like as part of this community and his daughter wants to be maybe part of a bigger world. You know, and both in terms of what Bob used to do, and also just having friends and going to dances and wanting to be out in the world through her phone. - One of the things I like about it too is just the way that most daughters are smarter than their dads and they know it and that that's a huge part of this. Like, Bob is such a burnout. He's a real, one of the running jokes of the movie is how he's completely fried his brain. So he can't remember anything, especially when he really needs to remember something. And he also wants to be progressive. He wants to be like, he wants to have an empowered daughter. That's important to him. And so when she starts scolding him, he wants to say like, stand up for yourself. That's right. - You should tell me what you said. - I am. - You know, like I did fuck off, I'm just serious. - Which is very amusing. And obviously like, she reacts to it. But she's like any 16 year old girl. She's like, I hate my parents. They're so annoying. Why won't they get out of my shit? - Right. - But that. - Also she has some points. 'Cause he came home at four p.m. about, you know. - And he's emitting to drinking and driving, you know. And he's like, I know how to drink and drive. You know. And then to me, the absolute funniest part of the movie is when her friends arrived to pick her up for the dance. - Sure. - It's a classic, you know. - And Leo greets them. And I can't do justice to what's up homey, but the entire what's up homey experience where he talks to Bluto is so good. And it does, to me, the movie kind of like goes into a second gear once that scene happens. - Yes. - Because it feels like it finds its comic sensibility in a real way. And if Leo gets activated in the movie in a way that he is really for the most part not been up until that point. - Yeah. That's where, that's where like, that's the best actor I've ever seen. Rick Dalton shows up. - Yes. - Yeah. - He kind of like running that whole space. - Well, and it is also when like the heart and the emotion of the movie shows up, the first 40 minutes are incredibly like upsetting and involving and I was like technically accomplished. And you know, there's like an amazing action set pieces. And but then you get to this moment and you know, you're like, oh, he's a girl dad, you know. And but there is, to your point about, there's a hope in this movie. There is some, there's real emotion and it becomes evident once Leo is in a bathroom screaming at people. - Yeah, and their connection is the engine. You know, the idea of him being so protective of her, there's this great little plot device in the movie of these kind of transmitters. These responders that they're given, that Leo is given right before he goes off on the road to go to back to and cross eventually. I love that actor who gives him the transponders. - Yeah. - Who put the Howard Summer Bill character. - Oh yeah. - Who like is never in movies. He's in this great movie, "Froundland" that Ronald Bronstein made some years ago and he's a composer. And that character who creates these transponders and eventually shows up a little later in the film in the present day is a classic Paul Thomas Anderson thing where I'm like, did he just remember that that guy is alive? - A lot of T. - There's a guy in this movie who plays like basically like Sean Penn's characters and Terragator who has a single IMD credit and it's one battle after another and he is one of the scariest parts of this movie. And I just don't know how he does this. - Over and over again. - The guy's in the Christmas adventures and we'll talk about, but like you're just like, where did you fucking, how did you come up with the roulette wheel that gave you these three dudes? - Yes, there's a lot of examples in this movie. You can go through everyone, honestly. It's a podcast, we have time. But he hands his daughter this transponder and we realize that her life is kind of hard because he is obsessive about protecting her. - He's paranoid, also. - As she says in the car, they're driving away. - Yes, and he is like really, it's wearing her down as she's entering her teenage years. And I think actually Paul might have said this when we spoke, but just the idea of like, maybe for the first 12 or 13 years of her life, she didn't realize how weird this was. - Yeah. - But she's starting to realize now. - Is that true Paul? - It's very much so. - It's very much so. - I love that idea and the story of her trying to find a way to break free figure out how to be her own person. But she's kind of bound by the actions of her parents, you know, and that she can't actually be as free as she wants to be in the world, which is really interesting, you know, common condition about. - Yeah, here we are all all are. And I think it's funny that Leo has is doing this part to me. He's never been a parent to an older kid in a movie before. He turned 50 years old last year. And he's-- - He was born sometime in the '80s according to this movie. And he's like, "I clocked that." - He's playing down a little. Well, he says that, he's a police officer. We don't actually know if he's even telling me the truth there. But this is a new step for him, I think, to be playing, he's played parents before, but not like this. And there's a certain kind of like desperation and goofball-ness, like looser-ness. - Yeah. - But many of the dads I know, like instantaneously become losers when they become dads, like you kind of like seed something. - Not you though. - You just love about that. - I mean, I was a loser well before I was a dad. But I just think this performance is really special. It's been part of a lineage of movies that he's now done. For roughly the last six or seven years, we talked about the Wolf of Wall Street on the show this week. And then if you go from there to what's pun time in Hollywood, which Chris just mentioned, then the Rick Dalton energy don't look up. Killer sort of the flower moon. These movies are all like really nervy, comic, kind of like goofball, but also deeply dramatic stories. - It's also an interesting, it's interesting to think about like him thinking of himself in this way. - Yeah. - Because it's, sometimes you see a picture of him and respectfully like he does have a little bit of a, of a Bob energy. You know what I mean? When he's got like a V-neck white t-shirt on and he's like vaping with a hat pulled down. - And then he's on a jet ski. - And then there are times where he puts on a tux, and you're like, well, you win. - Yeah, there's a carry grand, yeah. - And what he wants to be. I mean, he hasn't done carry grand a while, you know. - Sure. - It's basically been like, I want to hide it. I want to have a punch. I want to be stupid. I want to be insecure. I want to be in a bathrobe the entire movie. It's interesting that that's what he is interested in. - But still like, you know, vaping on a jet ski or like playing tennis, which with his younger girlfriend, which I think was this summer's activity. Leo loves the summer much like myself. That's still like very far from the dad energy that he is ringing to this. And there is something so like, I mean, he's just a really good actor. It's like deeply felt like emotional. And you're just like, oh, like, no, you have the dad stuff. Like you really do, you care. And that scene in the car when he's talking about how he doesn't know how to do her hair. And the scene at the, you know, the very end with the hot, like it is, it's so moving. And there's a softness to it that I can move with. - Leo had. - There is. - That is so essential to making this movie work. And then I've never seen before. - Yeah, and I also think that one of the most powerful things the movie does is just say like, it doesn't really matter. Like, it doesn't really matter like the title is incidental to the behavior in terms of like people's family familial relationships or how they treat each other. And it's like if Bob treats her like a daughter, then he is her dad. Into why that is. But like this movie essentially moves from this moment where, you know, Willow goes to her dance. This is where the movie leaves fucking earth. And you will like, don't leave. - You can go to the bathroom and do anything. Just stare at it because this is one of the best sustained pieces of filmmaking. I've literally ever seen in my life. And it just turns into the fucking inverted version of the searchers told from the humanities. And it's like this maniac chasing down this family. And it's unreal. - One thing, one last dad thing I want to note that I think is important is like pretty relevant to this whole movie is Paltemps Anderson is the daughter of biracial children. I'm going to use the father of biracial children. And like this whole movie is very much a movie about black women and black women existing in the world. And his experience, I assume, as a white dad, trying to understand how to help his kids get through the world. - I do also think that there's a little bit of his wife is Maya Rudolph. And there's a Katie Weaver profile of Maya Rudolph, like 2018, I think. But I always remember because Maya Rudolph's mother Minnie Ripperton died pretty early in her life and has the detail of Maya Rudolph's father not knowing how to do her hair. And that being like I think, like in one detail, like explaining what that lost means at that age to a young black woman. And so then that is showed up literally lying for a line. And you know that there's also absent mother in that. So it's just he's pulling from not his experience, but people very close to him. - There's no doubt. This is an incredibly personal movie for him. And it's risky to kind of draw conclusions based on people's biographical details. But there's some things that are just so over that you can't help but ignore them. The other thing too is that one thing that we joke about a lot on the show is the generation gap and the way that ideas are a little bit different for people who are 10, 15, 20, 25 years younger than you are. And this is a version of it in politics. And in particular ideologies and the way that parents as they get older, even if they fancy themselves revolutionary types, just turn a little more inward. Get a little bit more focused on their own shit. Sometimes they turn conservative, but even if they don't turn conservative politically, they turn conservative personally, or they just become more nostalgic. They don't think about progress in the same way. And that having kids or even just encountering young people can really be like a confrontation of your values. So hard to make a movie about that. And this movie's very much about that. Because of how strong Chase Infinity's character is. Even though she's not like banging a gavel, explaining how the world works to her father for two hours. - Right. - You sense that there is a real tension. And so far as she gets herself a cell phone, even though he's told her not to. Like she is seeking a certain kind of independence. - Yeah, I think there's like a very funny exchange about they then pronouns that like he's just like, "I'm just trying to be polite." - Yeah. - Yeah. - Just like it's they, them, it's not that hard. - I think that it's basically what this movie illustrates really well is that when you're old enough to have any wisdom, you lack the willpower to change anything. And when you're young enough to have the willpower, you don't really have any wisdom and people get hurt. And I think that that's depicted very well in this film. - Yeah, I think also just beyond like the difference in ideology between generations, there's this movie's inflected with a real sense of like we are not, we didn't do anything like we didn't fix it. And so now this generation, and you know, I think we all feel this way about our boomer parents, but now we're also having kids. And it's like, okay, well, what we're handing down to you, we like we've completely failed to change it. And in any way, shape, or form. And like, you know, Jack's generation or our children's generation, like know it. And so like Chase's Infinity's character, Willa is a little, like yeah, you did, like you fucked up. And I, like I don't want to deal with this. And all this is for nothing. And now I have to figure out how to do things my way. - I think it's really insightful. It's definitely a huge part of the movie. And it's, I was driving into work today. And I usually listen to podcasts 'cause I have to listen to a lot of podcasts. And I was like, I'm just gonna listen to music. I want to have like a clear head. I want to have just a nice emotional upbeat drive. And I didn't want to have to even have to make a decision. So I went to made for you on Spotify. - Oh, boy. - And I clicked hip-hop mix. - Okay. - And the first song of the play was "Bombs Over Bagdad." - Okay. - "How Kess Bombs Over Bagdad." And it hit me that there's not a lot of popular art that is about radical politics and rebellion. There is a lot of art about that. Not a lot of stuff that gets popular. And this is an attempt to make a popular work of art about these ideas. "Bombs Over Bagdad" is not the anarchist cookbook or anything. It's not like a guide to how to feel about the world, but it is very much a song about the chaos of that era when "Outcast" was making music. This movie is the same thing. This movie about the chaos of being alive at this time and thinking generationally about the decisions you've made and how they affect the people in your life as you get older, which is really deep. But also what you just said is true, which is that once Willa leaves the house and she goes to the dance, the movie grows wings and starts flying. And you can think about all the ideas if you want to, but you really don't have to, to enjoy yourself. Because then it just becomes an abduction, chasing, retrieval movie, which is super duper exciting. And the mechanics of how he does it, like we can talk through each step. But I was impressed, you know, it sounds stupid to say that, but I was impressed by how he pulled it off. Even though this is my favorite director, even still I was like, I didn't know he had-- - It was new, we haven't seen him do all these things. That doesn't mean that he can't do them, but you are just like, "Huh!" And there is also, it's not just one chase sequence. I mean, we've described like the first hour of the movie, now, right? - Yeah. - So it's another hour and 40 minutes of people and cameras like on the move. - Yeah. It's an element to the second half of this movie. And I wish I had a more, like, maybe unique comparison point, but it made me think a lot of Nolan, Christopher Nolan movies, because what he does is he takes the real world, and so there's a huge sequence in a town, and then there's a huge sequence on the road. And what he does is he takes these like, pretty like, recognizable things, and then you're like, "Did you spend a billion dollars building out a tunnel system in this area?" Or, "How did you orchestrate a rooftop chase like this, while there's also a riot going on in the streets?" And that ability to see what we see every day, and then imagine like, "What's five layers deeper than that?" And imagine like, "What if you went through that window and then out that door and then into this other room that's over here?" Is that feeling like you are actually inside of a world rather than watching someone paint something or construct something? - Yeah, there are two things about that. One, you write that there is like a level of world building that is really big. So that allows for in the storytelling, this really great experience of intercutting and simultaneous action, 'cause you've got these key characters who are separated from each other. And what's happening to, there's not like one guy sitting in a room waiting for something, and things are happening to another person. - Right. - They're both on a kind of, you know, separate track journey. Three different, 'cause it's Sean Penn's character is also. - Sure. - Yeah. - You know, he's trying to lay siege. Bob is trying to find his daughter and Willa is being exported out. And that allows for the movie to not just be like, rolling down a hill the whole time, but for all of these things to be happening in the periphery and all matter to the story too, which you're right, Chris, that's really, really hard to do. And it's like a huge feat of editing too. - It made me think about like how when you watch Dunkirk, you're like, "God, you go inside the boat." And then you go inside of like the cafeteria, like the mess hall of the boat. And then you know where the mess hall is when the boat gets sunk and how like hard it is for them to get out. And that same thing happens in the back-to-cross battle, essentially, where you're like, "Oh, I understand how this store turns into a dormitory," which also turns into like an underground railroad for immigrants. And like it just all unveils itself to you as you run through these doors. - Yeah, let's talk about that because at the big switch over to 16 years later, we very quickly meet Sergio, Sensei Sergio, who has been a DCO Del Toro's character, who is a karate instructor. And we very quickly come back to him because Bob needs his help. Bob needs his help because Lockjaw has laid siege on his home. That leads to Bob escaping through a tunnel, one of many tunnels in this movie. And he realizes that his daughter is, if she has not been abducted, she is in big trouble because he's received a call from the wider resistance. I guess that's what we're meant to believe is that there is a larger apparatus of French 75 that have turned into whatever it's turned into. - It's a point of contention. And it's not really clear who Comrade Josh is answering the phone on behalf of. - Better name Josh. - Yeah, better name Josh. That whole sequence where Lockjaw is trying to find him and smoke him out with a tear gas. And then he needs to escape through that tunnel that presumably he has built into his home some years ago and then race through the convenience store and then get on the pay phone, which is the moment that is seen in the first trailer with Ryzen Shine. And that whole exchange, - What time is it? - Doing phone acting, yeah. His skip is amazing, amazing. And his performance in this movie talking into phones is remarkable. Like some of the best stuff is just him on a phone. - Some of the best stuff is him needing to charge his phone. (laughing) - There's no more different places that he plugs in that one. - So good. - It's really, really funny. - He does eventually find his way to Sergio who helps him to transport him. And Sergio also needs to jump into action because Shawn Lockjaw's team has invaded the high school and invading the high school has triggered this sense of panic in the community. All these places are being raided. This seems like it's a very progressive community. - It's a sanctuary city. And that World War III is starting to happen in the streets. There is a direct confrontation with police forces and while that's happening, everyone is scurrying around trying to clear out all their illegal activity. This is happening simultaneously to Bob who's trying to get to a safe harbor and to charge his phone to get in touch with his daughter as soon as he, or at least to get in touch with the French 75 so he can figure out where his daughter is headed. - Yeah. - So I talked to our friend Wesley Morris about this and he pointed something out to me after the first time I'd seen it, which is that that sequence when Sergio takes him up to that building where all of the migrants are being transported, protected, given safe harbor. - Yeah, yes. - The patience that the movie has during that scene is amazing because it makes a real effort to humanize as many people as possible because Sergio keeps introducing Bob to all these people, telling them their name, making him look at them, making him like respect that they are alive. But you know those who are amazing in this movie, we can talk about why, but that decision in the face of Bob's chaos, right? Bob is freaking the fuck out. And all he wants to do is yell at Comrade Josh and get the rendezvous point so that he can go find Willa. But he has to look at all of these people, these older family, this young mother. - The toddler. - Yes, a little kid. He's like, I noticed this time Leo touches the little kid, the way that you do when you meet a little baby and you just like touch the finger. And all of that patience and the super zen quality that Sergio has in that scene, while Bob is moving in. - And what is he saying, ocean waves? Like I'm trying to calm him down. It's such a good choice, such a human choice in the movie, which then leads to another-- - He also keeps giving him Modelas. - Sure, yeah. - And it's just a great, like, it's still kind of a buddy comedy. It's still, there's elements of that where it's just like, we can stop to have a beer, though. - Totally. One of the movies that PCA is inciting is Midnight Run. And they have a little bit of Midnight Run energy between them, you know, the still waters and the chaos beside him. And then the conversation with Comrade Josh. - Sure. - In Sergio's apartment. - I'm calling it a Greyhawk? - I'm calling it a Greyhawk 10. - Oh, Greyhawk 10. - That's right. - Is it you're doing this? - He's like, yeah, I'm doing this. - And you get to Supervisor on the phone. And his Supervisor is played by the R and B singer Dijon. And Dijon, who's got like, died Grey hair. I think he's like 28 years old. - He gives him the clue with my-- - This is the most Paul Thomas Anderson making a whole movie. Where he's like, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob. - You're gonna know. - You're gonna know this question. You're gonna know this question. This isn't what time is it. You're gonna know it. What's my favorite type of pussy? And Bob, in less than five seconds, is like Mexican hairless. It's the only time he's cogent in the whole movie. Is he instantaneously room it for members, this inside joke clasped for the story. - It kind of sounds like a cat, too. It's just like, perfect, right? So that allows him to learn that, in fact, he's headed to the sisterhood of the brave beaver. - The supervisor is like, apologize, mean it. - To Conrad Josh, it's just really, really, really funny. - He's like, this is a war hero. - He says to Conrad Josh, I love that sequence so much. I love Leo in that whole sequence. And then that leads to another amazing chase. You mentioned the rooftop foot chase. - Oh yeah. - It honestly has my favorite shot. I think of the movie, which is the, all the smoke and light coming off of the street. And the kid with the skateboard, like leaping over, like a roof and Leo has to climb the ladder to get up. - Yes. - And just following those skaters. And it's just like, I watch a lot of TV where there's a lot of critiquing and nitpicking of the mechanics of doing something and it's like, why did this character do this or do that? I love that he puts real people in action sequences and that Leo falls off the roof. It's the fucking funniest side guide you'll see. Like for a second, I was just like, this didn't really happen. - It's so unexpected. - Because he's making his getaway and you're like, your revolutionary soldier and these awesome skateboarders are leaving you with freedom. And then he fucking falls off the roof. - It's just like a beautiful shot down the tree. - And I don't know how they did it. - I have no idea. - It's like his three times, and he's in the shot. - Yeah. - There's no cut. And it's down through this tree. Is he like falls off these branches, lands on the ground, stands up, walks five feet and gets tazered. And it's so awesome. Which I also then actually, if I don't mean to run ahead, but like that leads to honestly, one of the most beautiful sequences in the movie, which is the hospital. - It's wonderful. Yeah. - Is when like then the, like kind of, the community now, the community, kind of kicks in. And they say, oh, he's diabetic, even though he's not. And so he needs medical attention. And then immediately the nurse is like, - And that nurse who runs in and you're gonna, you know, go through this. And he just says, right now. And she just like very, like, calmly like, yes, right now. And then leads. It's wonderful. - Those two actresses, the one who receives him and then the nurse who sends him out are so good in such small moments. There's 10 performances like that in this movie. The people you see for a minute, and then they're gone. Before we get too far, we should probably talk about the Christmas adventures. - Oh, yeah, that's right. 'Cause we could skip over. - They are. - Just a tough one. - I guess we should also talk a little bit about Aksha. Just in general. - Yeah. And Sean Penn, because there's such an important part of this movie. The reason that Lockjaw is attempting to apprehend Willa and kill Bob is because he has been asked to join a secret society. He's been invited to a hotel room by characters played by Tony Goldwyn and James Downey. James Downey, the famed SNL writer. Of course, once appeared and there will be blood showing up 20 years later in a PTA movie. And these two men want to invite him to join this secret club called the Christmas Adventures Club. - Yeah. - Introduced with the, what are you doing New Year's Eve Needle Drop? - Yes. - Which is really. - So good. - As soon as it hit, I was like, okay, this is what's happening here. - Yeah, they're greeting as Hale St. Nick. - Hale St. Nick. - Yeah. - Tony Goldwyn, marshalling the wonderfully malevolent force that only he can marshal. - Great sport. - From a time to kill, or not time to kill, the Pelican brief to go scandal. - Yeah. - Yeah, just always a great asshole in a scene. - Yeah. - And they explain the lockjaw that they want him to apply to start the initiation process for this very secret club, which is clearly a white supremacist organization that is attempting to eliminate the maniacs, haters, and punk trash as Sandy. Jim Downey's character identifies, which is what we're also trying to eliminate here on this podcast. - That's all we're trying to do. (laughing) - No more lunatics. - Yes. - And they're all lunatics, you know. - And lockjaw, who we don't know anything about, except for the fact that he loves black women because he has told this explicitly to Bob's face. - Yeah. - And has had an affair, a coerced affair with Perfidia, and works for this government organization. These are the only things we know about him. - Well, we know a lot from his physical demeanor. We know a lot from his haircut, which is, I mean. - Shaved on the sides. - Yeah. - We've grown long down in front and combed down. - Whispered. - Whispered. - And he has a very specific walk. - Yes. - And. - His posture is stick up the S. - Yes. - And also injured at some point. - Yes. - And veins visible just about everywhere in a pretty alarming way. - I have not heard Sean Penn say this, but I would be stunned if he was not inspired by Vincent McMahon. This is Vincent McMahon. - Oh. - Oh. - This is Vincent McMahon walks. This is how his arms look. This is how his hair looks and his cut at times. - He also reminded me of Michael Flynn. - Totally. - Okay. - There's huge parts of that for sure. Sean Penn, something I keep hearing about his performance in this movie is that this is the movie that will remind people why Sean Penn is Sean Penn. Because it's been a very long time since he's given a performance. - Right. - One that a lot of people have seen. Two that has been acclaimed and three that is outside of the context of the kind of chaos of his life. - Right. - You know? - Like interviewing a chop-up and stuff. - Yes, exactly. - Yeah. - Thank you for your service. (laughing) - He was in Lakershe Pizza in a small part. And PTAs always said fast times is one of his favorite movies of all time and when he saw Sean Penn, he was like, "I'll follow that guy anywhere. I love that actor." And he's an actor who like, I would say roughly until about 2015, other actors venerated so deeply. Like young actors would be interviewed and they would say, "I just want to do what Sean Penn does." You don't hear that as much as you used to. - I kind of moved into like making either taken rip-offs or not ill-advised, but just unsuccessful, independent acting showcases. - He directed a couple, he directed like an action movie. He's had a kind of a curious decade or so. - Yeah. - There's a case this is his best performance in Scarlett Osway. Like this is the most scariest, the most immersive. Like he disappears into the park. Like that's the thing that people used to say that he did. He disappeared into parts you couldn't see. All of the little ticks and the actual physicality of it. - Yes, he's so gestural, his voice, you know, he looks like a piece of burnt beef jerky. - Yeah, really, really, very gross, yeah. And he just gets gross or looking as the movie goes on intentionally. But he is, they do a lot, shout out to the hair and makeup department of this film, but he is really committed to using his body. - Disfigured in the cause of lightwashing his past. - Yes, basically. - Which is I think a big theme about the people who are in power who are trying to control other people is their own. - Yeah. - You know what it's about their shit. - Yes, they're hidden shames about the things, the way they really feel about things, but are afraid to tell anybody. They're letting anybody know. And it's tried and true, but very effective. And the Christmas Adventurers Club stuff is so good because it's the most pinchonian part of the movie in my opinion. - But it's not, you've read, Vineland. - It's not in the book. - It's not in that book. Because the first time I saw it, I was like, is this pinchon? - It's spiritually pinchon. - Yes, but it is very, it's a nice marriage of the two. - The only thing in the book that is really the same is this triangle, like love triangle slash, like familial triangle that evolves over the movie as far as I can tell. Like obviously the sentiment of the characters and the idea of revolution. - Yeah, yeah. - But, and you could tell the movie would not exist without Vineland, but a lot of the logic is, like time before. - It's the biggest pinchon. - And all these people. - Right. - Yes, yes. - This episode is supported by FX is the lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke. Allow us to introduce you to Lee Raybahn, a quirky journalist slash rare bookstore owner slash unofficial truth seeker who is always on the tail of his latest conspiracy. This time his most recent expose, puts him head to head with a powerful family that rules Tulsa, meaning only one thing. He must be onto something big. FX is the lowdown. All new Tuesdays on FX stream on Hulu. Lockjaw, because he is being asked to join this initiation and knows that he's going to have to go through a fairly thorough vetting process, needs to clean out his past. He needs to get rid of, he needs to find out if he is the father of Willa. He needs to get rid of Bob. He needs to close open business. - Right. - So that he can join this club. - And I say one of the more bracing commentaries on like contemporary politics and the militarization that we see going on in this country is how much of his own personal animus is animating like national policy. So he's able to just be like, yep, this is a big narco terrorism and sexual human trafficking hub and it's not. You know, and he's just like, so we're just going to have to go in fucking Delta Force and wipe it out. - He literally says to his lieutenant, make me a reason to have to go to back cross. Which is, I think how many people feel like national politics and the military state operates sometimes, you know, that there are, there are conveniences. I think especially in the aftermath of W's Iraq war, the like incredible cynicism about the way that these decisions are made that has been coursing through the country for the last 20 years. - And lack of oversight and lack of, and just the amount of power and tactical force available to just the people who you've never heard of who can just do whatever they want. - They take over a small say. In fact, during that protest sequence, there's a funny chilling moment where they say, activate Eddie Van Halen and a guy jumps out of a military vehicle and he's got a Molotov cocktail, but he's dressed like a protester. And he throws the Molotov cocktail at the police to incite the violence and then that leads to tear gas and rubber bullets and the police moving forward with their shields and it's terrifying stuff, but it's terrifying and it's happening alongside of Bob being funny. Yeah, you know, and the movie is able to walk this tight rope of this huge Sean Penn performance of this really comic, nervy Leo performance of Chase Infinity's performance, which is very steely, you know, non-comic at all, she's very pretty much under threat the entire movie. And it's all like, he spins the plates effectively. Again, I can't overstate how hard this is to do in a movie. Like most movies like this have to be one thing or the other. You know, they have to be incredibly like hard bitten and straight or they have to be really over the top and melbrooksy and he's synthesized these two genres types like so amazingly well. Where should we go from here? - All right, so we did Christmas adventures and we did, we do see them again. - Can we talk a little bit about Regina Hall? - Yeah. First of all, watch her own Good Hang. She's incredible. - She's fantastic. - She's one of the best working actresses. This is like a supporting role where she kind of fills in as a, you know, surrogate mother figure midway through the movie and also a, you know, suspicious interrogator of Willa as she ex-fills her from back then, takes her to a convent, a revolutionary convent in the California mountains. And I find that she just does so much remarkable shit emotionally and just reactively with very little, sometimes like she's in a mirror. Sometimes she's watching two people look at each other and she does amazing work in this movie. So I mean, she obviously becomes like a major part of this sort of second act here. She's incredible. She also, this is a very, very funny movie at times, but she who is an incredible comedic actress does not get one offline. She's just wearing an awesome sweater and watching people and so much of what she is communicating is through just the way that her face looks. - Yeah, I had the exact same thought is, it's fascinating to not, when I heard that he wanted to work for her, I was like, he's gonna write her the funniest part of magic. Like PTA was born to write funny shit for Regina Hall and the choice to not have her do that is actually more power to make her just watchful through the entire film. And sort of like a guardian angel and sort of like a person who is still fighting in the good fight but has also been left behind in some ways. - Right. - You know, like she doesn't have the wherewithal to look for Willa's phone. Like she asks her, but she doesn't have the force to root out and find out. - Yeah, and I think there's also like, the difference is like, you know, if you live in a revolutionary cell for most of your adult life, like being honest with one another is probably a condition of survival. - That's right. - And you don't come across a lot of teenagers who are like, - Yeah, but then she also, she has the scene with the, you know, mother superior of the brave beavers. And it's like I didn't have the heart to tell her that her mother was, you know, was a rat. And it's her revolutionary duty kind of going up against the surrogate, you know, mother figure and you can tell she has a lot of, so the personal versus the political, just in that moment and she doesn't really know what to do. - Very nuanced and very powerful. - So because she hold onto this phone surreptitiously lock jaws and will attract her essentially to this kind of. - Yeah. - So did you guys happen to clock who the mother superior is who that actress is? - No. - This is another lost figure in the PTA filmography. That's April Grace. She played the journalist who interviewed Frank T.J. Matthew in Magnolia. - Oh my gosh. - So that's your rate. - Oh my gosh. - 20, 6 years ago. - Wow. - And she is also a very striking actor. - It's also interesting in that exchange that mother superior has with DeAndre, Deandre, right? Is that true? - Deandre, yeah. - Where they're like, we might need to get rid of this girl. - Yes. - Because we can't have another loose end running out there. - Yeah, for fear of death. - That really helps. - When you're a part of a revolution that tacit trust is essential and this idea that there's something genetic about Perfidia's ratdom is, that explains how tight everyone has to be. - By the way, we didn't talk about that. Her name is literally Perfidia, which is right there. And like all things in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, the obvious is actually not obvious. And you're supposed to, but that is pretty funny. All of the names are insightful in one way or another, Jungle Posey, the rapper and actress, Shana McHale, is in this movie as like her cohort, you know, Jungle Posey says it all, right? She also gets that incredible speech moment where she is taking over the bank for a couple of minutes. - May West. - May West, yeah. - Yeah, it's really good. - That way. - When Harris is Laredo, the wig shot is just really, really pretty. - Her and this convenience story, yeah. There's so many moments like that. Also, the sisterhood of the Brave Beaver is also just an incredible PTA joke straight out of the earned bias, or a pinch and joke for that matter. - At the DGA screening, we went to, Paul told Steven Spielberg in the rest of us, the story of Chase Infinity, not understanding the name. The sisters of the Brave Beaver and him having to explain why he had chosen that. - He was a being. - Yeah, but that was not something that Chase Infinity's generation was like, was that fun yet? So that is special. - I was like, the DVD beaver. - He's gonna say, she's clearly not a visitor to DVD beaver.com, Chase Infinity. - Tough stuff. - Yeah, and then the movie starts to culminate because the second encounter with the Christmas Adventurer's Club, someone has been brought in to eliminate lockjaw. - It's clear that lockjaw is trying to cover something up. He has now gone basically rogue, even within the MKU military unit that he controls. - Yes, he overreached. - And is taking guys with him to go specifically just find Charlene Slashwella. And they have a stunning confrontation in this comment where he runs a DNA test on her and they have their first ever conversation, which goes about as well as you can imagine. - Yeah, and to make the active paternity test visually interesting sounds hard. - Yeah, my little test tubes. - Yeah, all the little tubes and droplets and the spinning wheel and the lines coming down. But he makes all of that stuff work. And there's a real tension because we're washing them. - We don't want her to be his daughter. - Yeah, but we know because just the visual language, it cuts from them having sex to her and nine months pregnant shooting the machine gun, which is in the trailer. - That's probably also a huge reason of why she leaves. - Yeah, and you're like, right, yeah, there we go. - Yes. - So we know. And it is revealed in fact that Lockjaw is Will's dad and that that sets him off and he knows that she also needs to be eliminated. She needs to be-- - But crucially, he cannot do it himself. - He cannot bring himself to do it himself. So he hires, well, we'll go forward step by step before. - Yeah, just he, we are reintroduced to this character of Avanti Q, who is a bounty hunter and tracker. - Right. - Who is played by the eighth, the great Eric Schvig, which PTA mentioned, he first saw and lasted the Mohicans. I haven't seen him in a movie in 10 years. - Yep. - And Avanti won't kill a kid. So he's told to take him to, take her to 1776, - Great, yeah. - Which is apparently the compound of a very naturalist group, yeah. - To have her killed. And that sequence is incredibly tense. Maybe the most tense thing in the movie, because she's been handcuffed to a bench and the world is operating around her. All these military men are coming in and out and she knows what her fate is going to be in Avanti, has gone back into his car, but he hasn't left. And he has a change of heart. And he decides that he's going to save her and that he's going to take these guys out. In part, because they show us that the 1776 guys are racist, they make note of his Native American heritage, they mock him. And his. - Those guys prefer the original version of the searchers. - Yes. - Yes, like he's literally called Wagonburner in the movie, which is clearly a callback. - And Firewater, yes. - Yeah. And that is happening in this series of intercutting moments where Bob, who has been freed from prison, escaped, transported by Sergio. While they're driving drunk, drinking Medellos, and talking about revolution. And he said, I think it's certain point, Sergio says, saved a friend to 75 or twice in one day. Yeah, like really like remarking upon the wildness of their experience together. And there's a stop-drop in roll. And a. - Very funny Tom Cruise joke. - Yes. - And a great. And Sergio sacrifices himself for the cause. - Bob jumps out of the moving car, hot wires a car. He goes on his chase. - It gets silica. - Yeah. - It was a decelica. - It looked like that. - It looked familiar to you. - It was just a great car. - It had that home clicking sound. - It was perfect. - And a spoiler. And then he goes on a hot chase. And that hot chase is happening simultaneously to what we learn is Tim from the Christmas Adventurers Club who's been assigned to eliminate Lockjaw. So Lockjaw has left Avantiq and he's off to go to the next stage of his life. Hopefully joining the Christmas Adventurers. - Lockjaw and also. Deimplication is also Willa, right? They need to clean everything up. So there's, you know, it's a pretty grim assignment. - Yeah, and Deandra will be killed. How are some of you will be killed? All the French 75 will be eliminated so that this can be all clean for him to join his club. And Adam know where Tim shows up. Speeding down the road. Is he in a Dodge Mustang? - Dodge Charger. - Yeah, I believe that Avanti and Tim are both driving chargers. I was like, I would love to see what a bad charger does on a drivetrain. - That's right, because Willa takes Avanti's car. - Yes. - Right. And then he's also driving like a bright blue. - No, Avanti's is white. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tim's blue, yeah. - Well, we're talking so much about these cars 'cause this movie is leading to a huge car chase. - Yeah. - Eventually Tim shoots Lockjaw in the most bracing moment of the movie. Shoot some in the face while they're driving. The car crashes off the side of the road. We think Lockjaw's gone for good. Tim circles back, Bob arrives since he's on the chase to discover Lockjaw, Lockjaw's dead, he thinks. - Yeah. - He turns around, moment of panic. He's got, he's uttering the green acres line from the Gil Scott Heron song and trying to get somebody to counter it, yeah, so show up. - To show him that there's somebody's on his side that someone's gonna help him and he's all alone. He doesn't know what to do. And then the final act of the movie is this chase scene, which takes place in Barrego Springs, a highway. It's just an incredibly loopy up and down highway in California. And what do you think of that scene? - It's like a roller coaster. - Yeah. - I just want all our lords of letterbox out there if you're thinking about making a road trip. Just be careful. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Don't be an actress. - This is not a safe roadway. And there's a lot of highway driving in California where you will just be like a holy shit. Like you come over a hill and then the sun is eight feet from your face and this really captured it but also made it feel like inception and also made it feel like the, is it the California adventure ride? What's the ride at Disney where you're hanging over California as you're being kind of like flown through the air? - I think, are you thinking of American screen machine? - No, it's not. It's like you're looking at a screen. - Oh, soaring. - Soaring. - It reminded me of soaring. - Yeah. Soaring, no G. - Okay, soaring. - You've been on Soaring? - No. - Disneyland? - No, I've been to Disney World when I was seven. - Anyway. - She skipped right past that 'cause she just not want to get into it. - Yeah, just I've absolutely no interest. - Two suns who want to get their picture taken with Iron Man. - Yeah, just coming. - It's coming. - It's you in an Iron Man. - I'd be busy. - Okay. - 'Cause it might be good content if you have to go. - But this watching this in IMAX definitely had an amusement park feel. Like you actually did become as the camera like goes up and down. - Makes you queasy. - You start feeling like the motion. And again, at the GGA, Q&A, Paul Thomas Anderson said that they did not have this ending until they went location scouting and that they were just around an event for all and they found this road. And he was like, and then it all came together. - I wonder how much of this movie is a result of like finding a place to put it. - Like he talked a lot about that in the interview. You'll hear that. - Okay. - It wasn't as much on the pages you might think. - Yeah. - I've never seen a chase sequence like it. - Yeah. - They're moving straight. - Yeah. - Three cars. - But you've got to change over here. - Yes, because they disappear. It's not, nothing like this has been done before. - Yeah, with that. - The closest comparison is probably Steven Spielberg's dual. That's, which is a straight chase movie of a truck in a car and that's it. And not, and moving at a consistent high speed together. You know, not necessarily whipping around turns and flying across things, you know, it's not. And then the conclusion, which is incredibly exciting and incredibly scary and sad. - Yeah. - Davie, shows Willa is also a free fighter. - Again, incredible practical knowledge. - Yeah, she has been schooled well despite everything that she would say about her dad. - As far as much as it's a great car chase movie, it's an amazing car crash movie. The crashes in this make me really want to buckle up. - Yes, there's a crash that the car that Perfidia is in, escaping from the bank robbery is a wild car crash. It feels like you're sitting in the seat when it happens. Anyway, Willa decides when she's gotten to the top of a very tall part of the Barrego Springs highway that she's gonna park the car quickly, come to a hard stop. So Tim cannot see that she has stopped her car and then he crashes into her. - Yeah. - And as he stumbles and gets out of his car, he's survived, but she attempts to find out whether or not he is-- - On the team right? - Yeah. - And he's not friendly and she shoots and kills him with the gun that she has found in a volunteer's car. And I said this the last night. - All right. - The scream that she lets out when she shoots him for good is very emotional, very upsetting and raw. And you see that this is the real toll of the things that have happened that her parents have done. Like this is really, she's now taken someone's life and has been under this incredible terrifying threat and also has this terrible knowledge that her father, her birth father is a monster. Eventually Bob does show up in the Celica, he arrives and she doesn't know what to think and she's confused and she almost shoots him. - Right. - Until she finally, he finally convinces her that it's me, it's your dad. - Yeah. - He's saying, on your dad, it's your dad. - And then he does also quote, part of the thick old sky hair and tug back with it. - Yes, well no longer be relevant. - Yeah, can I ask you guys when you first saw it. So the next sequence, you're kind of like great. So we've gotten to the end of the movie and he's gotten her away from this and then like a terminator, Flakja has returned and he's storming through the desert, blood all over him holding a machine gun and he's got more shit to do. So when you first saw that where you were like, oh are we gonna have another confrontation action sequence between Bob has to kill Lockjaw and take. - I'll tell you why I didn't because of the music that is used in that scene. When we see the roadway and you see the sun haze and then you see his head come up over the hill, it's a laugh moment. - Right, and do you know that song is called? It tell us. - Perfidia. - There you go. - Yeah. - Yeah. - He's surviving for her as well and because it's funny, I didn't think that we were headed toward a Robert Patrick moment. - Me too. - It could have happened, but in fact like I, that's an unexplained part of the plotting that you can ask that question. What happened between that moment and Lockjaw learning, determining that he is going to join the Christmas Adventurers Club because he's actually not been successful. He thinks he's been successful, what he's doing, but he hasn't confirmed it. - Right. - We don't actually know. Tim has also been killed and has that feedback gotten to the Adventurers Club? - Sure, yeah. This is all unexplored. There's like, there's a gap here in information. - It does seem like a pretty expansive organization when you get right down to it because that's just the Southwest office. - That's true. - And like they introduced like the Fifth Fleet Commander just to the Southwest. - That's true. - So there are a lot of levels here. - Yep. - I don't think that's actually the Southwest office for the record because that's where he's murdered. - Shown. - Yeah, Lockjaw does eventually get into the club and by getting into the club we mean gets gassed. - Yeah, he's gassed to death in a very funny moment. - While he meets his last, his moment of finally arriving at like, he's been accepted in corporate America, gets the corner office. - Yes, he gets the corner office. And you know, that's what you learn about that character is that that's somebody who's been fighting wars to feel accepted. - You don't think that the Christmas Adventure Club has like a gas chamber as part of its office? - I don't know if that would be an office you would want others to occupy. - Yeah, I mean, it's as if he did as a gas. - I thought Lockjaw could have been like, where is everybody feeling? - Right, right. - There's something very eerie about that entire sequence and you're meant to feel like, oh no, something terrible is about to happen to him and something does. It may be on another floor. - Okay. - That might just be the gassing floor for the Christmas Adventure Club. We don't know. And then the movie's Danu Ma is one last conversation at the kitchen table between Bob and Willa, where Bob gives Willa a card, a letter that is written to her by her mother and Tiana Taylor will invoiced a wreathless letter to our daughters, incredibly moving and powerful. And I think it's a big part of what this movie is about which is don't give up. Maybe you can change the world in the way that we were not able to. And this moment of like exciting inspiration comes where we see Willa a little bit later on getting a CB radio call about a protest that is happening in Oakland and she jumps out of her chair and grabs the car keys and goes and drives up and makes her dad drive. - And then American girl starts playing. - Yes. - And my heart grew 10 sizes. - Yeah. - Yeah. - A very simple, straightforward and conventional needle drop. - Not a wow look what I found in the crates, you know? - Oh yes. - Yeah, I mean is there any, what does it mean? You know, like what does the whole ending mean is something we can talk about. But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a proud season moment. - Yes, I think that it, that will seal some Oscars. Just that one song. - You walk out of the movie feeling a sense of relief and happiness and maybe even inspiration for some people. - A little bit of melancholy as Bob tries to figure out how to take a picture with his new iPhone. - Yes, but just for him that he finally got an iPhone. - Oh, I, I kind of, I mean it's fantastic and I'm glad that they figured out that they can be, you know, on 5G and just, but he's moving into his donut. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And he can't make the flash work. - Nope. - Yeah. - I mean, you know, it comes for us all. Like it's very much a movie about passing the baton. That's the whole thing. - But also what's equally great about that scene is the instructions that she's giving are like useless. - You know, I was like, that's it. - But that's how you tell, that thing when I was like, - You realize that like if they don't know this - It's so lovely. - Yes. It's just like 25 years ago, how do I get the flashing midnight off the VCR? You know, how do I fix the tracking on my tape player? All these things, this is what kids and their parents and you have to do for them. So the movie is very, very insightful about all those things. Bear with me as I read through why this, I think this is the culmination. 'Cause there's still. - Wait, can't talk about the ending? - Yeah. - No, no, no, no, no, just like, you know, this, it does feel like how happy is it of a happy ending? - You do know what I mean? Like what are, because there is so much in it that is, there is hope and I do find this movie to be very open-hearted, but especially on my second watch, you know, I told it, I found it very, like, I was taking my, the comedy and the spectacle the first time and the second time was more emotional. It's more upsetting. There was a lot of dark stuff here. There was a lot of mess stuff going on. There was a lot of regret. There is, you know, to Chris' point, like, at the end, Leo's just like, sitting on a couch, trying to figure out, like, he's out of the, and in Perfidia's letter, there is a lot of regret. So, you know, and the last line, he yells, like, be safe and just like, I won't, and it's very cheerful. So, you know, I don't know, maybe, is it supposed to be just purely, like, hey, it's Tom Petty? Are we supposed to give over to that? Is like that the question? Just, you know, are we supposed to? - I think you, I think you can very, read it very clearly but Paul Thomas Anderson thinks that a young girl that looks like Willa is the American girl, in 2025. - Yeah, sure, yay! - So, that part of it, I think, is very sweet. - Yeah. - And that I'm sure she looks somewhat like his kids. - Yeah, and then maybe it requires having your whole life in front of you to imagine a better world, you know, and to imagine anything is possible if we push back hard enough. Whereas, like, once you get older, I think you have all these reasons why, like, I push back that hard 'cause I have this, right? You know, we have to do that. - Absolutely. - And also, the first line of that song is, she's an American girl raised on promises. - Yeah. - Which, you know, has its own bit or sweet, I'm perfect writing, by the way. - I do think it is hopeful, but I think it's also very wide eyed and, or I should say, eyes open about the fact that Willa now knows the cost, that she has fired a gun, that she has seen what the monsters really look like and that she has made an active choice to try to make that change? Maybe inspired by her mom's letter, maybe inspired by her experiences. Maybe inspired by what she knows now about her dad and what her dad did to go save her. And she probably knows that it's not, it's gonna get worse before it gets better. I think that's a big part of this, too, that you have to, if you wanna make the change, you're gonna have to get into some shit. I don't know if the movie actually thinks that that change is possible or plausible. - Right, right, right, right. - But I think it does wanna believe that it could be. - Yeah, well, I think, why did it get called one, why did he arrive at one battle after another? And I think that that title gets brought up like in little ways explicitly and then also it's basically one fucking thing after another and what is the, is it ultimately the conflict that forges us and not the result and what's cider you on, you know? - Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kinda curious about how the, when the movie goes out in the world, how much of that is tangled with, you know, like whether or not that's a takeaway. I think having seen it multiple times, it's very clearly. - Right. - An older guy looking at what he did or did not do in his life and what impact that did or did not have and what it means for his family and younger people. - Yeah, exactly. - What's now, what is their responsibility? Which is a scary thing to think about, but also happens to anybody who cares deeply about the world and people. And also is like maybe a little bit feels a little guilty about what they didn't do. - Yes. - I couldn't accomplish. - I think, I mean, I think that's a big part of it. - So, this is an amazing movie. I mean, we haven't talked about a lot of like the mechanics of it, it is shot on this division with IMAX cameras, which must have been extremely challenging. Those cameras are huge and loud. - Right, and they're also moving up and down those hills. - Yes, we also heard that the, there's a special thanks to Giovanni Rebisi in this movie. And that is because Giovanni Rebisi has a hobby of restoring old movie cameras. And he is a lover of film and celluloid, which J.T. Mollner talked about on this show when he helped shot Strange Starling. And he rebuilt and gave PTA a VistaVision camera to shoot this movie on. And I have yet to see the movie in VistaVision. I'm seeing an in VistaVision tomorrow. I'm excited about that at the Vista. It's only playing in that format on maybe fewer than 10 theaters in this country. But we've, I've seen it in IMAX twice now, once at the Chinese and last night at CityWalk, at CityWalk it's overwhelming because that screen is so tall. And the movie, like you said, on the chase scenes and in the whipping action, but also in the close-ups, you know? One of the key influences on PTA is Jonathan Demi and the inti-camera close-up. There's several of them, you know. Tiana Taylor's face, the detail that you can see in her eyelashes is wow on an IMAX screen. The same for Leo's face holding the screen, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro. And then to be making a movie that is in constant motion with those kinds of cameras too, you know? It's not a chamberpiece down the world. It's pretty impressive. Also, kind of an unusual color palette for PTA. Very dusty, very brown, Bob's robe. It's kind of the like, it's the dust bowl of California. It just looks like California to me. And this is kind of the real California. Yeah, the end line. Yeah. And we haven't mentioned Johnny Green. I was going to say, yeah, you want to do the score? It's really interesting. I mean, I think it tells you a lot about how he views how PTA views the movie because it's very David Shire, Michael Small, like it sounds like clut. It sounds like the conversation. These like single-plinking piano notes that are played like very rapidly and kind of getting your heartbeat up because you know something is happening. We're headed somewhere. It's kind of the energy that it gives you. There are a couple of orchestral moments. It opens with this kind of like, big orchestral dirge when we meet the French 75. And that comes in, if you try, it's like it does. And like usually in those close-up shots, like when there's one with Willa, there's one with Lockjaw when he comes up and it's like, is a recurring motif. There is also one needle drop that producer Jack was particularly excited about, which is when Mo Bomba drops at this school of dance. I laughed so hard. - That's really funny. - I think, you know, the inclusion of someone like Dishon in the movie and the Mo Bomba drop, there's a lot of like, my daughters told me about this stuff going on with me too, which I really like, you know? Like I don't think PTA is really bangin' Mo Bomba at home, but I bet his kids were at a certain point in the last 10 years. It's still a movie that is like about all of his same stuff. You know, I wanted to mention this to you guys. So he gave PTA a given interview with Dazed this week. And he acknowledged that he participated in some way in the scripts for Napoleon and Killers of the Farming. - Okay. - Which is something that has been, had been rumored for a long time. - Yes. - I've told you, I've gotten separate, like private phone calls of people being like, it's true, it's true. Like PTA worked on these movies. And when we talked about those movies, we talked about the fact that it's very plausible that PTA, if not, contributed like, wrote them wholesale. 'Cause they're about dumb guys. - Yeah. - They just love to fucking kank it out of their own way with the women that they're in love with. And they also do terrible things and have to kind of cope with their decisions around those terrible things. And they're like, one of the hallmarks of all of his movies. Bob is yet another PTA guy. Like there's just every movie has a guy like this. Like what I wrote down is like, unsure, creative, horny, sincere, man boy, who subjugates himself to a woman. And then has to reckon with what it means to have subjugated himself to her, right? Phantom Thread, that's what Phantom Thread is. You know, a lot of these punch trunk love, that's what punch trunk love is. Like all of these movies are about a guy turning himself over to the idea of love and passion and then shickling life. - Yeah. - Yeah. There's a million things like this in the movie though. Like all of his movies are about families breaking up. And mom and dad can't be together anymore and then how do what does that mean for the man boy at the center of the movie or the tangible connection between radical politics and satire and how things that seem like they could change the world also seem ridiculous. Like he always talks about Robert Downey Senior. All the Robert Downey Senior movies are about that very idea. - I think he also, I mean, I'm thinking of the master and there will be blood and magnolia specifically but like sexual trauma and unclear patronage comes up. - Yeah. - A lot in his movies and that's obviously something that's in this film but then is on the other side comes out. It's just like we can get through it. If you love each other, like you can conquer that. - That's it, the movies are so humanist. They're all about flawed people trying to figure it out. I go back to Perfidia and how she kind of like haunts the movie certainly for me and the fact that her voice is one of the very last voices that we hear and the fact that the, you know, her identity in the world has a rat despite the things that she did and the way that she talked and the way that she acted. And the fact that other people kind of define her agency in the aftermath of everything that has happened is a really interesting concept. And like maybe the way that we think about people who try to make change in the world and then get villainized and the things that they have to do to survive is very complicated. - Oh, I mean, what's really rich? - Find out her secret. You can go back and chart different interactions with Lacta after they've had sex obviously. And you know, there's a really amazing scene in the hospital after Perfidia has been captured. And Lacta comes to her and it's basically like, it's this, you know, or life in prison. You know, it's like you have one chance here. And the decision that she makes to save, you could say like she makes self-decision. She rats these guys out. She goes to witness protection. She eventually escapes is also probably to keep Charlene away from Lacta, you know, right? - Yeah, do whatever she can to kind of keep him away from her daughter, yeah. - What else? - Do you want to talk about Oscars at all? - Yeah. - I also want to talk about like how this has been presented and how it will be received to the extent that it's possible. - Okay, let's do marketing and box office in the world of Oscars. The second trailer, which is the predominant trailer for the movie, does not feel like a trailer that Paul Thomas Anderson cut. The first one does, the first one with the Johnny Greenwood score and the phone call, that feels like a PTA trailer to me. The second one does not. People don't seem to like the second one. That's the one they're running before movies. That's the one that I think has failed to ignite a ton of interest. I think it is not a bad trailer, but not very representative of the movie. And so the movie is now tracking for somewhere between 20 and $30 million in opening weekend. It's a very expensive movie, costs anywhere from $115 million to $180 million, depending on who you, what you're reading, who you believe. I definitely don't need to have a long conversation about whether or not this movie needs to make money or not. For me personally, I don't care. But I am quite curious about what the world thinks this is and what they're going to get. I don't even know how to talk about that, but it is a movie with the biggest movie star in the world. - Yes. - And it is an action movie. - And he is selling it in a way that I have not seen him do, or really a major movie star do since like late 2000s. He is on every podcast. He is doing junkets. He is doing magazines sort of. And he's just on my Instagram way more than Leonardo DiCaprio has ever wanted to be. - There's like a chase infinity has been playing him in here. - Yeah. - In TikTok, yeah. - Totally. They are like, we need to sell this movie. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - The way that other movies are meant to be marketed and Paul Thomas Anderson doesn't do a lot press these days. Leo of course, he hasn't been on a talk show in almost 20 years. He went on Jimmy Fallon this week. Yeah, Jimmy Fallon this week. - Hasn't done it in 20 years. - Yeah. - And they're working hard. This movie comes from the same studio that is on one of the most legendary runs of the 21st century at the movies where Warner Brothers has six consecutive movies that have opened at $40 million or more. There's not much else going on with the movies this weekend. - Yeah. - We can three of Demon Slayer. Chris will be running it back for a fifth time and. - It is three hours. - It's three hours. - Yeah, and you ask like, what do people think they're getting? And they are selling it and the trailer and then the very Leo forward strategy may make a lot of people who aren't really in the habit of going to the movies being like, oh, Leo's like in an action movie. I guess I would go see this, but then they are going to get something slightly different than what that would, but I actually wonder whether that kind of marketing, whether the random person is like, oh, Leo's in an action movie. Like sure, I'll go out to the theaters versus the more specific PTA heads or the premium format people or all of the I'm acts of it. - Are you more susceptible to the critical response being to this phone being almost uniformly in a way that I have not seen, certainly since Oppenheimer, but even Oppenheimer had it's like, well, you know. - There will be a well about this movie. I just want to put that there. - Yeah, no totally. - We are going to get a lot of feedback that is you oversold this and that everybody oversold this. That's going to happen. That's okay. It's just because we've not had this level of unanimous acclaim from critics. I'm trying to think of when's the last time. Probably Parasite. Parasite's probably the last time everybody was like, we're all on board. This is, let's make this a movement. - But there's a big difference between Parasite bubbling up as a foreign film that then just becomes a phenomenon to the biggest movie star we've got is in the movie with one of the best living filmmakers and we're going for it and we're advertising it on something out of football. - There have been examples of this that have become tremendously successful based on that power. The movie I think of is Gravity. Gravity is a little bit like lost of time now so it's such an in theater experience and the script is only okay. But that was a movie with platinum reviews. It was a huge, two huge stars and a huge super celebrated director. And you know, I don't remember word for word every review that came out but people were gaga over gravity. And it worked like that machine. Now that movie had space spectacle on its side. - And it was also 90 minutes long. That's true. - Which, that is a factor for sure. - I mean, it's a different time in movie going of course. - Which I'm not saying this movie should be shorter, I'm gonna say that like that actually does. - But now we do have this, I asked Paul Leo about this too, this large format in theater cult thing that is happening. You know, like Kugler really pushed a lot of that along with explaining the formats and the film stocks. - Last night. - See if it's after you doing this now. It's mashing machine. - Last night people, I mean we were like at Nerd HQ but people by the way, I think Unicorn Everett for my ticket. Shout out to Corey, 'cause the other real one who's now seen it three times, he's going the fourth time. - But we, people applauded at the IMAX like teaser, you know, just it's like the IMAX brand thing and like all the, all the men. And it was about 80% of them who were applauding. And I was like, oh no, I thought there were some. - Some ladies said. - I got a little nervous about this. I don't want it to become too stratified. - I get it. I get it. - There's just not IMAX theaters everywhere. They're not good or whatever, you know. - I mean they do need to build more. That's a whole, that's a separate episode. The only other thing is I think that there's one, I had a long conversation with Van Lathen about this yesterday. He hasn't seen the movie. He's been on a jag about how it needs to make money. I don't agree with him. He and I have had that debate many, many years. This movie probably needed to do a better job of marketing to black audiences 'cause it's a movie about black women. And like Leo is definitely the star of the movie but it is about Perfidia and Willa and to a lesser extent Deandra. And activating black audiences is something that really works at the box office. And they just didn't, I don't think they've really done it. I don't think they've really, the fact that Van is like, I'll go see it, you know, but isn't like, I can't wait to see it, is that's not good. And I don't know who that's on specifically but maybe there will be a word of mouth thing that helps with it over time. And the other thing is, you can use this as a trail way into. - It will have long legs if it wins around for a long time. - Yeah, there is, there's a case for 10 Oscar nominations. And they're, I can certainly see the headlines on March 18th, 2026 that are one battle after another wins best picture and best director, Paul Thomas Anderson, Crown King of Hollywood, this year. - Right, yeah. - That's, that is possible. - And they did it. - Yeah. - I'm not saying it's going to happen. - There's a road where this is, this is like a Oppenheimer thing. And you know, the minute it comes out, it's like, okay, a celebrated director, finally. - Yeah. - And it just is kind of a steam roll through. - It would also be interesting if this gets sucked up into the culture wars at all. - Yeah, which it could also happen. - I think it will. I think it will. - I mean, it is about radical politics. - Yeah. - But that, lots of people like Jimmy Kimmel this week. - Yeah. - Oh yeah. - There's more than enough people that could just support the movie that agree with its politics and it could be a success and a question. But, and honestly, from a box office perspective, that would probably help. - That's what I'm saying. - I mean, that almost would be helpful if somebody was like, this movie, are you fucking kidding me? Like, yeah. - Yeah, but they're like exploding the power grid in the major American city, you know. And they're like, this is the hero of the movie. - But that will probably, I think, become a bigger issue or a bigger talking point when it's a word season. And movies are under a little bit more scrutiny. And then there's the usual dirty tricks. - I would like to start the Benicio del Toro Oscar campaign here and now. - Okay. - Please vote Benicio del Toro for Best Supporting Actor. - So it's not not Sean Penn. - You can nominate him as well. - Interesting. - And I know, and that is like the showy performance. And obviously he's one of the three. But, I mean, sense is incredible in this, in this movie. And it's, that's also like a quintessential supporting. - Yeah, it sure is. - You know, he shows up, the movie does not work without him. Memorable, he's on his own kind of wavelengths. - Yeah. - And then he goes away. So, thank you. - I don't think that will happen because supporting actor is a knife fight this year. - Well, that's fine. But I, you know, I have a platform. - I you do have a platform, you're right. - And I don't have a vote. - So. - I support you. - Thank you. - Stellan Scarsgard in sentimental value. Sean Penn, Adam Sandler and Jake Kelly, Paul Neskel and Hamnet, Jeremy Strong in Springsteen. - Yeah. - At Lordy in Frankenstein. - So Hamnet, you brought up that, which is the other. - That's the collision course right now. - Right. And so we either have like a Oppenheimer year or we have a saving private Ryan versus Shakespeare in love year. - And, you know, and which is interesting because in a lot of ways Hamnet is Shakespeare in love, but as Sean pointed out, like Chloe Joff has already won, - Yeah. - An Oscar. - She's kind of Spielberg in this race. - Yeah. - So what is it like nobody sees Hamnet? Still, it'll still be like-- - I think it's-- - It's a specialty release that speaks deeply to artists. - Okay. - You know, the Telluride at One Toronto, it's like, it'll be in the mix. - It will definitely be in the mix. - I think it's also-- - I know how I feel, but, you know, we're talking about like the models for Oscar season. - PTA is 0 for 11. - Yeah. - It's very easy to tell that story. There's definitely a world where it's like Hamnet, wins Best Picture and He wins Best Director. I could see that. - I got-- - I could see that very clearly. - Sinners is not going to be in the mix, sir. - It will be in the mix. - It'll definitely be nominated for Best Picture. Everything after that, I don't know. I thought it would fall away a little bit when a bunch of movies started coming out, but some stuff that I thought would be big was not as well received. - Yeah. - Whether or not Coolur gets in, I don't know, but Adapted Screenplay seems likely, Editing seems likely. Whether or not they decide to run Chase Infinity or Tiana Taylor for supporting actress, I don't know. - Right. - They're gonna have to probably make a decision there, which is tough. You know, you've got production design, you've got best casting. - Score. - That's right, we have the new-- - Johnny Greenwood School. - Colleen Edward for Costume Design. - That bathrobe is legendary. There's definitely a 10 or 11 or 12 Oscar nominations potential. Warner Brothers has a lot on their plate. - Right, and they're running campaigns for, they announced Sinners, Weapons, and one battle after another. - Yes, so what's gonna get the most time and energy? Warner Brothers did campaign-do in part two, but not very well. - Right. - So they haven't really run the race, this era of the organization hasn't run the race in quite this way, we'll see. Leah will be nominated. - I mean, they won, no, that was universal for up. Remember, they lost Barbie, you're right. Because that was the switch. - Yeah. - I take solace in the fact that we will be talking about this movie in 20 years. - Yeah. - It's pretty exciting. - So I hope it makes money and I hope it wins awards just for everybody's benefit, but. - Where are you in the PTA rankings right now with this? Do you wanna do this? You wanna save it? - I would like to see it for Monday. - Okay. - Is it minute to minute? - It always is. - We'll also be having that conversation, again, throughout this year. - This is the first movie that it really impacts 25 or 25, where we have to look at it and say, "Do we have to do this, is this the right choice?" I think we're gonna, we'll probably talk about it for the next couple of months. - So you guys are a lot, did you have a caveat that you can break in case of emergency? - It's until the episode is done. Like, one of the episodes is reported. - It's the basement tapes. - We can't go back and change this. But we have changed things. - Interesting. - So if we wanted to choose this film, there's still time. There's 10 more movies to go. - I had one last one. - Yeah. - You know, I think, I don't know if you're gonna do a syllabus for this. - I made one. I don't, I didn't wanna put one out 'cause I don't wanna spoil the movie for people, but I have a long list right now that I can talk through. - PTA talked about searchers running on empty midnight, running Battle of Algiers, being inspirations for this movie or being movies that you could watch along with this. I can't get over how much this movie made me think of the searchers. I think I will watch the searchers this weekend, and then I would like to go back and see one Battle of Algiers. - To love 4K from Warner. - I have it. - Yeah. - It is, did you get a copy of Witness? - Yes. - You can just bring that right over. - It's like a bloating situation. - To my house. - No, no, no, no. I just like, do you need it? - Yeah. - Do you need it? It's a question. - Any movies that this movie made you think of? - That you-- - You know what? - The Christmas Adventurers Club and Lockjaw, it just could not be more Doctor Strange Love. Like the RIP, Colonel Ripper, the Sterling Hayden character, and especially the speech that Penn gives at the end where he talks about being raped and reversed and her wanting his power is just pure Ripper. So that's a big one. There's a really great Jewels Dassen movie called Uptight from 1968 that I would highly encourage people to check out. It is about, it's essentially a remake of John Ford's The Informer, and it's about a black revolutionary group and someone who turns and informs on the group. That is an imperfect movie, but is an incredible time capsule because it's made simultaneous to the movement, to the rise of the Black Panther movement, and is really powerful. There's like a bunch of other movies from that time, like Medium Cool and Zobersky Point, I think, or both in this movie to some extent. And then there's all the comic stuff too. Like he mentioned, Midnight Run, but like something wild. - It has Chichen Chong in it. - Chichen Chong, the totally Lebowski is all over it. - Yeah. - I think, I tried to think about some other movies that are about this, 'cause there's just not a lot of movies of set in these worlds. - Well, there's not, it's not about this specific thing at all, but there's a lot of Casablanca in this movie, including both like Perfidia, The Song, that's also played in Casablanca. He orders a friend, so like there's the Easter egg stuff, but like a cocktail. - A love triangle, like three people during a revolution. Yeah. And what are your responsibilities to love and have? - As some of the like- - Exactly. - And passageways. - Yes, Morocco. - Yeah, no, it's completely true. I mean, that's the other thing too, is making a movie with a light motif, you know? Like having an idea of like the characters are always moving across bridges or moving through tunnels. There's that moment when Tim goes through Alice's house and goes downstairs into the basement and into the tunnel. And it's this large circular tunnel so that he can get into the meeting room for the eldest member of the Christmas Adventurers Club. - Played by Kevin Taig, right? - Kevin Taig, who's so good. Or he's like, I want to be able to eat it off the floor. That's how clean I want it. That is like pure movie-making stuff that you can make, you can have 10 examples of this feeling racing across the rooftops, skateboarding into World War III. Just the idea of like being dragged on a line for, you know, 90 consecutive minutes on the movie is so great. Hard to pull off. I mean, also just like obvious stuff like all the presidents, men, sorcerer, movies that give you that feeling of paranoia and anxieties you're trying to get to where you need to go to unsolute to solve this mystery. Any other thoughts before we go to the guests of this episode? - I wish I could make a fool of myself before you introduce them, but I can't take everything. - Okay, thank you both for your thoughts on this film. We'll talk more about it very soon. Let's now go to my conversation with Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson. It is an honor and a delight to be joined by Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio, as thanks for being here. Paul, I know you've been working on this movie for 20 plus years. Why was now the right time to actually make it? - There's a few answers to that. I think one of the first answers is that after we finished Phantom Thread, Adam Sumner, producer and assistant director, legendary assistant director and producer, said it's time for us to go make that one. And I went over to see Leo after coming back from England. I said, I don't think we're getting any younger. And I think, but then I started to look for a will. I got distracted and I couldn't quite feel like I had it right yet. And got distracted and made Likres Pizza, got to work with his dad, but not him. And then it just sort of seemed like I felt comfortable with where the script had landed. And Adam was really forceful and saying enough, you've searched enough and I think it's really time we have to do this film now. And so I got him, I say, all right, I think we've got to get started, you know? And that was, but that was also years before, really. I mean, honestly, it was probably a couple of years before. So the search began to find Willa. And then we got slowed down a little bit by the strike, but we kept working so we were ready when that was over. And here we are. But there's also a shorter answer would just be, I don't know, it just felt right. And thank God everything seems to have happened the way it was meant to happen. And I'm just so grateful for the way it's all turned out. - So Leo in 2018, I talked to Paul and he said, I love Leo and I loved him then, which is around the buggy night's time because I was obsessed with Gilbert Grape. And he said, this boy's life was a fucking amazing film. And he said, "Leo and I will work together one day and it will be the right thing, it will happen." - So when was that? - '18. - Okay, a Phantom Thread time, yeah. - So you were thinking about it. - Yeah. - What was it that you connected with with Paul's work and why did you want to ultimately work together? - His body of work, his unique storytelling, that you're transported into world. I remember watching The Master and I, it's very aware where you get that moment of, how do you put it? Detachment from feeling like you're in a theater where you feel immersed. And I don't know what it was, but I felt like I was in that time period and I felt that these people were real. And even with a film like this, the fact that Paul's been working on this for 20 years, you say, right? 20 years, there's so much intricate thought, put in and layering to what is essentially, a sort of action film about a father trying to get back to his daughter, but there's, I've compared it to Star Wars in a lot of ways. You have the bounty hunters, you have Princess Leah, you have Viota, you have Darth Vader, but it's saturated and real world. The world that we live in right now, it's holding a mirror up to society and it's in the fact that he wrote this, started thinking about this 20 years ago, the fact that it's so incredibly topical to the world and the struggles that we're dealing with now and society, the fact that no one seems to be listening to one another, that there's extremism on both sides and the conviction that all these characters believe in their ideology that they feel that they're right. And I know I'm just really, to me you can see films that have a lot of thought put into them, that have had ideas put in that maybe he's taken out and replaced with something else. And the mallet that was great about working with him on this, when it was the malleability that he had for new ideas too, I think Regina talks about a moment where your action sequence TBD, TBD determined or something like that. There were kind of little moments in the movie with Sensei and I where we kind of didn't know what direction to go and then you get the actor in. We waited three months to get Benicio 'cause we knew he was our Sensei Carlos, he was our man. And then he came in fully cooked with his idea of who Sensei was that he would have connections in the corrections facility and at the hospital and that he's got a sort of Harriet Tubman immigration system going down in his basement and we go, okay, let's follow that. It's highly ironic that 20 years of writing and we basically Benicio came in and wrote down in the day when he was like, huh, okay, so a day in a dinner we just wrote the best sequence in the movie. Let that be a lesson to you, don't write for 20 years. Thinking about something for 20 years is okay. I guess that's what gets you there, but it's true. You, Benicio, that sequence was sort of stagnant before he kind of came in and brought all of this energy. It was much more isolated to that apartment. I can't even remember what it was exactly at this point. It grew so quickly and the whole world sort of just sprouted out of nowhere and then the fact that we're in these communities working with real people, real shop owners was like, okay, this is, we have a relationship here. It was like made on the spot. It was improvisational and it was fantastic and that flexibility was just so much fun. Part of it feels so real despite the tone and you know, even though you started writing it 20 years ago you haven't made a contemporary movie in over 20 years. The novel is set in the 80s, it's about the 60s. Why the decision to set it right now? Well, I mean, I think in a practical way, in a very, very practical way, not even an artistic concern is Jesus, wouldn't it be nice to just walk into the street and shoot a movie and not have to think about all of the things that you have to think about when you're making a period film? That is a kind of relief and I think enabled us to do the kind of things we're talking about, to be fast on our feet, to kind of make up things. You can look over here, you can do anything. But more to the point beyond a practical thing is, I suppose as I started to get much more serious about writing in this film about seven or eight years ago, I had kids that were becoming teenagers. I could understand in a deeper way the relationship to teenagers, the gap that's between generations. So it sort of became impossible to ignore that. And the fun of making a film, I think right now is, when we first started talking years ago, I was still tiptoeing around really embracing that it was a contemporary film. I had a kind of, I had I kind of safety nets and I didn't want to talk about phones and I was too nervous of all these things. And between him and Chase, especially him, it was pushing it and leaning in more and more to grounding it as a contemporary film. I mean, really just having to shake hands with it and look it in the face and say, we can't get away from this, there's nowhere to hide. And if we hide, we're doing ourselves in the story of disservice. So yeah, there's a lot of people talking on phones, but not looking at their phones, which is a very, a big smart choice. - Big smart choice, yeah. Leo, you haven't played a dad in very many movies and not certainly not an older, having an older child. And I have a young daughter. This is an amazing father daughter movie. And I think we'll hit a lot of father daughters very heavy. But I'm curious, like what conversations you guys had about the father daughter relationship and kind of getting into the mindset of somebody trying to take care of a kid at that age? - I have played dad's before a Revenant. I think I played a father revolutionary road and reception movies like that. But yeah, this center future of this entire story is this sort of makeshift father that is trying to relate to his, you know, trying to relate to his daughter. And that's the driving force of this entire movie. You know, when I was thinking about this character and movies to watch, you watched a lot of different movies, not based around a father's father daughter dynamic, but I remember watching, what did we watch? Running on empty. - Yeah. - Which was, you know, sort of revolutionary parents running with their children. We watched Battle of Algiers. I think I remember watching a lot of dog day, I watched dog day after noon a lot 'cause that urgency of the grade now, but you know, in that movie with those phone calls, the franticness of trying to get your loved one back at all odds where it was a big influence, but. - Did you watch "Line in the Winter"? - I watched "Line in the Winter" too. - That has nothing to do with it, but it's great 'cause it has the best acting ever in a movie with Peter O'Toole, Catherine Hepburn. And they can be so gigantic and so fun and so hammy, but like that, switch to an intimate thing that's like, that's razor's edge. And I like that as an idea. The movie is very different, but in similar ways that we could go from really big and broad and all over the place to keep it real and make it really, something you would literalize when you were preparing to make the movie or even on set. - No, I don't think so. I think those things just sort of come 'cause you're feeling your way through it and you kind of, you know, just try to play loose and see where it goes. And, you know, most of the times you kind of, you feel good and you go, this feels right, I will not say in six months when we're looking back at it's right, but we have to keep moving forward. And so this instinctually feels pretty good. Or from time to time, you do do something and at least within 24 hours you go, maybe we should revisit that and that can happen too. - Time to time. - I was curious about something related to that. This is a really big movie for you in terms of scale. You've worked on a ton of movies, Leo, with huge scale. When you're working on something that is this big, that this has this many moving parts, do you know when you're getting it, do you know when you're getting what you want because you have to have so many various moving pieces going as opposed to just two people sitting in a room talking to each other? - Yeah, I do. As big as it is, it was still the same 15, 20 dope around the camera that it always is. It was all just us making the movie, you know? I mean, things would grow, we would have bigger days, but we started the film in that little cabin in the woods shooting three days. There was only room for four of us and Chase and Leo. So you know, and we would watch Daily's every night and sit and have our dinner and look back and say, okay, this is feeling good and keep progressing. So yeah, you do. You do. The scale kind of becomes inconsequential. You know, you kind of, if we were prepared, we knew what the goal was. So you're just really focused on getting what you need, looking for inspiration and keeping your shit together, really. - Leo, it feels like Chillers of the Firemoon in this film don't look up once upon a time in Hollywood. There's a strain of comedic drama that you seem really interested in in the last few movies and this kind of nervy, very funny, but kind of anxiety riddled figures. Like, does anything account for that? What is drawing you to these kinds of guys? - What's drawing me to them? To be honest, it's not a, it's not a conscious choice. It's reading the material, working with the director and trying to do this story justice and bring up my hope. My hope is the comedy comes from real life circumstances and real life, you know, scenarios that make it funny. Otherwise, it's never funny to me. Once a set up gag or a set up joke. I mean, just the opening of Bob's character, it's kind of like, I love the fact that, you know, it's like you're 15 years, 16 years later, his past comes back to Haunt and what would Bob be doing? He'd be smoking pot, you know, on his couch, watching Battle of Algiers for the 50th time. And that would be, and he would have an argument with his daughter about the fact that he got drunk last night. You're right, and there's a set up for that is, and then of course, you know, the gag of my character, not knowing the password is a brilliant choice, you know? You think you're gonna be with this sort of traditional hero who's gonna use all his revolutionary techniques from his past to save his daughter in a profound way. And he can't get, he can't get passed over the first hurdle of the race, you know, tripped on the first hurdle. And then he continues to trip on every single hurdle all the way around the track. And then we kept on doing that too, where there are moments in the original screenplay where we're like, okay, maybe he does this and Paul was like, yeah, no, I think that the mirror, for our protagonist, our flawed protagonist, I think the mere act of just propelling himself forward against all odds is his heroism. And through that is a lot of hilarious moments, you know, a lot of comedy comes naturally from that, from that situation. - I think to that, or say, you know, we had an idea, it didn't exactly kind of emerge like this, but it was good for us to go into it, thinking about this way. Is it, what if like the sixth most important member of the French 75, you know, like ended up being, now suddenly the last man standing and the guy with the baby, you know? Like, of all these people who you'd really rather see, you know, in an action position, guy number six, choice number six, who was really kind of just involved in shooting stuff off, and maybe that was his job, is the last man standing and also has the child. It's like, what happens then, you know? That, and that was good for us to just have in our body and our mind approaching the story. - He's not like a full-blown buffoon though. I love the Mexican hairless moment where it's like, he's made a hero, you know, like, damn it, you know? - That's exactly right. If you go full-blown, then that's preposterous, you know? I mean, he's sharp enough, but he's also stuck in, and what he's done to himself in 16 years to disengage has definitely slowed his game down. - I want to ask you guys about that, 'cause I do think one thing that I really connected with, that I think a lot of people who are maybe 40 plus well is you're very young, you're hopeful, you're idealistic, you're maybe even radical, you get older, you turn a little inward, maybe don't turn conservative, but you become just a little bit more into your own stuff. And Bob is not conservative at all, but he's kind of stuck where he was in some ways. And I'm curious about like that dynamic and developing that dynamic, and even talking to someone like Chase, who has, you know, a much more limited life experience, and I would assume is maybe a little bit more idealistic and kind of making sense together out of that in the movie. - You're touching on one of the main things that we always talked about, that and the fatherhood aspect. We just mentioned it, but, you know, there was an up north, they have a type of character that is Bob and they refer to them as hip necks, which is half a hippie and half a redneck. And generally, probably when they were younger, they were miles apart in terms of what their ideology is. But they become closer and closer and end up being the same exact person in middle age, and they share the common theme of just leave me alone. I do not care, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, it's a natural, and it's, I don't know. You put miles on you and you slow down and it's a funny one. - And probably his inability to relate to his daughter's generation whatsoever, you know? In fact, that she's off into the stratosphere with, you know, her own ideology and he's trying to pull her into his, but at the same time, just a setup that we have of this guy in a log cabin that can't make a phone call. He's, I almost thought it would have been interesting if he put in a blazer disc of battle about it, you know? He's not online, there's probably no connection to the internet, you know, and he is trying to exist in today's society. It's just a brilliant setup in that regard. - I think we're finding them too at a time. I bet, I bet, and there's, you can kind of see in the backyard the remnants of all, like little toy slides and things like that that are now overgrown and everything else. I would imagine that their life from like zero to 10 was absolutely idyllic. She knew nothing else except this doting dad, and he's gonna take her, and maybe we go to the market and then we come right back, and he's taught me all this stuff about how to survive. But as you start to emerge in young adulthood, you start to, you are forming your own path, and you know, a friend of mine recently took his daughter off to college and his heart was broken. And he said, you know, if I had known she was gonna break my heart, I wouldn't gotten this close to her. (laughing) It's the sort of premise that the best thing that he can do is let go, you know, is let her go out that door. No matter what danger she might end up facing, that's his job. - One other thing I really loved about the movie is it's set up to be a showdown movie. You, you incurred Darth Vader, you know, that this idea of good versus evil, but you actually only get, I think just the one scene was Sean. - Yeah. - And I was wondering if you guys could talk about the decision that kind of keep them apart ultimately, to make this not high noon and something a little bit different. - Well, I think that was, that was Paul. I mean, I remember us talking about the varied possibilities, not only for the ending, but the midsection of my character. And I remember him just saying, look, I just don't know how to do that. I don't know if I wanna do that with this character. And it, I think to him, I'm not speaking for him, but it would rob that moment and not to give away the ending, but of the sheer relentlessness that Bob has for just being there and being present and being that father figure. That is, that becomes his heroism at the end of the day. I mean, there was a lot of traditional tropes that we could have done a little, but it took a lot of discussion. And I think I had to let go of a lot of those ideas as well into the process. And it kind of naturally occurred. And there we, I don't think we even decided until we're right there on that road in Barrego Springs with her, with the three cars sort of following each other. And he said, no, no, this is, this needs to be passed on to the next generation. I remember him saying that, the trauma of what, you know, Bob is now, she's now paying the price for Bob's ideology right here, boom. And it's the next generation dealing with all of this right here. And what happened? And then, not to give away the ending again. But yeah, but the idea of her being in complete shock, you know, the, who is this man? She's, she's been put through such extreme traumatic events. And that was a brilliant choice at the end of the day. Yeah, it was, and it was, it was sort of discovered. You know, you're standing there and you're just faced with logic. You just asked yourself, you said, let's get back to common sense. Forget the move, Venus of this. What is common sense? What is she, what is she asking herself? We know what he's after. He's after just protecting her. That's quite simple, you know. But now it was her time, you know. After all this time of being thrown around in the movie and handcuffed, she's got a blossom and she's got a few fucking questions of her own to ask around here, you know. And that's, to his point before, I think I, what took so long over 20 years is, is trying all of these versions, maybe more traditional things, that it felt like you were supposed to do. Boy, no, man, you got a bad guy and you got a hero. And I wrote all these things and all these things. And there's a certain point. You can really, you can really try to do things that you think you're supposed to do. And their terrific exercises, because inevitably they will let you know like, hey, it worked or their characters aren't going that way. That's not what they want to do, you know. And you just have to keep listening to the story or the people in the story. And the more you listen to them, the more they'll speak back to you and help guide the story. Hopefully they're guiding it in an energetic and kind of action oriented way that has momentum and is interesting to an audience. Hopefully they don't want to be boring. Well, it's just interesting to hear you talk about finding it so much creatively and the making of it, especially because shooting on this division, and I know that those cameras are a little bit complicated to use and it's a little different from just grabbing a digital camera. - Yeah. - But on the other hand, something is clearly happening in Los Angeles, I think in other cities where there is a film fandom that really wants unfilm large format. I want to be with 500 people in a room community thing that is going on and it's like no one's movies and Quentin's movies and the repertory scene here is very crazy now and exciting. And I'm wondering, like you guys have participated in that, you always shoot on film, most of your movies are on film too. Like what do you think that is about why are people, especially young people into it? - I think even young people are oversaturated with the sheer amount of imagery and fast-paced content. I mean, look at the amount of production that's out there on Netflix alone and no discredit to any of it. There's some brilliant stuff out there, but that, I don't want to say low-fi experience, but that theatrical communal experience of seeing something on, that's got to be equally as vital. And I hope to me it's exciting because otherwise, there's a huge gap in the art form. All these things have to sort of coexist together. And this movie was, it's a truly original idea. It's a big budget film and it's meant to have that communal theatrical experience. This movie is specifically made for that. More than anything else I can imagine, it is made for the theatrical experience. In "Bending Zero" and I were talking about it the other day, you know, I love uncomfortable moments and movies. That's what I love the most when I'm sitting there with the character, feeling an embarrassment for them or not knowing whether the laugh or cry or, and that communal experience almost allows you to connect with the character. Oh, that guy feels that way about this moment. Oh, that's actually funny. It's something that can only happen when, you know, bunch of homo sapiens are together in a room, you know, feeling the energy of one another. And I think everything that Paul did to make this movie was for that singular experience. It is one of those movies that's not meant to be seen on a tablet or a small screen. It's meant to be in the theaters, to be felt and witness and experience in the theater. You said it best. I'm just gonna fuck it up, that was exactly right. I mean, no, that's why you go through the pan and the ass of working with these cameras and doing all these kinds of things because it's absolutely worth it. Back to your point about, you know, finding things with a VistaVision camera, yeah, they're kind of counterintuitive, you know, you kind of you would think you should, but 'cause I don't want it to seem that we were out there just kind of making it up as we went along, you know, this is the product of a schedule that, you know, if you have four days to do something, you can do it as it's written the first day, look it it back, you come back the next day, you refine it, you better get it right by the third day and you got that fourth one to really bring it home, you know, especially for key and important valuable scenes that you know are essential and that there might be something more to, that's just, that's what a great producer and assistant director brings you, that's what we had. - We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they have seen, one of you guys seen recently, that you really dug. - It's a film that I've seen before. - Is that okay? - That's okay. Vertigo. - Why did you watch it? - I'm working on a film where that's a reference point. Marty had a conversation with Marty about it and, you know, anytime you get to sit and talk with him about movies is a religious experience, but when he talks about a movie that he's still trying to figure out, it's an even more. He's like, you know, each decade, that movie means something different. - Yeah, is she a ghost? Is she not a ghost? Is she there? Is he a ghost? What is it? - You know, listening and to talk him, so I rewatched it and I knew the moments, exact moments in the red woods that he was talking about. I was like, that's the moment that Marty felt that. - Right. - So, yeah, there's something that we're working on that film has been a reference for that. - That's a Vistivision movie too, so, you know, and we actually funny enough, it was good. - Did we have one of our cameras from Vertigo or was it North by Northwestern, was it? - Probably not, I don't know. (laughing) - There was from that whole other-- - There was, but, but, but, we shot a whole sequence that we cut out of the movie, in the beginning of the movie, and we were in San Juan, Bautista, where they shot a lot of Vertigo, very famous over the short films there. There's not the churches there. There's the kind of, there's the carriage that she goes along spot, it's there, and there's an upper landing that they used for the courtroom scene. So, we took our little Vistivision camera there and we put it up there and we stood there and we went, hmm, there was a camera here, or 60-something years ago, shooting Vertigo or standing in the same room. We ended up cutting the whole sequence out, but, nevertheless, we really felt like, fucking hell, this is exciting. I saw, for the first time, a movie called Tom Horn, which is with Steve McQueen. I saw, there was a book about him later in his life. I think it was his second-to-last movie. And I said, "God, I never even heard of this. "I never even seen it." It's terrific, terrific film about Tom Horn, who was a real Pinkerton detective, but kind of protected a cattle rust. He kind of employed by Rich cattle barons and Wyoming. So, it kind of touches near where Heaven's Gate goes and stuff. It's a really interesting film, beautifully shot by John Alonso. And recent enough that there was a gaffer named Jim Planette, who I worked with many years ago. I got to text him and say, "I just saw Tom Horn." He's like, "We had a great time making that movie." I was exciting to see Steve McQueen in the movie. It was his second-to-last movie. So, I think he was already ill, but he gives a great performance and Richard Fondsworth is in a terrific film. - Great recommendations. - Leo Paul, thank you so much for chatting on. - Yeah, thank you. - Okay, thanks to Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson. - Yes, thank you, Leo Paul. - I'm a normal thank you guys. - Thanks guys, I'll see you later. - Thanks guys, you know, Paul. - Good job with you at your house. Thanks to you both for your contributions. This is a very special movie. We hope the listeners of this show go to see it. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Don't forget, big pick [email protected]. If you'd like to send us some questions about the film, though we did talk about a lot of it here. And see you in New York. - Yeah, next week we head to New York for a live show at the 92nd Street Y, where, what are we doing? No, don't spoil what we're doing. - Okay, we're taking this surprise. - You like to show up and be like tonight, we're here drafting wizards. - Yeah, tonight we're drafting wizards. Former members of the Washington Wizards, the Gilbert Arena is where we drafts. - I'm actually quite prepared for that. You'll be there. - I will be there. - Thank goodness. Not just in the audience, of course. And there will be other special guests. I'm willing to say that. So it'll be on October 4th. In between then we have nine episodes to record. So we'll do our best. - Are you serious? - Are you serious? - No, we have time. - Oh, I was like, I mean, that would be possible. Like, oh shit, I gotta check the spreadsheet. - Yeah, okay. - And hopefully everyone listens to all of them. We'll see you then. (upbeat music)