‘Wildwood,’ ‘Wicker,’ and 10 Movies We Missed! Plus: Travis Knight!

I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is the Big Picture 8 Conversation show about Wildwood, Wicker, and many other W's, the inimitable. Joanna Robinson is here today to talk about a wide collection of new movies, as this October is officially the busiest stretch of new releases that I can recall in the history of this podcast. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Travis Knight. He's the director of Wildwood, the dazzling new stop-motion adaptation of the 2011 young adult fantasy novel. Since 2009, Knight has been the CEO of Leica Studios, the world-renowned animation house. He's also directed a number of films, including Kubo and the Two Strings, and this year's Live Action Masters of the Universe. Knight shared his story of 16 years working on this film, The Future of Leica, his feelings on animation and AI, and many other things. Stick around for that conversation. It's a very good one. But first, some movie news and a little Oscars talk with Joanna, right after this. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great. Impressions reach and react. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? Bullspend. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash thebigpicture. That's linkedin.com slash thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply. This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What? Pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life. With great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime. And now you may speak. Hello. My intros are getting longer and I don't care. I don't know. You said inimitable, so I'm thrilled. Nailed it on the first try. I'm just on. I'm honored. Joe, what's up? It's been a minute. How are you doing? What a delight to be with you. Welcome. During my favorite season, Oscar season. This is a busy time. What news should we start with? You want to do the news first? I do. I know you're very protective of the news. The news is important. It's all you have. It's all I have. You heard about that? So you do. Yeah, I saw the memes. That was good memeing, everybody. So you do that. See, I was just like trying to start doing the news. I was like, sir, have you not enough podcasts? I have the one job. What are you doing? A couple programming before we start. TV takes off right now? I'm watching some television. I heard that. And I'm watching Survivor, and I'm loving Survivor. I watched a conversation happen between Chris and Jack before the recording of the episode on Friday about Survivor, and I just got major FOMO. TV FOMO for the first time in forever, and I caught up. Banger of a season so far. Banger. Here's why I know. It's a banger season. I have a Survivor pool that I've been in the last three seasons, and I crushed the previous two seasons, and I'm tanking, and that's because it's a very unpredictable game. Sorry. This is boring for you, but for the first time in 10 years, they figured out something new that I'm really excited about. Anyhow, quick programming note. Two new Netflix movies that are in theaters right now that we're not talking about today. They're in limited release. That's Possible Love and the Mosquito Bowl. Possible Love next week on the Netflix streaming service. We'll talk about it here. Mosquito Bowl, not until end of November. We'll talk about it then on the show. Let's start quickly with Dune Part 3 trailer. Did you watch it? No. I'm done. Show me the movie. That's fine. Listen, I am very excited for it. I saw the first. I saw the first 10 minutes in April at CinemaCon. What if I told you the trailer was 89% Zendaya? I am very pro-Zendaya, and I will be seeing this film as soon as they will show it to me. So once again, show me the movie. What did you think? I loved this trailer. It's so good. It's really, really good. I'm happy. I'm so jacked for this movie. How do you feel about the visuals being slightly different, you know, with a different cinematographer? How do you feel with the visuals being slightly different? Does it feel distinct enough? Does it feel distinct in a fun way, or does it all feel of a piece? It's a good question. I mean, I think the thing that struck me that is related to that is it's clearly a war movie. That it's like Apocalypse Now meets Patton. That that's the movie that they're making set in the future, which is fucking great. The Vietnam War movie visuals from the first trailer, the one that Amanda watched, have been astounding. I saw 10 minutes. I saw the opening sequence, which was like Saving Private Ryan, you know? It was incredibly intense. We were all so excited about it. And again, I have liked all, both films in the series. I liked Denis Villeneuve. I will see the movie, but let's go. The one thing. You know what I mean? Well, it's coming out in two months. You know, take a sip of water. It'll get here. We'll get to it. I think the thing that we were texting about it yesterday on our movie chain, and I wanted to say two things, and I didn't say it. And you know what? I'll just say it to just the two of us here on the pod. And no one else. One, I was like, could be a masterpiece. It could be an all-time classic based on what I've seen, which is not a good place to put, not a good place for my head to go before a movie. I know. But I did, I started getting that tingly feeling. And then the second thing was, I was like, are we sure Best Picture's out here? Are we sure? Yeah. This can't happen. That's so funny because. I thought that was not going to happen at all the whole time. You and I had that conversation like months ago, and you were like, no, no way. Zero percent chance. These movies are so well made. Well, so here's the Best Picture conversation that I've been trying to get my arm around, which is that the Odyssey, which has been the front runner for so long, and a reason that the Odyssey is considered the front runner, other than the fact that we all enjoyed it and thought it was great, is this idea of how many categories it can sort of represent in. Dune has historically sort of been one of those can represent across the board. I mean, and we've been wondering if this could be a Return of the King-esque celebration. Even Amanda enjoys this entire trilogy if she likes the third movie. So, I mean, how would you feel about that? If it got this sort of recognition for an entire trilogy's worth of work? I mean, that would be fun purely for men. From an Oscar race perspective, right? Because we're about to talk about You Can See Everything. You're going to do your Oscar predictions, but things are getting weird and fun. And we have talked the last few years about how it's been decided in May or June or July, and we just like have to sit here and blog out loud for six months. But I'm very open to it. Also, the more time I can spend talking about Dune 3 instead of Doomsday, the better for you, truly. So let's lean into that. You're not watching this. You're not watching the Doomsday Clock countdown? No, I'm not. I have it up in my office. It's just running all the time. It just goes on my watch all the time. But I learned that someone that I didn't know was going to be in it was going to be in it. But then I think I did know. In Dune Part 3 or in Doomsday? Yes, yeah, but I think that's right. Yeah. I like that you're doing the German. Höhler? Yeah, sorry. That's beautiful. Let's use that as a portal into the broader Oscar conversation because a couple things are happening. One, you can see everything has become a mass sensation. Really? Over $50 million. My mother saw it in theaters last night. I was like, oh, this is happening. That's what I'm saying. That is incredible. And Fahrenheit 9-11 has been cited often as the last great big benchmark for a wide-release documentary film. We can debate whether it's a documentary or not. Could you debate whether this is a documentary or not? Yeah, this one specifically. The awards campaign was confirmed. We know all the people who are running. She Who Shall Not Be Named, for anybody who's listening to the top of this podcast, will be running. We're still not talking about that. I think just this will be the last time. Okay. On this. This is going to show that we don't spoil You Can See Everything. Does that seem fair? The movie is available wide. So you can see it. Don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Yeah. It is still harder to get tickets. Because it's selling out. Yes. So we should give people time and grace. But it's also leaking out a little bit. Also, we're just going to slip up at some point. So I think what we should do is try to keep the secret for as long as we can without messing up. And then when it happens, it happens. When it happens. When it happens, it happens. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have been deemed ineligible to win Best Director at the DGA Awards. Does that mean something? I don't know. Who is the president of the DGA's currently? Thank you for saying so. It's Christopher Nolan, whose film is in the running. Do you think that came across his desk? I just. And he was just like, no. No. Were I Christopher Nolan, I would have pushed to include them just, you know, to be a bench. To save face. Yeah, exactly. Well, by the letter of the law, all documentary filmmakers, it seems, are not eligible to win the Best Feature Prize for Best Director at the DGA's. Interesting. And it does say a documentary by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder on the posters, which I have been noting. But it's eligible for Best Picture. Correct. Of course. Do you think of it as a documentary? Do you believe it is a documentary? No. Okay. I think it's a docudrama. Okay. Is that helpful? I think that's fine. No, I think it's useful. And I think a potential acting campaign out of this would be not only exciting, but I think merited. Merited and delicious. Yeah. I think that it is a documentary, but I also think an acting nomination would be merited and delicious. Because it's really, I think, a performance nomination is what we're doing. And it's a performance unlike any I've ever seen. It's a performance that I'm, you know, setting my course by going forward. And it's similar to, you know, when. Well, you should be so lucky. She's an inspiration. I mean, always has been, but like now more than ever. When we talk about something like Wildwood and we, the credits roll in a Laika film and you see all of the work that goes into Laika film. And I said this on our House of Art coverage of it, but I cry at the end of every Laika film whether or not I loved the movie because just seeing that much passion and dedication and artistry that goes into that project. Hundreds of people. You know. Hundreds of people working on these movies. For like 30 seconds of footage and stuff like that. So the way in which, let's continue to talk around it. You can see everything reveals not just the ability of this person to act, but also their process is, I think, puts them at a huge advantage inside of. They're not just making the case for themselves as a performer, but also the process of being a performer. They're able to show their work inside of this project. Does that make sense? Yes. And also what the person does in front of the camera to advance. Yes. The story and the narrative and complicate the narrative of the film, both scripted and improv and improvisation is certainly allowed within the context of a performing Oscar. It is. This particular thing that you're describing, if this person is rewarded for it, they will be rewarded for that. Yes. That doesn't mean that's by the letter of the law what an acting nomination is for. However, I am totally comfortable corrupting that in this particular instance. And do you know how I mean? So many times. Like, why did Matthew McConaughey win his Oscar that year? It's because of True Detective. Like, the narrative outside of the narrative is so consistently there to push things, various things forward. And so I just don't like, I mean, maybe this is actually I can't mention that. OK, we're not. I've never cared about category fraud and I'm not going to start now. OK, good to know. When we did our Best Picture Power Rankings last week, was it last week? It was last week. It's been a long stretch. We were we went to San Francisco and then came back. San Francisco says. Hello. How was it? Yeah, it was nice. Yeah, great weather, which means it was very gray and foggy. Of course. That sounds right. And the people were very lovely. Did you have any good food? I did. I went to Zuni Cafe by myself. Did you get the chicken? No, I didn't. Listen, I'm over shame. You didn't have the chicken. I told you it's hard to get the chicken bread salad for yourself. It's for like four people. Well, my plan was also that I said I'm going to get the chicken for bread salad for two for one. Yeah. And then I told Sean I would bring him the leftovers. But then I. I got there late enough and I was so hungry and they say it takes 75 minutes. And I did actually sit next to a table who were already eating when I arrived and had not received their chicken when I left. So it was more of a time thing. I had a beautiful Bavette steak with creamed corn. Did you have the mountain of fries? No. What I did instead was like the like the vegetable tempura, basically, which was delicious. And I did get the chocolate cake. So what I'm hearing is we're all going back to Zuni Cafe for the chicken bread salad. I've never been and I would love to. It arrived next to me. It looked beautiful. They were lovely. That's your favorite meal in San Francisco. Yeah. Wow. OK. We didn't. And by we, I mean me. Didn't allot enough days in the city to do anything really of note besides perform. And we did perform. And you did. And then we came back. We ranked movies. We had you can see everything pretty high. Do you see it as a locked in Best Picture nominee? Yes. You do. I think given what Amanda was saying about her mom being there, the number of people in my life who I've heard from who have watched it, the way it's animating conversation about what art can do. I think it would be foolish to leave it out, especially of a 10, you know, a 10 film category. Is there anything like, well, maybe we should just do your predictions. I don't know if you have a Best Picture prediction in your predictions right now. I mean, I'm kind of bullish on you can see everything in a in a very weird way. Because going all the way. Well, it's complicated right now because I've been thinking a lot about, of course, the Odyssey and what Universal's plan is, because the Odyssey comes out hot and strong and everyone's like, this is it. This has to be. This has to be it. And then they're doing the let's go away for a minute game so that we can come back and remind everyone how much they loved the Odyssey. And we're going to re-release some Nolan films and theaters at the top of the year. And everyone's going to get really excited about it. What they're fighting against is, you know, the recent Nolan sweep. That's something they're fighting against. I was, you know, I know we're going to talk about the Gothams, but I was really interested to see they didn't submit the Odyssey at the Gotham. So I guess that's part of their let's go away for a minute strategy, even though one battle was. You know, dominant at the at the Gothams. And so Universal has a really fine line to walk in terms of go away long enough for people to miss you and then come back not too late for them to forget about you. And they also have to time it against Dune 3, which is coming out at the end of the year. And Amanda can't wait. And I can't and I cannot wait quite literally. And will also have its own campaign and is competing in a similar blockbuster technical, you know, below the line across the board. Scope and like the big Hollywood movie from a venerated, if not yet rewarded director in the case of Denis Villeneuve. And that's and Denis has the advantage over Nolan, given that people can say, well, Nolan just had his his big year. This leads me to my sort of hottest best picture take that I am currently handling, which is I think La Bola Negra, which a movie that I actually really enjoyed, is way over indexed in everyone's ranking. I understand. I understand why. I mean, again, I really liked it. And I think a reason why it's ranked so high is because of that scope. Yeah, that's sort of like it's a big, sweeping, long epic. And if the Odyssey, the big, sweeping, long epic is the front runner, like what could possibly match it? Maybe it's La Bola Negra. But every person that I've talked to who's actually seen it, not at a festival, but sort of here in town has been colder on it. So I just don't know if it feels over indexed out of festival season and will not fare as well into the award season. My one pushback against that is that it is the only really powerful international film and that we've seen. Obviously, there are always going to be one or two that have strength. Whether or not a movie like that has the strength to stand up to the Odyssey or you can see everything or if Dune Part 3 is as good as we hope it is, you know, it's a big caveat on Dune Part 3. It's sort of like it actually has to be as good as it looks right now. Right. And I think it will be. Well, we just don't know that. And something, you know, the story of that. That book is so weird. And yet also, Denis is making a lot of adaptive decisions that he didn't make in the first two movies. So can he round the weird off enough while maintaining the spirit of the book to give something that feels palatable enough in a Return of the King sense to crown the trilogy? You know, I do also think our our Oscar indexes are imperfect and do not, you know, what happened with Bola Negra happened after it won the People's Choice Award at Toronto. Several other festival awards and Guitarca de la Fuente, I've been practicing, you know, is really getting his U.S. launch after being so popular in Spain. And so then that goes in. But like our it's kind of like the interest rates and the inflation where we like can't really keep up in real time with what's going on out on the streets. I was hoping this would come up today. And so, well, listen, it's not good. It's not good out there in terms of America. But so, you know, then you can see everything. It was made available to everybody and became also the sensation, which I think even at the surprise screening at Telluride, you would you have predicted $50 million in the box office? No, I mean, it's going to make $100 million. I mean, it's going to be it's going to be one of the biggest documentaries in the history of the form. October surprise, baby. October surprise, truly. So like our measurements are imprecise and too late. But I think you're right. I'm not. I think you are correct. It's all subjective in terms of who we're talking to. I'm not here to like critique your ranking. I'm just saying in general, everyone has it one, two. And I'm just I feel like it's going to slide. It's I was thinking a lot about Amelia Perez. Obviously, it's not going to be dogged by hopefully not dogged by like some of the similar controversies. But that was another thing that just came in sort of really inflated out of festival season. Were we all together that day? Were you? I feel like you were on the podcast. When that film's promises went down. Yes. When the. Tweet flame. Yes. When the story was broken. It was either like near. It was right around then. I think we I remember we had a lot of this annual episode, like a check in. With Joanna episode really on that. So it's nice to see you. Great to be back. Good luck to La Bola Negra, I guess. One last thing about that note, which I think is very interesting, is you you're right to point out that the Odyssey and Dune Part Three have something in common in terms of its scope and execution. And La Bola Negra also has something in common in that respect. The one thing that La Bola Negra has going for it is it's also a contemporary story. It is also very much a modern day story. In addition to being this grand war story. Many things. And so because of that multiplicity of story and theme. It can appeal to a lot of different kinds of voters in a way. It can it can appeal to the steak eaters. It can also appeal to the international audience. It can also appeal to the costume drama audience. Like it kind of hits a lot of different targets. And which is why I think it Netflix, if they play it right, has a strong chance to do something interesting with it. But even its enthusiasts that I've talked to, at least, are like, I liked it, except for this. I was going to say that that is both its strength and its weakness, because it features so much. It doesn't really commit to anything like is it the most complete portrait of what's going on in the Spanish Civil War? No. And I really need to read some history before we do our episode. Is it the most complete portrayal of, you know, modern, you know, gay life? Probably not. Is it the most complete depiction of a play or the history of literature or, you know, Glenn Close? I mean, you know, I know. So you can have like a nice table, though, with a lot of different things to take. You know, I do like a little, you know, small plates. the steak eaters just want a big juicy steak they do you mentioned the Gothams the Gotham Award nominations came out this week I don't really know how to regard the Gothams we don't spend a lot of time thinking about them they're really first out of the gate and I think they have they do this great act of locating a handful of films or performances that are probably not going to be in the awards race and the critic circle races for the whole run through there were a couple that I really liked I liked seeing Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother get some love and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma I liked seeing John Early get recognized for his direction for Maddie's Secret a movie that we really like I liked seeing Ian McKellen for The Christophers which is like a movie that if they had put that at festivals and it had come out in October maybe there would have been a more interesting race for him I really liked that movie I loved it it's really stuck with me too that movie and Tuner which I saw earlier in the year have really lingered and might be bumping around somewhere in my top 10 top 5 maybe even and Ian McKellen's performance is so good Michaela Cole also amazing in that movie so I don't know I would love to see you know we're going to talk about the John Turturro performance as well but like Turturro and McKellen like as kings of you know the Indie Spirit Awards or something like that this year I mean that's exciting to me definitely seems plausible and I mean the Gothams do you race to your computer when they're announced in the morning and say what does this mean well the Gothams in addition to being first they eventize the ceremony in their own way and the speeches from the Gothams are always very memorable and recorded kind of you know charmingly on video phones and posted online so I always feel a little bit of FOMO that I'm not there and I look forward to those invite Amanda to the Gothams well I know that's true I gotta figure out how to get to New York in December yeah but also there can be a breakout moment and especially in the performances where someone gives like a good speech and then there's suddenly a little bit of juice going in campaigns so I like to see who's sprinkled and to your point about isolation a few performances that are not on our predictions lists and are maybe not gonna hang around for awards season sometimes I like to see who they throw in just you know in case something pops through at the same time they also do a good job of like planting the flag for a couple things you know and this one I was just really happy to see all of the Mike Lee and Tender Loving Care nominations which I still have not even seen but I'm very much looking forward to and I do always feel that we get to the end of an awards season and we're like oh yeah what about the Mike Lee movie so there are a couple other instances here where they're really like don't forget like pay attention to this all of a sudden you know popping up everywhere seems like an act of advocacy that I appreciate I'm glad you brought that up too because you mentioned the Matthew McConaughey moment where he wins for Dallas Buyers Club but it's part of the McConaissance that's one of the reasons why he was awarded and Kato Flynn being one of the biggest breakout TV stars of the year and also appearing in Tender Loving Care and she's devastatingly good in Tender Loving Care and playing in a completely different register than the one that she plays in on Widow's Bay and so that's a universe where she's acknowledged here by the Gothams that could kickstart a long campaign and supporting actress if that's where they decide to choose her to me she's a lead but I know we don't care about category fraud nevertheless have you seen Tender Loving Care yet? I haven't yet I'm excited look forward to that conversation also you know Bollinegra not in feature at the Gothams either which I think is interesting but also the Gothams has like very strange you know the way they do their nominations is down to sort of like small small jury small jury of people so that's and they used to have parameters around their budget and they no longer do right so now every movie can contend if they submit the movie right and again for Universal to not submit the Odyssey I just think is interesting I know that Odyssey stuff is coming back pretty soon though so that you know I think that they kind of have to start the campaign in November do you think the optics is they don't want to like try to put themselves up again against like this cute boutique indie sort of I don't know lineup but again one battle did and that worked out really well for it I mean watch out you can see everything can win and then all of a sudden you can see everything train starts rolling and I think that's a film that's going to do very well with critics groups so it this is a cool race this went from in July I was like fuck this is going to be really boring and now I feel completely differently about it it's the best did you bring some predictions well I have some hot takes I guess okay hot takes are even better than predictions okay this is around or questions a series of Syrian questions is this like a Socratic method situation well here's my question I saw Wild Horse 9 I absolutely loved it I think Malkovich is incredible like a miracle performance in it and then I heard from a couple people who had seen it they asked me how much I thought that was improvised and I said I don't actually think not improvised at all and so do I think McDonough is a shoo-in to win yes could the quality of his writing hurt a lead actor uh is that is that the smear campaign they're running not not I I'm pro Malkovich it's gonna be down to like Damon and Malkovich and then we can talk about Andrew Scott but like but I was gonna say the Gotham Award nominations once again can also confirm like things are really happening Malkovich is in performances you know Andrew Garfield is in supporting performances you're just kind of this that is that is absolutely gonna happen you and I are like so bullish on Garfield and Artificial I really really can't Joanne and I saw Artificial sitting next to each other and I just really really such a good experience can't wait um we like ran to the ballet stand like brimming with first of all wanting to beat everyone but also just like brimming with enthusiasm I did also quite literally do the Leo pointing at the screen at someone who will be discussed on stage to and I think also yell sorry to everyone else in that screen another movie that I think will be very insurgent when it really starts getting shown more widely in this race I think um some so yeah back to Malkovich you know I like what you're saying mm-hmm I feel strongly at this moment in time that Malkovich will win so do I I also feel I hope so I think he should that I will be surprised at the moment if McDonagh doesn't win original screenplay and here's why he's never won for original screenplay and he's widely considered one of the best writers in Hollywood Travis Knight on this very episode cites Martin McDonagh as a filmmaker that he loves who was the last somebody else was just recently in here and they also saw oh the filmmakers behind Once Upon a Time in Harlem they both loved Wild Horse Nine it's a movie that like everyone really likes and he doesn't he does have an Academy Award McDonagh but it's for his short film from 2005 Six Shooter which is kind of what launched him off the stage and into Hollywood within Bruges Wild Horse Nine has a lot in common within Bruges they're very much they're twins and so I like what you're saying but it's and maybe maybe is it possible that it doesn't benefit Malkovich that like maybe it benefits McDonagh more than it benefits that's what I mean that's exactly what I mean is that I think McDonagh is like a lock for screenplay oh I see what you're saying that a screenplay is so like his writing the quality of his writing is so good that it sounds so like natural this is maybe me grappling still with Banshees of Anishinaan trauma and the fact that I really thought Colin Farrell should have won for that and I'm just sort of like yes was that the whale year I think so yeah yeah yeah that's a tough one that's a tough one anyway Malkovich should win Garfield should win those are two strong takes of mine I mean the only thing I would throw into you with original screenplay is that Simon Rich will be in that mix for Artificial and I think when people see that it's there's gonna be well but the Artificial the Artificial smear is gonna be this is not you know it's that classic this is not based on reality well sure but that didn't matter for Aaron Sorkin and the social network it's true yeah it's true that was adapted though because that was that was after the book but I mean Artificial I feel like we know even more about the events that are portrayed because that story I don't want to spoil Artificial for people but that's a very interesting one we'll talk about Wild Horse 9 next week I can't wait I can't wait to listen to you guys talk about that another thing I have to do research for no spoilers there's a lot of research needed yes Olivia Wilde yeah really popping it feels like and it feels like one of those Hollywood redemption arcs that people get really excited about it's like sorry we were mean to you even though I don't know maybe did you deserve it did you not I think she's done all the right moves to sort of re-ingratiate herself and I love that movie and so in adapted screenplay I think that is a really strong and we talk all the time about the screenplay categories as like the cool kid categories so like that so like could Olivia Wilde over Christopher Nolan for the Odyssey like could that win happen but she's not the writer it's Rashida Jones and Will McCormick but like her as the face of that whole campaign yeah that's an interesting one right well they transfer it she's in a tricky spot where it's very clear that that script which is you know adapted from another film evolved a lot because of the skills of the actors and the director on set she's told stories about it yeah about what Norton brought to the table obviously what somebody like Seth Rogen brings to the table you know Olivia Wilde is like a tremendously experienced actress Penelope Cruz as well so that's an interesting one where like I think it will be nominated right but you feel like I think it will be held against it that it was like you had the superpower of Seth Rogen like one of the all time on set improvisers like the craziest story to me about the Edward Norton thing is the story that she told on the pod where she was like he wrote that whole hawk speech right near the end of the film and then Seth Rogen didn't know it was coming and in real time improvised his reaction that's in the movie right which is so funny and obviously that's what he does that's what his skill is sure but I wonder if that takes away at all from adulation for the screenplay I don't know it's what occurred to me when Olivia told that story but I really feel like feel like, okay, I hear you. I really feel like people want to recognize that movie. Is there another space you recognize that movie? I can't figure out where it's going to win. And I think it will get a tremendous number of nominations. And it's already, you know, they're going to be at the Palm Springs Festival and I think probably Santa Barbara. And they're lining up all the award season events. They are running. They have been running. And there is real love for it. But it seems to me like a real six to seven nomination, no wins type. It's a tricky one. I'm feeling similarly. I don't know what to do with it. Because I think it would be a really good nomination for her in director. But she's up against a lot of very brawny men. You know, with a lot of big. Two hobbies, not just one. Two hobbies, a Nolan, a Villeneuve. You know, we got a lot of, a Fielder and Oppenheim. That's true. Two duos. It's a lot to ask. Okay, that's a good one. What's next? Zendaya. Let's talk about it. Okay. Okay. No spoilers for Dune 3 or the trailer. Just that she's in the trailer a lot. Just that in, they've dramatically rewritten that part from the book in order to give her as much to chew on as possible. According to the trailer. No, according to what Villeneuve has. I mean, they set it up in the previous movie. I mean, you have Zendaya. What are you doing? You have to do that. Well, I know. Well, sure. But they didn't do it in the last movie. But the last movie ends with her being like, motherfucker, I will kill you. So, the drama. Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Spider-Man. Zendaya, Euphoria, Odyssey, Dune. Could we get a Let's Married Tom Holland? Yeah. Could we get a Let's Celebrate Zendaya, one of our biggest movie stars, for this incredible year that she's had? Sort of wins. For the drama? For Dune Part 3? For Dune Part 3. And they're running for Best Actress. It's just announced that she's running a Best Actress. Okay, so we got Julianne Moore is another that's happening. A weak field. Julianne Moore feels like the front runner right now because there isn't major competition. And Hathaway has ducked down into supporting. I do think Indy Navarrete will happen, despite it not happening at the Gothams. So, that's two that we feel really confident. We got no Best Actresses from Odyssey because they're all running and supporting. We have no Best Actresses from La Bola Negra because they are very supporting. But Penelope's great, though. She's great. Yeah. You know, and Glenn Close speaks Spanish. So. Yes, she does. She does. She does. In the way that the character is intended to speak Spanish. Yes, absolutely. Is her Spanish better or worse than Ben Affleck's Spanish in Animals? Debatable. Yeah, up to you. You'll see. It's a question. Okay, who else are front runners? It's a funky lineup. Yeah, it's a funky category. So, it's possible. It's Julianne Moore and Indy Navarrete, I think, are in. Yeah. I kind of think Olivia Wilde is in. I'm not totally sure. After that, John Doe Young from Possible Love to Me, who is also recognized at the Gothams, that feels like a very clear mandate for Netflix to make that happen. Her performance is amazing in that movie, as we'll talk about next week. After that, it's like, it's Marion Bailey from Tender Loving Care. It's Renata Reinshofer from Fjord. Sandra Hueller from Rose. Maybe that seems like it's likely, but not definite. Is that one of the five Sandra Hueller performances that you're going to pick? Well, I haven't seen Rose yet. Doomsday. I heard it, and I loved it. But do you think her role in Doomsday will be essential for her? Well, I still don't know who she's playing. Me neither, honestly. So, is she Mrs. Doom? Yeah, she's Jill Doom. Mrs. Day. Doom the mom. Yeah, Jill Doom. Okay. She's like Jill Biden, but for Doomsday. I like this. I like this. It's a weak category. You're onto something. And I think, you know, and she has such a, you know, like Spider-Man made all the money in the world this year. The drama is just like a really great performance and a really idiosyncratic movie. She's phenomenal in the very flawed final season of Euphoria, you know, like as she always is in Euphoria. And she's just a massive star. People just want to see more of Zendaya. I think there's a case. There's a case to be made that she is the number one overall draft pick in all of Hollywood right now. Mm-hmm. Chris Nolan's in that conversation, you know, Leo maybe. Like, there's like a handful of people where you're like, if you had to start with a person, who would you start with? I think she might be number one. Yeah. Maybe this is a podcast episode that I'm spoiling here. Okay. Well, and so you, it's the podcast episode that we do every single time. And it's, you've forgotten Timothee Chalamet. I think she is over Timothee Chalamet. I would take her over him. Yes, but in the conversation, I think. Sure. I love the guy. He's sort of in that conversation as well. And her husband. Mm-hmm. What's his name? But she has, over Pattinson and Timmy, she has the like sort of sterling personal life sort of fashion aspect of her. That's true. That's on top of that. She's a very powerful celebrity. Yeah. That's what I mean. Like, one of our movie stars. Uh-huh. So, it all depends on whether or not we feel like her performance in Dune is worth that push. But like, if Dune Part 3 doesn't feel like it is genuinely going to win any of those other categories. And the Odyssey is going to take them. Could she be the sort of like, let's give Dune Part 3 an Oscar and we'll give it to Zendaya? I love how you're thinking. You got any more? I think that's it. Okay. I think I did it. It should be an interesting race. Oh, and she who shall not be named. I feel really bullish on that. Yeah. I think that's happening. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I mean, a nomination. Yeah. We don't know if it's going to actually go all the way to her. That's a much harder category. But like, it could be really fun. I think so. Okay. Let's talk about movies. Um. So you had seen more than I ever would have expected. A lot of these are streaming at home. You know? A lot of them are streaming at home. There's been, uh, we've done, I think, a pretty good job this year of covering new releases. I feel like we put in a lot of effort seeing new films. And yet, ahead of this episode, I was like, motherfucker. I got to catch up with like nine movies. Sean and I ran into each other unplanned at the Americana. I was like, which of the many movie theaters that I've visited in the last five days? Your second movie of the day. My second movie of the day. At that movie theater. Which was very, very kind. What were your double features? Mine was Wildwood and Clara and the Sun, which was actually an interesting double feature. That is an interesting double feature. Yeah. I literally can't remember what my first movie of the day was. I'm going to look it up right now. Oh, it was Wicker. Okay. It was Wicker. Um. So let's start with Wicker. Great. For all these films. Uh, Wicker is, was, it debuted at Sundance to some acclaim. Um. Directed by Alex, Alex Houston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson. It is about an ostracized fisher woman, played by Olivia Colman, who commissions the local basket maker, normal thing, to weave her. Husband. When her Wicker creation proves unexpectedly extraordinary, his presence ignites jealousy and upheaval that threatens their quiet village. This is an extremely normal movie with a very normal premise. Joanna, you've already podcasted about this movie. So Amanda, what did, what did you make of Wicker? I was quite charmed by this film. And some of it is, I think, because of expectations. And so I went into it thinking this was, you know, kind of more romancy, like money grab. And then it is. It is. It's kind of an arch fable. It is very knowing about the story that it's telling. It understands the story that it's telling. And for the most part, understands audience. I went to a video screening with a lot of fans, I guess, of this genre of literature. Wicker fuckers. Yeah. Like a lot of cheering every time there was a sex scene, which was, um, one way to watch it. And not necessarily the way I watched it. I watched it when I was cheering mostly for Olivia Colman and Elizabeth Debicki. Debicki is the star. The star of this movie. Throwing heat. Debicki's amazing. So great. But she plays a rival townswoman. Yeah. Shout out Taylor's Wife. You know, I'm a big Taylor's Wife fan, honestly. I mean, we've been talking a lot about adaptations of the romance and it's, you know, tributaries genre and how a lot of times it seems to be the source material problem. And also that people, the filmmakers adapting it don't really understand or maybe even have some disdain for the material. They're forced to work with for commercial reasons. And it felt to me like these filmmakers not only like understood and appreciated what was good about this material, but also like had their own own ideas about it and added to it. And that was very refreshing to see. I want to dwell a minute on the on the on the horny and the ad campaign because like so the short story that it's adapted from does not have any sex and implied. But it's not like a horny story at all. And the, you know, the writer's director. As a married couple have talked about the fact that they were like, we just thought it would be interesting and funny. Like the more we thought about the more interesting and funny we thought it was. And then the way that the ad campaign out of a Sundance moderate Sundance hit. I don't think it was like even scorching on a Sundance, but like the way that the ad campaign leaned into this sort of like romantic see basket fucker. They gave out wicker nipples at like various screenings. All of the photos, the F.Y.C. billboards around L.A. that are just like a close up of the wicker nipples, etc. They're just like. They just leaned into this like, hey, come watch Olivia Colman fuck a basket. Who was played by Alexander Skarsgård fresh off the pillion campaign, which just kind of kept going. And he changed from one. I mean, so did I. But, you know, he was he has been doing the the promo tour and the costuming appropriately since pillion and transitioned right into wicker. And I salute it. I agree. And and it's sort of is it a misleading campaign? I don't know. Like there's less sex in this movie than I think a lot of people. People are expecting when they go in. There's still plenty and it's still weird because it's like a wicker husband. But it is like actually when you said, you know, you were charmed by it, like it's actually more of a heartwarming fable than it is a horny romp. You know, it's fun. I agree with everything you guys are saying. I thought this movie is very charming as well. I did think of it a lot as a parable. And, you know, Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård kind of exit the movie in the final third of the movie in a way. And it becomes much more of this. I mean, too much Peter Dinklage, you know, there is a lot of Peter Dinklage with a British accent. - Yes. - And a lot of working alone on his back And delivering speeches not unlike the terrible speech from the finale of Game of Thrones. What's more important than baskets? Which will never escape. And he'll never escape and I'm sorry to him. And I don't think that that stuff is as effective as when it's Olivia Colman's movie. When it's Debicki and Colman. Like picking blueberries. That's the best scene in the movie. But I did like the idea. Which is like this is another way of telling a story about othering people and being a little bit different. And the way that society kind of gathers around. And when something isn't exactly as they expect it to be. The way that they find reason to take issue with it. And that part of the story I think is really well told. It is like 17% to like tweak work for me. You know just a little bit. There's a little bit too much mustard on that part of the story for me. It's a movie about falling in love with a basket woven man. Yeah. And then is it spoilers for Wicker? Sure. Or spoilers for Wicker. Is it the Wicker baby? I didn't love it. Yeah. I didn't like it either. The Wicker baby is not my favorite. I think production design wise like in terms of the fantasy world they create here. In my sort of like Bridgerton PTSD where you know there's this idea of fantasy that is just let's not ground it to any kind of reality. And what they made here I thought was so decently grounded in a number of different realities jammed together to make a fantasy world. They're like callers for the wedding ceremony or the various rituals. The way that the town square is created sort of like in this theater in the round presentation. I just I love the world that they created. I agree that the story is just a little creakier than I would hope for. But I mean it's a it's a fable. You know there's like there's five pages of actual story. So some of some of it is a little Etsy crap. I agree. And that's not to my taste either. I accept when I need to order a Halloween costume. But I think a theme of a number of films that we're about to sort of run through that I would want to shout out is just sort of like I'm just so glad they exist. Yeah. I'm so glad Wicker exists. A lot of people are excited about it and talking about it and seeing it in theaters and that these filmmakers will get an opportunity to make something else weird and fun. You know it's a really good business. Yeah. I made like eight million dollars over the weekend which for a film like this and this is the first. Really big hit that Black Bear has put out and they've been trying over the last 12 months to get their distribution thing going. They put out Tuna earlier this year kind of you know with the onset of Skydance like we need more companies like this like picking movies like this and putting stuff like this out. And then the other thing too is that Olivia Colman I think there's a world where there's also an Oscar thing there just because I'm sure you witnessed this at your screening like she is beloved. She's in a very rare class of actor where everyone adores her and I don't think she has as much to do. In this movie as she has had in films like The Favorite but. What she does and just the way the camera holds her face you know is Lady Gaga. Yes. Can we do a quick shout out to Ella Brucoleri from The Other Bennett Sister. There we go. Oh my God The Other Bennett Sister. I know yeah. Can I just say on microphone. Yes. I have a whole end of your Austin plan for you Amanda. Okay. That we should talk about. I mean I would love to. Okay great. Wow. You're invited Sean. I was literally saying you're not invited. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole podcast happening over here. He still hasn't learned Mansfield Park in Northanger Abbey. Okay. So he's not invited yet. He'll get there. I have seen the film adaptation of Mansfield Park though right. That's Francis O'Connor. Yeah. Yeah I've seen that. You know who I thought of watching Debicki in this movie who I think should be in Supporting Actress. It's fucking Alan Rickman. I was like this is an Alan Rickman ass performance. Yeah. A lot of sneering. A lot of snidely whiplash quality. A lot of like interior like pain. You know like there's something inside that we don't know what's wrong or what happened. Yeah. But can't get it out. And then we meet her dad. And we're like I get it. You see. I get it. Played magnificently. That was a surprise. That was like a jump scare. That was really good. Yeah. This is a fun movie. It's definitely worth watching. Okay. Let's talk about Wildwood which is you know at the beginning of the month I was like this is the big ticket item. This is going up against Clayface but this is a 100 million dollar stop motion animation film that's many years in the making. You can hear a lot about the making of the movie when I talk to Travis Knight. It's based on a 2011 novel. It's about a girl named Prue and her classmate Curtis are drawn into a magical forest as they embark on a desperate quest to rescue Prue's abducted baby brother from a murder of crows. Goes in some wild directions from there. Joanna what do you what do you make of Wildwood? So I've been waiting for this movie. This has been a sort of like ongoing joke with us that like I drafted this movie in my hype draft two years ago because that's when I thought it was coming out and like it's like nope you gotta come back. It's been a couple more years to work on it. I and I really like this book. This is a very strange book by Colin Maloy but I really quite like it and I'm just a massive like a fan in general and so my expectations were just through the roof when I went in to see this movie and I think and everyone I've talked to seen it just like the experience of the visual experience of seeing a like a movie. I think you should never skip a like a movie. This is not my favorite like a movie but I don't think. You should ever skip a like a movie because I just think it's just a visual feast. This is a story that I really love whether it's Marie Sendak telling it whether it's Labyrinth whether it's like you know this this my baby brother has been kidnapped by fairies or crows or whatever the case may be and I have to go in the woods to get him and it's a portal fantasy where all of a sudden like birds are talking and all all these things are going on. This is a set up that I love. I just think and this is a very we were talking about this is a very long book. There's just a lot of story. And when you've got like Mahershala Ali here like to voice an interesting uprising story that is the D plot of this movie then I just feel a bit disoriented and I'm like I guess it's a long movie and I still feel like I need more time to metabolize all of the story they were trying to tell. What do you think Amanda? I'm the opposite of Joe in that because I'm a closed minded Phyllis Stein my expectations were low for this. And I mean this is this is great in just in terms of sitting there watching something beautifully made and interesting and I wanted to know what happened which again I really honestly can't say that about half of the movies that I see quote unquote animated or not. So I was certainly invested. I alternated between sitting there being like wow this is really impressive. And as we were discussing before we started recording who is this for. And that we were debating the question of who is this for and is that something that the film should answer that the marketing should answer that do you need an answer to that should a movie just be so self-evident that it is the fact that we don't know a sign that there's something missing or some sort of emphasis that isn't quite working. I are on the side of I'm a dumb audience member and so if you tell me what I'm going to see and then I go see it I'm like oh OK. So if this had been marketed to me as a YA fantasy extravaganza and a really technically artistic. Accomplished version of that I would have been really impressed and tried to find a 13 year old to you know to share this world with just a random one on the street. Well I you know you. I did know that this wasn't for my young children so I didn't take them and that eased some of the issues that I see other people are having and I guess they assume that animation means child. And that seems unfair and limiting and I say that as someone who really prefers real humans to be in movies but you couldn't tell this movie with real in the real world it is a fantasy I was I was thinking a lot about the live action Moana while watching this just being like that is one of the worst movies I've seen this year and it was not live action but some of that is just because you can't yeah you know you can't create imaginary things in the real world always so can I take you like on a long journey through my experience of thinking about this movie because I join you please just endure this OK was in the same spot as you which I've been looking forward to this for a very long time I love like I love what they're about I don't love all of their movies but some I like I think Coraline is a masterpiece so I've been looking forward to it for a long time I bought the book to read with my daughter not knowing what it was maybe six months ago and we started to read it and through the first chapter I was like oh this is not for her you can tell by the way that the story is framed. That it is not for five year olds and that's OK to your point about who it's marketed to and what kind of story it's telling and maybe it's for eight year olds or 11 year olds or 13 year olds that you find on the street two things but you don't offer them candy yeah two things have happened in my or a ride in your minivan don't buy them liquor two things have happened in my movie going with my daughter recently one is two weeks ago we went to go see Mad Monster Party Mad Monster Party at Vidiot's which is a movie that's going to be a lesser known Rankin and Bass stop motion animation Halloween movie which she absolutely loved it's a very strange movie and its themes and its jokes which come out of the 1960s are pretty adult there's like some sexualization going on it's got a real rise sense of humor that it feels like it's for grownups but so I talked to her about some of those things not all of them and I talked to her about the animation style and like how it looked and she kind of got what I was saying and I was trying to explain stop motion a little bit to her and that was fascinating and then the following weekend. We went to the academy museum to go see hotel transylvania a movie that she really likes which is i think what we think of as like the 3d animated like this is not really the greatest like kind of ugly yeah it's not a beautiful movie it's kind of dopey with its sense of humor however the director of the forthcoming i think hotel transylvania 4 came out before the movie and he was like before we start i'd love to do a drawing demonstration with you so i'm gonna put my palette my my canvas on the projector and you all have clipboards and pencils and paper and i'll show you how to draw dracula and you try to draw along with me that's so sweet this is awesome that's so sweet alice did it and it was like exactly what you want to see i feel bad that i just said yeah it was i i know it changed my mind about that too it made me shout out the academy museum and their family programming on real and one of the great places in los angeles right now um but it was so wonderful to watch her connect with the idea of figuring out how to do that that when you think about that in relationship to something like wildwood which is this insane act of creativity because when you hear night talk about like yeah the work that goes into what they're doing i have a similar situation with the story where i'm like there's too much story here this movie is too big it it actually would have made sense as like a three film trilogy or like a tv series i don't but i'm just sort of like i needed more time so yeah maybe a trilogy i don't know and maybe if this movie was 90 minutes and there was another one that was 90 minutes that was coming in a year from now it might have been a little bit easier to swallow but a little bone temple i would have been cool with that i would have been down with that um maybe that wouldn't have made sense for laika or whoever else was working on the film but the the things that are being done as somebody who has seen a lot of stop motion animation in my life there's no precedent there's no precedent for the eagle flying through the sky chase sequence there's no precedent for the battle sequences like this stuff is they are literally breaking new ground by moving puppets one millis centimeter at a time like the absolute like smallest amount of movement to create um is extraordinary work and it's also like and we talked about this in the conversation it's at a time where i think a lot of kids movies are 3d and they're frantic we talked about this with forgotten island movies like all that we see i mean i was watching battle sequences i was watching birds fly and then i think i then i went to clara and the sun and watched animated birds fly and similar formation and i was like wow this looks so shitty yeah and you can tell even without comparison when you are watching wildwood that you are looking at something like if i don't know if like the handmade nature of it is totally that's not what you're seeing you just can tell that it's done with care and that it's not slop and that it's beautiful like it is it is so beautiful and the time just the time in a 60 if you think about 16 years like an entire 16 year old that's how long they've been working on i don't know any of those because i would have taken them to see wildwood if anyone had told me you would take a 16 year old not a 13 year old don't you think like you know tend to it's i mean it's it's based on a ya book and i was thinking a lot about like can't believe i gotta watch another hunger games movie at the end of the month instead of more versions of this you know like i would really appreciate it if what if sunrise on the reaping is good what if you love it i i think it will be it might be the book's good i'm kind of bullish on it jennifer lawrence is back in it to sell her hair care products which i would love to try oh is she back in it is that why she's doing all this press well she also did launch her own hair care line backed by science okay and it hasn't gotten to yeah woody harrelson's gonna be there yeah gang's all here i'm kind of interested you liked the clapping one hey oh the yeah the lumineers i actually didn't hate the clapping one hated the clap but i think this this sort of thing is good i think it's good i think it's good i think it's good material is much better uh anyway well but i think by the way is the conjuring ladies and gentlemen happy halloween that was three episodes ago uh i think my also my parent brain got into this movie too because there are two different parental tracks in the story there is prue's parents yeah and what is communicated about what they've done to become the family that they are and then there's is it alexandra the sort of the queen of the realm um the carrie mulligan character cooking what a time for knife jawline blonde villainesses with carrie mulligan and this and elizabeth debicki and wicker and elizabeth holmes yeah i'll have you know heck yeah well yeah no not a knife i honestly can't remember the jaw i was too distracted by the hair um and the eyes sure um i i liked the parent stuff as you know but you wanted more well i i thought it was effective and maybe it speaks to what you're describing too where it's sort of like those two stories are supposed to buttress prue's story right that prue and her quest to get her brother back and to explore this world and to kind of conquer this world starts butting up against this rebellion story that you're talking about and then we go back to the real world to learn more about their past and it becomes all of these this tangle of plotting that is very hard to untangle and with a little bit more space i think you might have gotten a little bit you each one would have had a little bit more time i think the alexander storyline is probably the most developed um that's the the queen who's sort of who's lost her child oh yeah desperately trying to replace her child amazing opener for the movie like an amazing tone setter for the movie i also felt like i understood the portland hippies the portland hippies and you know it even explains why they weren't allowed to go outside and that that all seemed pretty contained i'm not really sure what the coyotes and the various birds were doing but i again sometimes it's not your realm exactly so my brain does turn off a little bit i'm just like okay so a lot of birds also you know birds i'm not sure what the coyotes and the various birds were doing but i again sometimes so they were effective i was threatened by them did you know that there's going to be a tv series remake of the birds i did know that i saw that are they going to film it in bodega bay in the bay area which is where they feel the first one okay one hope i mean she's australian can she do san francisco if they come back to bodega bay i'm into it i don't know if we need a tv series of the birds we were joking about this at the halloween movie draft i know come on we don't need to remake the birds it's a perfect object anyhow um wildwood i would like to see it again um i feel the same way i think i was trying to absorb all the story but it's it's undeniable how astonishing the craft is and it's also a movie that you know i mentioned this to travis like we were talking about it labyrinth and return to oz and all of these movies before ya was you know divergent and the hunger games and whatever the twilight twilight wherever the genre is now show some respect there was a time when fantasy was really at the heart of it not like uh fascism and and social chaos like that's really what defines the movies for ya now instead of this kind of feeling where you go to another world where you're transported as you say to another i mean it was always a little bit about fascism right yes twilight no momby and return to oz that's about fascism that is all the philip pullman novels are about fascism for sure for sure you know harry potter i guess evil fascist they're fascist for sure i don't think you need to qualify fascism yeah you can just say sure that's true but i was like that it's yeah yes a supernatural yeah it's kind of what i was going for when was his dark materials written 90s yeah 90s okay yeah i guess i'm thinking more of like 70s and 80s and how this this reminded me more of that period of time yeah and that kind of storytelling which i think does things get a little weird yeah and like at a young age and dangerous and dangerous yes i agree there is there's some violence in this movie that is pretty bracing for stop-motion animation you know the the war sequences are like characters are being killed on screen it is not they're not messing around you're right that there isn't or at least i wasn't paying attention to the explained underlying system that is motivating the coyotes right exactly and all these sorts of um well it's an allegory let me tell you something yeah we got uh you know the republicans we got democrats yeah you know and then we got independents like cr yeah people were trying to sort out which what part they like sure what part are you a member of coyotes yeah can i ask you about coyotes their fashion like literal coyotes you guys having issues with this in your hoods there's one like literal like you know i thought you were gonna go into like a wolverine i got a text from my neighbor i got a text from my neighbor the other day and he's like i walked outside there was a coyote sleeping on your i have like a couch on my front porch he's like there's a coyote sleeping on the couch there yes he's like then it got up and took a dump in the driveway and i was like all right the coyotes regularly sleep and dine on the couch outside of our home yeah as well and they'll be like oh my god i'm gonna go to the bathroom and i'm gonna go to the bathroom and i'm like we i was walking the kids home one day and the coyotes were on the street and just saw my children and we're like oh cool can we come say hi i was like no no no no no no yeah they're really they're making ourselves at home our our mantra is they're more scared of you than you are of them okay don't bother them they won't bother you yeah i've been saying this about coyotes for 15 years i'm just nervous for the small dog that the small dog that lives next door to me that's what i'm nervous for um i wanted to briefly mention the oscars with wildwood too because i think coming into the film it was far more scary than the oscars with wildwood because i think the oscars with wildwood is far and away the leader in the clubhouse for best animated feature and frankly most leica films should be recognized because of the kind of work that is being done it doesn't always mean that the stories come together but they're it's kind of hard to measure a movie like forgotten island versus a movie like wildwood there's hundreds of people that work on both movies yeah intentions and and work is different but then something happened over the weekend that was quite interesting which is that coyote versus acne was deemed eligible in best animated feature and that movie has become a big success and is a big success for two reasons one the movie that they made and the other is that they're going to be a big success for two reasons one the movie that they made and the other is that they're going to be a big success for two reasons one the movie and two because it is this kind of strike against david zaslov and the movie being kind of uh deleted from warner brothers and it going to catch up entertainment and then it's now made I think like 130 million dollars worldwide which is a huge success great time at the movies um and then let's say what do you take a two-year-old just on the record speaking of a 13-year-old in the street maybe a 13-year-old would like it I find that Wildwood and Coyote vs. Acne are kind of similar in that they're more for 11-year-olds or 40-year-olds than they are for five-year-olds I thought with an audience of 40-year-olds they had a great I did not get that memo before I took a four-year-old and a two-year-old the other thing that happened is tragically Eric Baza the the voice of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and a number of other characters in the extended Warner Brothers Looney Tunes universe passed away at 46 years old out of nowhere and very tragic and this is very unusual for a film like this Coyote vs. Acne which is a hybrid of animation and live-action to be eligible in a category like this I think Marcel the Shell with shoes on is the only time this has happened before I think it needs to be 75% of the film needs to contain animation is the qualifier I think this feels like it's cutting it very close having seen it there's a lot of scenes of like Will Forte and John Cena talking to each other excuse me excuse me didn't we just have a conversation 20 maybe like 45 minutes ago seven hours ago about how you can see everything yeah eligibility and category fraud and the rules don't apply this year would it be really fun if you can see everything as a best picture frontrunner and Coyote vs. Acme is the animated feature frontrunner that'd be great it'd be fun for the Oscars yeah it does push a bunch of movies down though it's like Toy Story 5 which I think was maybe not as strong as previous the last couple Toy Story movies in terms of this race and the last time not in terms of its quality the last time a Laika movie was nominated was against Toy Story 4 that's right it lost and it lost although that film I don't feel I feel it's the least successful Laika film Missing Link so you're going to say the least successful Toy Story film didn't you put it below below 5 Toy Story 5 when you ranked them at me 4 I think it is less successful than 5 personally I think that's a good time with the movies I like 4 please sing us the Taylor Swift song I literally don't know what it's called but you know what in the theater I was like I knew you I saw you I knew it I knew you I actually think it's good okay you sing it yeah let's hear it no I won't I thought about it no I won't thank you for the invite Ray Gun you mentioned we've seen Ray Gun we're doing a lot of work there Joanna and I saw Ray Gun together oh beautiful it was you and I saw Artificial together that's true we share you more to come on Ray Gun on the pod I'll say okay and then there's a few films a couple films that were a can Iron Boy Tangles there's Hoppers also from Pixar this year Hoppers great it was good in a normal year Hoppers would be a top 3 contender now I feel like it's in 7th or 8th place talk about a lot of story Hoppers yeah Hopper and talk about sort of alarmingly violent for children yeah that seemed to go over my child's head but didn't you talk about this in the Hoppers episode what happened in our screening yeah we're like we're watching it and we're 40 minutes in and Alice who's a very contemplative and focused watcher of movies God bless her 40 minutes in turns to me very loudly way too loudly and is like what is this movie about which is an understandable question get her a microphone Knox in my screening said turned 30 minutes in and said this isn't Hoppers because none of the Hoppers featured in the commercials talk about dumb audiences you know like mother like son he was like where are the Hoppers Hoppers anyhow like I did not know this is Jon Hamm's movie I had no idea truly it is a film about politics the cat in the hat you seen it no I haven't seen it either Shaun the Sheep the Beast of Mossy Bottom you seen that one no I heard it was good Mossy Bottom's funny honestly the Shaun the Sheep cinematic universe is one I enjoy but the Beast of Mossy Bottom is just not something I've gotten past it's on VOD Hex we've not yet seen that comes out on Thanksgiving I'll be there Forgotten Island I don't think it's contending uh any other thoughts on Wildwood before we go to the next film everyone should see it I like it same with Wicker like everyone should see Wicker everyone should see Wildwood everyone should see these artistic endeavors to make something different and uh fun and exciting do you know a 13 year old or can you find one on the street or is there a 13 year old still living somewhere inside of you that you can access if so you'll love it and it is I mean it's artistically very impressive do you enjoy lovingly laughing at Portland then you will love Wildwood I love the Portland sequence at the beginning of the movie okay let's pivot to the only living pickpocket in New York which is also in theaters like Wildwood and like Wicker and is expanding right it's expanding to more cities around the country sure can we can we spoil the only let's maybe not spoil it um it is directed by Noah Segan it stars John Turturro Giancarlo Esposito Tatiana Maslany Steve Buscemi when a theft goes awry a veteran pickpocket is sent on a mission through New York to reclaim it just thought we could start with a little chat about pickpocketing something you've given much thought to as an art form as a skill as a trade have you done it uh no I've not done it but you know I've seen Oceans 12 many times so I'm watching Linus learn you know do you think you'd be good at it no I don't thank you that's nice I don't know whether it's hand-eye coordination not actually one of my features I know I talk a big talk about all my competence in the world but that one you know I'm just flailing a little I think you both would be great pickpockets yeah thanks for saying so I've been studying for years yeah okay have you uh no I haven't uh I thought this was a really smart idea for a small movie yeah and it's a very this is an 88 minute film character study total 70s vibe like complete and purposefully so that's so funny I got like a 90s vibe oh that too maybe that too you know like 90s New York independent cinema maybe it's because Steve Buscemi was here in Totoro yeah obviously and Giancarlo Esposito as well like icons of the the east coast you know spikely bread kind of cinema but also like a tightly focused character study about a guy in a jam yeah it's a very familiar construct and it's also a movie that is about the friction between generations analog versus digital it's definitely a neat little allegory about how things were better when they were all done by hand and you know it's a component of Wildwood it's also a component of this small film I quite liked this movie do you think Totoro's character should have been maybe like 20 even 20 years older I do when he's like what's a computer virus you know I'm just sort of like what's happening so Noah Segan directed this but produced by Rian Johnson and his producing partner Noah Segan of course has been like a long time Rian so this feels like you know Noah Segan who shows up in Brick Coffee and Pie Oh My like to all of Rian's movies no all of Rian's movies like from from the beginning this feels like is a gift like you know what I mean like Rian helped him make this movie I want to give Noah all the credit because I actually really liked this movie I thought it was like perfect for what it was and such a love letter to New York in an incredible way and almost like even though the soundtrack could not be more on the nose I just enjoyed every single New York needle drop I just enjoyed watching Totoro in his coat I enjoyed being on the subway there is some sort of like twisty tourney of the plot that feels like an episode of Poker Face complimentary just like real Rian as you were getting ready to say that I was going to say Columbo which of course is what Poker Face was inspired by so you know like I just love this as an opportunity for Noah Segan to sort of cut his teeth on something you know what'd you think I just I really like any movie that gives a beloved actor an opportunity to dance and be charming on screen for 20 seconds and when Totoro is dancing in the apartment I was like oh okay and you know and I knew that this was you know like his first leading role and kind of this will be it will be in its time Oscar or you know a recognition of everything that he has done as a character actor for so many years and but then to see it so crystallized with the shimmying and just like the charisma that's why I go to the movies so yeah I was again very charmed by it yeah there's a little bit of engineering in the story that you can feel with the like newfangled gangsters versus the old analog guy who only knows how to do things one way but it's pretty easy to get over some of the particulars of that because it's just it just the movie just has a vibe you know and this is not easy to accomplish there's something kind of loose and gentle and flowing about this movie that is very charming and Totoro is not really cooking in the movie and you point out that he doesn't have very many leading roles because most of the time when he's in a supporting role like in Do the Right Thing or in The Big Lebowski he's meant to go big because he's coming in off the sidelines and this movie he's very restrained and he's very quiet and there's a lot underneath the surface of the character that some of it is explained about what's happened to his wife and about where he finds himself at this station of life and he gets this big very dramatic sequence with Tatiana Maslany but she's doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that sequence she's going big and so his performance and this being of like it's Totoro's Oscar time is interesting because it's not the thing that you would expect from a movie from a thing like that which is to say he gets a thunderous speech or he gets to summarize you know sort of the totality of his acting history and it shows you what he does best it's subtle it's quiet it's physical it's about very delicate moves on screen that indicate what he's good at and what he's not good at that i think it's really nice um i don't i don't you know it's interesting to watch it go up against something like Malkovich in Wild Horse 9, where it's like, it's Malkovichian. Like, it is written for him. The way that he gets to kind of pull on the words and stretch out McDonough's dialogue. Yeah, I think also, like, the writing is not as much of an emphasis in Pickpocket as it is in Wild Horse 9. I think most of the performance, to your point about it being quiet, is in his face, is in close-ups, reaction shots. Like, you know, movement. I think my favorite scene is the one he shares with Giancarlo Esposito, or Esposito, I guess, on the subway, where he's, like, literally sitting on his hands. Like, could not be doing less. And there's just, like, so much, like, beautiful history between these two guys. He barely speaks in that scene. Yeah, and it's just, like, I was like, I could watch this all day. Yeah, it's a good film. It's definitely worth checking out. It's. But it's a little film, and I don't say that negatively. It's just, like, a sweet little film that you should see at, like, a small independent theater if you live near one. And, like, on a regular basis, on a, you know, a matinee. Like, that's what it feels like. Perfect fall film as well. Yeah, I really liked it. You know, the idea of walking around New York in your coat. Most of it does happen during the daytime also. It does have that, like, matinee. Yeah. You know, it is, like, a film that would be playing that one of these characters would, like, go slip into. What if Uncut Gems was just a chill fall vibe? That's exactly what it is. I read someone say this, and I don't know if this is true. It probably couldn't possibly be true, but it's one of the only films I could think of that takes place in all five boroughs. Oh. The character goes to all five boroughs in this movie. Spoiler. Well, it's kind of a kind of a race against time movie in a way. Yeah. It's a very gentle race. When are they in Brooklyn? I don't remember. Okay. I'm fairly certain that they are at some point. The Bronx, Queens. Queens. Manhattan. Manhattan, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Staten Island. Okay. Let's talk about Love of Your Life. This is the first movie we're talking about that is not in theaters. It's streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Yes, it is. That's a streaming service. Correct. It's directed by Rachel Morrison. This is her second directorial effort. It stars Margaret Qualley, Aaron Pierre, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Basso, and Catherine Keener. After a chance encounter sparks a sweeping romance, Maya's future is suddenly upended, sending her on an unexpected journey to love and live again. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's an interesting film. It debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Amanda, what did you think of Love of Your Life? Well, I knew that it starred Margaret Qualley. Didn't know anything, and I knew that it was directed by Rachel Morrison. Okay. Didn't know about it. Didn't know about the rest of the cast. So it's sort of a rollercoaster for me. Mm-hmm. And a down first, because Gabriel Basso is perfectly fine in this movie and is a very nice man and will never, never, never overcome Hillbilly Elegy in my mind. And so I was just like, oh, no. It's the J.D. Vance guy. That's not the story out of Hillbilly Elegy that I'm clinging to. Interesting. That's, uh. That's. I think of him as House of Dynamite at this point. I've forgiven him for Hillbilly Elegy. Okay, so you're. So you're down this and then you see Schwarzenegger. And then you see Schwarzenegger and no, and it's not. Oh, we're flatlining. Yeah, it's a low-to-the-ground rollercoaster. And then Catherine Keener shows up. So it's a little bit, but then. Tick, tick, tick. But then we have a lot of expositional dialogue that's like, I went to therapy and then I wrote a screenplay, you know, and like, here is my trauma and here are all sorts of things. So that's flatlining. That's bad. And then. And then it's a COVID drama, which I'm not really ready for, even though I did actually find something. Some of those hospitals seem to be some of the more affecting parts of the film. And then Aaron Pierre shows up. And then I was just on the ride of my life. And you were just in. And so I was glad that he was in the film, but it's a real, like, be careful what you wish for because you cast a powerhouse like Aaron Pierre up against all the rest of these people and you see a film that could have been. Also, they're in Portugal. Portugal. Lovely tile. I was happy that they got to have some tile in there. And then. Searing insight. Okay. I had a similar. Not the same journey, but I will say the first half of this movie bugged the shit out of me. Yeah, it's really annoying. But it's. I don't think it was because of the casting for me, but it bugged the shit out of me just because, like, I felt like I knew where we were going and I was really impatient to get there. And then the back half of the movie, which is the aftermath of that, I actually really quite liked and I wound up really liking the movie at the end of the day. But the first half made me incredibly impatient. I thought Catherine Keener was fantastic, actually, in this movie. I think Patrick Schwarzenegger is actually really good in this movie. Interesting part. Sure, yeah. Erin Pierre is just a star. She just is. Like, it's just impossible. I mean, the whole movie lights up. And then she makes some choices and you're like, no! What are you doing? And then, like, I don't know if you guys are mudbound heads or not, but I find Rachel Morrison, who is first and foremost a cinematographer, like, the visual. Like, when Margaret Qualley gets to the point of the film where she is sort of Ypres-loving her way through, like, Portugal and New Orleans and a number of other places. Very good comp. Like, you know, and the way that the tile of Portugal or the beaches or et cetera, et cetera, or the streets of London, it's a montage-heavy sort of time. Beautiful. Like, dazzlingly beautiful. And I wish. It's one of those movies, along with another one we're going to talk about, that I really wish I had seen on a bigger screen. Yeah. You know what struck me about the movie is that this is just a super sincere drama. Yeah. Which is something that just doesn't happen. They don't happen anymore. I mean, there are no movies like this anymore. And Ypres-love, I think, is a very good comparison because that is also a very sincere drama. It has Julia Roberts, so it has a kind of zest that Margaret Qualley is maybe not quite capable of channeling. But this is not a rom-com. It's not YA. It's not romantic-y. It's just a drama about a woman who's, like, falling in and out of love over time. Something that Rachel Morrison said when she was talking to our pal Kitty Rich at The Anchor, she was saying that she's taken to sort of hiding these sort of adult dramas that we always bemoan the lack of in theaters inside of other genres. So she's like, this is packaged as a romance non-prime video, which, you know, I know you guys have talked about the fact that, like, Amazon is leaning into the romance genre becoming sort of their identifying genre and personality. And so you see Love of Your Life, you see Margaret Qualley, you see a trio of handsome men, and you're like, I think I know what this movie's gonna be and you're wrong because it is just an adult drama inside of the packaging of the movie. I mean, it's a late-stage coming-of-age movie as much of anything else. It's about a woman finding herself. But even there, it is done with more care than those types of movies are usually done. I noted that the soundtrack was not embarrassing and often even good at times, which is just such a rarity with any movie starring a woman. And this has a lot of Fleetwood Mac, which I know you don't speak to. Not like disposable cheesy pop that you couldn't identify with. Yeah, the strokes and some, you know, which obviously speaks to me. Yeah, I think Rachel Morrison's a really interesting director and she's trying to, this is the same as The Fire Inside to me where it was like, it was pretty good. This is a pretty good down-the-middle movie and that's like, she used a sports story to hide a family drama and kind of another coming-of-age movie in a lot of ways. And that movie also takes, similarly to this film, it doesn't seem as worried about gratifying the three-act structure. It doesn't seem to worry about the conventionality of storytelling. It's like, we're gonna go on a journey with this movie with one person through a number of stages of their life and we're gonna try to think hard about how this person might be feeling. The tricky thing with this movie is that Margaret Qualley, I don't think, can carry the load that this movie needs her to carry for me to have been fully locked in. I hear what you're saying with Aaron Pierre where it's like, he's a star, he comes on screen. He kind of blows everybody off the water. Yeah, it's like, these other guys don't matter. Like, why would you not just be with this person, right? And the fact that I, you know, felt that way. so strongly is that the film communicates all of it to me and that Aaron Pierre, you know, just really, really is a presence. He just is. She is not a sincere actor. She actually does work better with a little bit of rightness and a little bit of sarcasm and a little bit of over the top. And, you know, I also think that. The honey don't. Yeah, I meant what I said about, I do think that the script doesn't really have a lot of specificity beyond the plot moments. And so she's sitting there having to say, like, my dad wasn't in the picture and my mom was gone and a lot of. The character is moving through the world, but there isn't a lot of, like, there there for her to work with. Yeah. So she just has to sell the emotion, which is not. She does a different thing. In my opinion. Can I ask a question before moving on? Yes. I don't mean to beat a dead horse because we've talked about James Bond maybe 900 million times. Could he be. Could he be the mystery person? And maybe this is just me wish-casting him. Oh, I know who the mystery person is. Are you able to share? Not on Microsoft. Okay. Understood. We also heard some rumors yesterday. Yeah, we heard some as well. I don't believe he is in the mix. He should be, though. He should be. It's like obvious. Yeah. I agree with you. You're right. You're correct. I agree with you. The one thing I would say that would be a strike against that is just that Craig was also kind of a bruiser Bond. And I think Pierre, because of his physique and because of his strength as a performer, he would also be kind of a bruiser Bond. And the sense I'm getting is that they're going to go back to kind of a lithe boy, that that's the energy that they want. Yeah. Instead of like, I will choke you out, Bond. Yeah. Yeah, they're going. Lithe boy is not. Not doing it for you guys. You know? Yeah. That's real find-a-13-year-old on the street energy. That's Gabriel Basso. That's, oh no, J.D. Vance is back. You mean like Debonair, like bras and Debonair sort of thing. Yes, but also like just look at the build of the actors who are up for this party, you know? I think that's an important point. they're going for timmy and not for i feel like i can say this i was told they are going for a very specific physical type and that has nothing to do with like race but just sort of like physical body type that's what i was told yeah a leanness 5 11 and not cut up yeah yeah yeah that's the sense i'm getting which is fine you know kind of my well up into six two and it's kind of my ideal so yeah um let's talk about sacrifice quickly okay streaming on netflix movie premiered at toronto last year directed by uh roman gavris costa gavris's son great uh stars quite a few famous people including chris evans anya taylor joy vincent cassell sam richardson john malkovich salma hayek do you think john malkovich is bummed this is coming out right now in the midst of his oscar no because no one's seen it yeah doesn't exist okay great and he's barely in it he is barely in it during a star-studded charity gala a movie star in the midst of an existential crisis is taken hostage by a radical warrior and her devoted followers that's the plot of this movie um you know got reuben oslin at home that's real like very obvious themes about social decay yeah colliding with uh a music video editorial sensibility and leading to i found to be a largely unsuccessful movie yes incredibly unsuccessful i watched while i was terribly sick at the telluride film festival trying to pull it together so i could go see some other screenings um i will say chris evans is innocent i thought what he was doing here is like kind of the only mode that he works in now which is like but that's super self-aware right guy okay you know where it's like he what's your other con what's your other example of this uh scott pilgrim okay you know like this is i did i did write lucas lee down um the problem is the script is so terrible and broad i do think that evans is doing his best with what he's given but this the the satire of this script is so bad that it's so and is it a problem with satire in general right now just sort of i was thinking about a lot about the menu a movie that i think is much better though not perfect but like it's so hard to satirize the horrible rich people of the world who don't give a shit because i'm just sort of like i just know too much and i've seen too much and like it's just not funny yeah for people to be you know it's actually worse than what you're seeing you're attempting to manifest which of course is part of what digger is about too and yeah it's interesting to think about this movie alongside digger because this is maybe the movie that digger has got its sights on like not even don't look up like i think it's more like things like this which are just like wildly unsuccessful iterations of this like we really need to draw attention to this huge issue we have which is that there are people with lots of money they're doing terrible things like thank you appreciate that um and they're insincere in their efforts yeah i i just thought this was a really bad script um yeah it didn't even to me it is not even good enough to like be the target of another piece of art you know it's just it's so flimsy yeah uh and and an obvious and we're doing all of the you know and obviously stylized and there are some things to look at though like i thought all of the the volcano stuff just looked quite bad even if that was on purpose and sometimes what you're looking at is what you're looking at and you don't enjoy it it's uh elaborate staging and handmade like the water in digger in the uh fossil fools production where there's this kind of like uh purposeful let's follow the show yeah yeah yeah that this movie doesn't really have a grasp on it's like it can't decide if it wants to show that to you or not if it wants to make you feel like you're inside of this world or not so it's really not successful this episode is brought to you by the home depot the home depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in 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momentarily okay um this movie is directed by alicia mcdonald stars angry rice spike fern and mini driver when a lovesick musician is given the wrong number for his dream girl he teams up with a driven psychology student to find her this movie is only on stream usually yes a movie with this tone with this plot correct with this energy yes and this movie got a theatrical release in august and we missed it we didn't talk about it um yeah we were on vacation i wouldn't say i've been missing it bob i don't know i was at the i was at the movie theater at the same time as one of the emily only screenings that they did to promote it which i did think was clever right it's cute um what did you think of this i mean i guess this is a better version of the love hypothesis in that it's not a love hypothesis it's a love hypothesis it's a love similar yes in that they hired people with um charisma and even though you know to be fair to the love hypothesis that seems to be part of the of the text not that i read the original text and i was both charmed by this and felt really really old watching it and i have been thinking a little bit about romantic comedies which which this is that's another oh you know mark and it's favor that it is in fact like allegedly yeah well i whether or not you think it's funny is a different conversation but um you know like i'm just getting older and so this continues to be everyone has to be like 28 in these things 25 to 28 and i do think societally 25 to 28 has just gotten a bit younger as a as like a way of lifestyle you know we're all delaying growing up but all of these people just seem very young and like it's none of my business you know and i'm like i just i can't really care about your psychology project i'm so sorry i guess they're undergrads i couldn't why this it was news to me that angry rice is 25 years old yeah where did the time go how old am i um are they undergrads she's doing a dissertation she's doing a dissertation so i would imagine she's a grad student 22 23 uh i thought he was great he's wonderful totally agree she can't keep up with that like like like like seemingly effervescently like charming and i i like it was one of those things where i would have stopped watching the movie i think if i hadn't enjoyed his performance so much and it hadn't felt to me obviously this is not a debut for him but it hadn't felt to me like i'm gonna want to remember seeing him in this so that when he's really good in something else i can say like did you see finding emily because it's great in that too i wrote down spike for in redemption after ella mckay because whatever's happening in ella mckay when he pops in the movie you're like what the hell what kind of i that part of the film sticks in my head like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know and part of it is that this is a british actor who's speaking in his native accent in this movie and he feels like a real and idiosyncratic performer yeah that pops off the screen so then you're like oh well that's what james l brooks saw when he met this kid and then he made him do a james l brooks character and that wasn't the right fit for this kind of actor but in this in this movie he feels so much more at home the movie itself i think is kind of a little baggy and a little all over the place and the script is just kind of okay completely fine um and you know we're excited the whole time it's not bad as bad it's not bad and there are it's there's a lot of uh misunderstanding about what a podcast is uh sure but they are on video and he doesn't realize that which is funny i thought great chiron work you know it's like it has it's not it's not brain dead and so what i found myself like not connecting connecting to was more just kind of phase of life and i just i really can't care this much about anyone's dissertation yeah i you know i watching this and love of your life i like it's kind of amazing these movies exist like yeah they are things that were like this is a totally original movie right it's not based on anything right is it based on a story based on a book and it's very unusual like it's its tone its sense of humor the actors that it's chosen like its vibe is just like a little bit different and something being not like algorithmically manufactured like this i find fascinating it does end up in the exact place you expect it to like all of these movies that's okay that's part of the feature of a romantic movie That actually is true. is okay it's more how that it gets there and you have to see one too many i think you know presentations about like really really bad case studies in psychology which again brings us back to love hypothesis i think that i um the reason i watched it in the first place uh was because i like angory rice so much and i was just sort of intrigued to see what she was up to and then i just felt like this movie knew did not know what to do with her at all agree and then he just like really popped for me yeah i really like her too and i feel like her her character is the only american yeah her like motivations are strange it all seems like a little too obvious the whole way along maybe driver is having fun though i wish there was more yeah i could have used more honestly let's talk about matchbox the movie i could not believe that you had seen this movie okay we were talking about did you watch this because it was on the original long list that i sent or did you just watch it because you're a movie watcher i made did i watch it because i sat through 20 minutes of a san diego comic-con presentation on it and i was like oh my god it will have to have been worth it um no i watched it because it was on your long list um and you've watched it as well and i've watched it as well uh this is the new film from sam hargrave who made i thought the two very solid extraction movies for netflix very really well made action film starring chris hemsworth this new one stars john cena jessica beale sam richardson arturo castro and tiana paris all actors i like to some extent or another um when a group of former childhood friends reconnect their reunion takes a wild turn as they stumble upon a dangerous plot and must save the world now this is the most important movie of 2026 yeah why because it opens with skydance and then it was mattel which enon kreitz used to run and now he runs skydance warner paramount etc and it is the future set out before all of us which is using toy ip to make a completely different kind of movie and i think it's a really good movie i think it's a really good movie and i so the movie that i was reminded of a movie i love which is game night and this is just sort of like a rancid version of game night a movie that i find so charming and just like these these ordinary people have been haplessly drawn into something that is beyond their scope and the you know sort of like the hapless asides that continually happen as they as they wander their way through the plot i have watched game night one million times i think it's one of the best comedies of of this like century genuinely this movie is so bad and every time i watch it i'm like oh my god this is every effort to draw out a laugh like flops for me it's the same setup as the in-laws one of my favorite movies alan arkin peter falk about a cia agent whose kid is getting married to a regular joe and he somehow gets trapped inside of the cia agents international journeys and and and fascinating dangerous scenarios um everything that movie does right this movie does wrong it uses matchbox cars for this group of friends who i guess are like 12 years old and hanging out together and they're obsessed with matchbox cars which is a toy for six-year-olds am i am i supposed to believe that sam richardson and john cena are the same age that's my question right sam richardson who's what 42 and john cena who's 54 right something like that and also the marquee it was like what was on the marquee it was like a late 90s and he and jessica beale's characters as children yes in the late 90s i was like that's the timing of this is bad the film looks bad you know sam has no feel for the tone of the movie i i do think it is it is corporate synergy as filmmaking which is can work but almost never does and it is a potential like doom signal for where we're going now this is the low this is the worst possible version it is this is if you want to be ungenerous to what's going to happen with skydance you can say well it can turn out like a like 11 of these a year i don't want to believe that but this is a bad movie it's inauspicious the timing and the the way it opens with all of the brand names splayed out before you and then the the flashback to and and they say matchbox cars at least 40 times in that flashback they start with that like throw of the car at the camera sort of thing i turned out to be very happy for because i turned this on at 7 45 in the morning on a sunday with my two children and i said do you want to watch the race car movie did we have to turn this movie off at 8 15 we sure did and you know one instance of machine guns and people fighting each other in a you know in an anonymous like vaguely xenophobic desert i was like okay well i'm just gonna let it go i'm gonna let this go by and hope the politics you know don't seep into my children's brains the second one was like well guess we're gonna have to go make pancakes instead so this this was quite grim i mean and just looks so terrible the opening town sequence so much of it is the digital doubling of like of every sort of like really silly um freeway chase scene and when like a motorcycle crashes and all of a sudden it's a digital double like it's all so ugly and so poorly done you know what else you know what it actually reminds me of is red one another movie that was on this podcast for that uncanny non-human quality of that entire production yeah i think listen i need the skydance thing to work for the future of movies like if you avoid this like don't try to force a movie for the mass audience by using various recognizable ideas just because you have access to them find a real story this isn't a real story it's not a real movie you never feel like these people were friends you never feel like john cena is a credible cia agent you never feel like the conflict and the nuclear football that's in play has any of the stakes that something like a mission impossible movie can trick you into believing is real right none of that stuff works and so because nothing is working in the movie it makes me so cynical about movies and i do not want to feel that way i don't want to feel like the next five years of talking about movies every week from these people is this let this be a warning don't do this when we start with a wicker and wildwood and we wind up here and we're not done but like we we find our way here like this is why a wicker and wildwood and pig pocket feels so important it's just like and you know i just go see movies go see good small movies um way of the warrior kid coming next month which i'm sure will dedicate an entire episode to we won't but like i'll go see you with an open mind and i hope it's good you know like we're about to talk about a couple of apple tv plus movies this was also an apple tv plus movie will you sit through the the trifecta of mountain movies i saw one of them okay so so yes there's this very odd thing that has happened yeah which is there are now three movies that are available at the same time that are all about the stakes and consequences of trying to scale mountains one of which is a narrative feature film though based on of course the true story of uh tenzing nor gay it's called tenzing and it stars uh gendon funsock and tom hiddleston and willem dafoe and it's about a determined man embarks on a high stakes quest and defies seemingly impossible odds to fulfill his dream of being the first to reach the summit of mount everest that's edmund hillary and also tenzing nor gay his shirtball along the way um the other two films are documentaries one is everest the other side which we mentioned in the aftermath of our festival attendance yes and also on apple tv plus right now is the last first winter k2 i see these movies as an unofficial trilogy they are speaking to each other okay hundred percent um which of the three have you seen remind me tenzing okay okay what did you think of tenzing i actually really liked it it's pretty good i actually like really liked it it felt so solid to me and of the three it is it is the one that speaks to the issues raised by the other two it certainly does in all of the different ways in fact it's about those issues yes and um the response what is the responsibility of the people who quest to do these things to the people who are helping them do them yes as opposed to not acknowledging that right which is something that is very troubling in the other two films or at least at the core of the story of the other two films yeah and also should these movies exist and how like and under what circumstances do they exist and the tenzing is um a bio it's a biopic so it is it is based on a true story but it is actors playing people and is made uh in the confines of a set and with safety precautions presumably unlike the other two films yeah jennifer pedum directed this movie and most of the time is spent on tenzing nor gay who's uh nepalese indian mountaineer and sherpa and a person who's critical to the history of these extraordinary acts of scaling these mountains and like straight biopic like there's three different actors who play him at three different points in his life you get childhood you get young adult you get uh adults and like edmund hillary's here but like tom halston's face is biggest on the poster but absolute supporting in this defoe as well like absolute supporting role and i just i thought all of the nepalese nepalese indian actors that they got were fantastic the actress playing his wife the actor playing his sort of rival i thought all of them were like really really good and even though it is very straightforward sort of by the numbers kind of story and quite earnest in in that sense it was just solid just like remarkably solid - And beautiful to look at. - And gorgeous. - It was filmed in the Himalayas. - Gorgeous, yeah. to recreate some of the climbing scenes you know if not in the real places at least like outdoors some some of this is actually filmed outdoors down the mountain yeah you know like at the foothills or something like that yeah yeah i think it's i think it's worth people's time it's fairly down the middle um it is centering a character who would not have been censored in the movies 50 years ago if this were a movie 50 years ago or even 30 years ago it would have been the edmund hillary story right right and if there's a criticism of the movie it is very aware that it is doing that and it's like hey we are centering this person and i am just tom tittleson here playing the most conscious about benevolent that being said i looked up edmund i was like how much of a good guy and edmund hillary was actually a nice guy and like dedicated his life after this to like helping the like other sherpas and stuff like that i was like okay and and they did have a lifelong friendship and connection which is it it's just kind of a nice story it's kind of a nice like middle-aged movie yeah um which there's a place for movies like this and i think yeah um it would have played at the angelica 30 years ago and now it's playing on apple tv plus and that's perfectly fine if you've got a nice big tv and you enjoy watching planet earth or whatever why not put on tenzing and just like yeah and see the beautiful mountains and then there's just like a lovely story that goes along with it and learn something i agree with you um let's talk about the last first winter k2 first before getting into everest the other side because i feel like there's a progression of experience yes and you can do these first two on apple tv plus this other film is not about it's about k2 it's not about everest um and it's the second highest mountain on earth in pakistan and this is a movie about but more physically challenging like the nature of the mountain itself topographically geographically it makes it incredibly difficult it's called the last first because this is thought widely thought of scaling this mountain the face of this mountain in the winter was considered the last first in mountaineering and so it's it tells the story of this 2021 period where multiple teams arrive at the mountain and attempt to do this and it's led originally by this icelandic mountaineer named john snorri and then um nim's persia who's a was a world famous mountaineer comes in and his team comes to join to scale the mountain and then another group of commercial climbers come in to scale the mountain and you have this kind of tripartite approach to how this is going to happen now spoiler alert like there were tragic deaths in this story and so the way that the story is being told i think has an interesting skeptical perspective where some of the people who are present for some of the tragedy are telling you the story in a fashion that suggests this never should have happened and that actually raises the question of why do we do this why do people pursue this and then who also is at stake when someone very powerful and wealthy frequently ends up doing this work i don't know if this is a great documentary but it's an interesting exploration i think of the psychology of the mountaineering and specifically the failings of a of a company it was at the center of this project what did you think of it it engages with a lot of the questions like both logistical and ethical um that i think non-mountaineers and you know the average audience viewer feels when watching these projects and watching these films and taking in um the world in general which as explored in tenzig and in many other many other of these documentaries is often just about a bunch of rich white people helicoptering in to a place and using the local knowledge and resources for their own like ambition and grandeur and you're like how and why does this happen and also why does it need to happen and there is an element of this documentary that does try to get into the psychology of some of the the mountaineers and their families and their families and their families and their families and their families as well and kind of like because it really is a why did this need to happen like why why did any of you need to be doing this this is so clearly dangerous and the film is structured in a way where the very first thing you see is emergency emergency footage from the night when things go very very wrong and so you know it's it's not like a suspense thing where yeah you're like like are they gonna make it this is an event that happened five years yeah right exactly and they and even within the context of the film they're not trying to build the suspense of is this going to be okay this is this is something that went wrong and pretty quickly people start talking in past tense about other people and they're not trying to hide the ball they're trying to investigate like a lot of these very thorny issues in a tragedy that happened and that they have a lot of footage of so i give them credit for that it's interesting it's a it's a really interesting doubleheader with everest so i saw these movies not in the order that we're talking about but i think it's interesting that i'm talking about them and i'm sorry to spoil a little bit of everest but i i think that it's useful um alongside these two films i saw tenzing then i saw everest the other side and then i saw the last first yeah and it was probably the appropriate way to see them consecutively um everest the other side is about these two mountaineers named jim morrison and hillary nelson who attempts to ski down mount everest's dangerous direct north face which is something that has never been done before much like what is going on right now and i think it's a really good what is characterized in these two other films that we're talking about it's directed by uh chai vostarelli and jimmy chin the you know acclaimed adventure documentarians who made free solo among many other films over the last 10 years and i saw this at telluride you saw this at venice um i think this is like an astonishing act of movie making and a very troubling ethical quagmire of a movie how did you feel about free solo um i thought like a powerful portrait of sociopathy you know like like a person who is like driven to do something but frequently on his own terms and by himself yeah and so there you can you can kind of wash away i think some of the anxiety that is provoked because it's like it is literally called free solo like he is climbing alone right and so in that movie alex honnold is taking on his idea of the world and it's at the expense of his partner i was gonna say his the romantic relationship and the movie asks you to kind of tangle with that a little bit right yeah yeah and it's part of the text of the movie yeah everest the other side is different everest on the other side isn't an amazing double feature with you can see everything and and it's like and it doesn't achieve the kind of like metatextual and um formal heights that well i mean it's very beautiful filmmaking is astonishing and some of what they have it's a real like i can't believe that you have this on tape but it's a real thing and it's a real thing and it's a real thing and it's a real thing in a horrific way and also just kind of they are up on the mountain filming these things right so that the access is incredible um but it the involvement of the filmmakers in the story that they are telling and the lack of examination of what they are doing as as climbers or as filmmakers is fascinating and unsettling and again to your point as an active filmmaking and even as an exercise to act to talk about why do we make documentaries and what are the responsibilities when we make documentaries and what are our responsibilities as people and it's not just about filmmaking it's about mountain climbing it's about grief it's about marriage i got i was so mad at my husband just like by proxy at the end of this film just because it's you know it doesn't answer any of the questions about why do people do this or it does depending on how you how you interpret it but it is a fascinating look at the psyche up close look at the psyches of some of these people i don't want to spoil too much of this for you but i have to spoil one thing sure and if you don't want to know anything about this movie it's playing in movie theaters it's playing on imax it's also it's a real thing that happened it's another it's a true story this is a documentary it is it has multiple kind of revelations of the lives of these people throughout the film that i think like insist on the questions that they're asking and i think it's a really good that you're asking yes um but you know within the first 30 minutes of the film hillary nelson who's um the female participant between these two people attempts to ski down the mountain as they're scaling it and and and falls off and and dies and there's an avalanche and you see avalanche and you watch it on screen and it's one of those and you're just like wait what did that is what just happened yeah and it's extremely upsetting and then the movie becomes this kind of personal exploration of the lives of these people and it's a really good movie and it's a really good movie and it's an exploration of jim morrison working through the aftermath of the death of his wife and they're they are both oh my god they are both adventurous um fearless people together that's like a part of their it's woven into their relationship into their personal dynamic how they met yes and that's they spend the first 30 minutes really talking about it yes why they do it how it individually and how it defines them um her children talk about this in the film they are featured in the movie but then the movie takes another dramatic turn we learn more about jim and his background and then in the background as you say jimmy and chai are also in the movie because jimmy becomes a character in the movie because he's going to help jim accomplish what hillary could not accomplish as a tribute that's the story of the movie is can he do this in her honor and it it's a lot of people who are like need to go to therapy like who really doesn't need to like sit down and talk about what they're doing and not try to do a thing does it feel does that however sort of psychologically misguided does it feel like it's a thing that's does it feel sincere i guess that's my question it puts other people in the firing line of this personal ambition and attempt to reckon with feelings now all these people are willingly participating i'm not saying anybody is isn't but there's all kinds of power dynamics about who has the money who's paying for this what how people in certain societies get the roles that they have that is all unexplored and should we be filming this and there is also the implication that he's only getting to try the trip again because they're also making a film out of this and so then the filmmakers are sort of enabling and and the fact that jimmy chen is participating i mean he is climbing along literally helping him with them there's complicity that's that's fraught and there's a there's an amazing scene between jimmy chen and chai vasarely at a table where she's like we were doing this film and things have changed and are we still doing this and you know credit to them to putting that in the movie yeah then she is no longer in the documentary and then they have since yes become divorced so and it's hard not to know that and read that into the movie too so you know this is a fascinating movie the filmmaking as always with their movies is so extraordinary because they're willing to the filmmakers the camera people in this movie are willing to put their lives on the line to capture some of this stuff that you otherwise would just would not be able to see but but like it i don't this movie feels wrong i don't mean to sound prudish but like don't you feel like you should i mean you guys just did but like you guys watched this movie without knowing that you were about to watch footage of a person die i didn't know the story i didn't know i didn't know the story so i was so i was don't you feel like you should tell people you know what i mean like i was at the premiere and jim morrison was there and hillary nelson was not and i didn't know the story but because i'm the dumb audience here i kept being like wait where is she and then i saw the thing and i was like wait i i mean i was shocked and i obviously should have put it together it's really horrible the other thing that's so interesting about the film and that not interesting good but interesting is that it's still it persists the story it's telling at the end is that he he wants to do this thing and then he achieves his uh his goal which is also like skiing down a mountain like who cares respectfully i like who honestly cares that your thing was skiing down a mountain and you learn more about him and what it means to him is very specific and i like who am i to tell a person how to deal with grief but the film's lack of perspective and distance is i think to your point it's like it's like it's like it's like it's about like the conversations we're having about you can see everything yeah i have been curious about whether or not that movie would do for documentaries what i don't know dewey cox has done for bio but like forever radically changed the way that we think about the filmmakers responsibility the subjects uh knowledge of what they're setting up for like all you know all of that is just such an interesting peel back the curtain on the entire process and you can't help but i mean i know you didn't see it necessarily in that order but like you can't help but be thinking about that when you see something like this and you think about this woman and would she have wanted a yeah glitzy premiere at a film festival watching the footage of but they it's possible sort of it's certainly possible but they have but again like they have her kids into camera being like i get nervous when my mom goes but she needs to do it it's i mean unreal and then they use it in that which you know that's another thing but what are you going to do that this is what they want to do and they're like oh my god i don't know what to do with it they signed up for it they were the thing is is they have a lot of footage there at the house as a family like this is a family thing that they were doing it's one thing to sign up for i agree you know and another to so this is why it's an interesting film it's really incredibly interesting yeah it is very thorny um i don't i don't really want to pass judgment because like jimmy chin and jim morrison are friends yeah like the film was not made under duress in any way like it is something that hillary clearly wanted to be made like she is participating yes before her death true true but you know what it's if it's up to jim morrison her surviving husband to make a call like they make that call but then you circle back to you can see everything and think about partners making decisions i know for their wives you're right you're just like it but it it like it goes to another level in the film in a way that we won't spoil but it sounds so stupid to be like i wouldn't want to spoil this but when this the next thing happens in the next revelation the movie comes i was just like jesus christ right this is so intense so it's an amazing document very unusual document it's an amazing document it's an amazing document it's an amazing documentary i think a little bit of a cautionary tale in terms of where we're going with adventure filmmaking that i think there probably needs to be a reassessment as to the value of this like i'm not going to tell people how to live their lives but how we choose to document it i think this is was unnerved me right yes because you can feel you don't it's chicken and egg of who's encouraging who and it makes us complicit yes because we are we are the sitting participant in the theater that is like i want to see this and then as soon as you say out loud i want to see this it makes you a part of the issue i do not want to see this i want to see this i want to see this i want to see this film like yeah it's a challenging one it's really challenging but you know what it's fascinating but i'm glad to know that it provokes yeah i'm glad to know about it i'm glad to hear you guys talk about it like i think that's very interesting thanks for sitting through i feel like we can we can hold on the you want to talk about clara in the sun really quickly how did it end i had to leave with five minutes i waited i you know oh yeah you had to leave uh not satisfyingly um clara in the sun adapted from kazoo uh ishi girl's novel great book uh the prize-winning book taika waititi's latest feature film of course our favorite filmmaker here on the podcast uh stars jenna ortega amy adams natasha leone steve buscemi two for two in this episode a robot girl designed to prevent loneliness tries to save a heartbroken family of humans in this film to me this is just a case of just the absolute wrong filmmaker yeah for this material a thousand percent i just this is a very sincere um philosophical yeah speculative science fiction yeah you know a gentle movie that is about like the the the quiet mind of ai and not not the upside of ai specifically but kind of like how human beings not unlike everest the other side yeah try to cope with their grief and like the lengths that they'll go to and then the situations that they'll put themselves in and taika waititi is really kind of only interested in the goofy parts of it you know he's only interested in the other robots and the way that the robot uh interactions with the humans actually works and the quirky inventor type and all the stuff that is not i just what's at the heart of this story i just didn't want to see this movie because i really like this book and i just felt like everything i've seen and heard about it just seems really wrong uh like after yang is the good version of this movie yes agreed yeah agreed um jenna ortega you know it's a little bit of an epidemic at this point we got to get this gal on a good movie it's been it's been a little tough run yeah it's tough you know seems like she's got great taste seems like she's uh interested in the right stuff you hear her talking interviews and i'm like oh wow one of us what's the best movie she's been in the scream legacy sequel maybe yeah you're probably right what about the one that you loved beetlejuice beetlejuice no i did not love beetlejuice that's just not true if you listen to that episode you can hear me being more critical of it even than you were what's that one that she was in hold on the fallout the fallout yeah that's not bad that's not bad that was an hbo original yes but it was at south by first uh you want to talk about amy adams you want to keep it moving come get your girl it's getting dark yeah getting another another project picking fiasco but whoo it's it's been quite a run i i didn't mind night bitch i saw it on i was i know you and rob did a very good job in no it's just me it's just me holding it down against sean and rob uh cape fear one of the worst things i've seen this year oh yeah i haven't watched that she's in a rut tough any closing thoughts we got a couple other movies we can save for another conversation okay uh the movies overall they're good and you should see them interesting yeah there's a lot out yeah what do you do and there's a lot of interesting you know what was interesting in that when i was trying to catch all the you know when we were doing our double features and catch everything in theaters that i hadn't seen it was really hard to find a screening because everyone's just showing you can see everything at all hours a day which is awesome that's a big story of clara and the sun i mean this is a movie that's been done for a couple years that was supposed to open on 2500 screens and playing 800 screens and made i think 800 bucks per screen which is horrendous and it's going to be out of theaters in a week it's just funny because like the october this the weekend of wicker wildwood clay face uh clara and the sun has been sort of looming like a like a bomb on our schedule over at house of r for a really long time or like how are we going to handle all of this all together the fact that you can see everything october surprises just out of nowhere to dwarf all of those conversations is just fascinating it's why we love this biz classic movie stuff okay let's now go to my conversation with travis knight very happy to have travis knight here for the first time travis um you've gotten this question before i assume but i i want to know the first time you ever saw stop motion in action when do you remember how old you were what the thing was i don't specifically remember the first time i saw it but i do remember you know being a kid and absolutely loving animation which is not unusual most kids dig animation but there was something specific about stop motion that i loved um i love the ray harryhausen creature features you know seventh voyage of sinbad and and jason the argonauts and and some of that stuff ended up finding its way into my work later um you know the rankin bass uh you know uh holiday specials um actually saw clash of the titans in the cinema when I was a kid, which is, I think that might've been Ray Harryhausen's kind of last big thing, his last big hurrah. And I just loved it. And there was just something so weird and cool and charming. And I couldn't quite put my finger on why. And I've tried over the years to explain or to analyze why it was, what was about stop motion that I felt was special. But it's just, there's just something I find kind of beautiful and primal and human about what it is. And I couldn't have imagined, you know, when I was a kid and just loving this thing that it would become my life's work, but I loved it. And I tried to teach myself how to animate and I did. I was, as a kid, I always had a sketchbook with me all the time. I was always drawing. I was always creating my own comic books and all that sort of thing. And I wanted to teach myself how to animate. And of course this was the 80s. So we didn't have the internet as a resource. And so you just try to figure it out on your own. You fail and you try, then you figure something out. Then you fail again. And that really. That really was my journey. I did not think I was going to do it for a living, but I've always, always loved it. And it's just been a huge part of my life. I had this interesting experience with it where I took my daughter, who's five, to go see Mad Monster Party, which is the Rankin-Bass Halloween special. You don't need to tell me that. I know you know. I'm telling, I'm sharing with the audience. It's for everybody. So we went to go see it. I hadn't seen it in probably 35 years. And afterwards, she had seen other Rankin-Bass stuff, but I was trying to explain her. She'd seen Kubo. She'd seen Paranorman. But I was trying to explain to her how it was done. And it was kind of challenging to communicate that. Do you remember when it was sort of demystified for you, the amount of like grunt work, leg work that goes into working this way? Well, the amount of work that goes into this form of filmmaking is insane. It's absolutely insane. I think most people kind of understand the basic principle because the principle is very simple. I mean, we build thousands and thousands of these tiny little objects, and then we put them on a handmade set and under lights and in front of a camera. And then, you know, you'll move something a microscopic distance. You take a picture. You move it another microscopic distance. You take a picture. And you keep doing that process over and over and over again until something basically has the illusion of life. And because film has 24 frames per second, you know, we shoot in ones unlike some other stop-motion companies who might shoot on twos, which is, again, we're getting wonkish in the weeds. You can explain it if you want to do the ones and twos. I won't get into that. But basically, every single frame of film, we have to move the puppet. A little bit so it appears like it's alive. Because film, it's not like when people are shooting film, it's just a series of individual photographs, basically, that are stitched together. And because we work in stop-motion, the time between those frames being taken could be 10 minutes. It could be an hour. It could be a day. It just takes a long time to do this stuff. But what you're seeing when you see a stop-motion film is you really are seeing the hands of the artists who are bringing these things to life, which is one of the things I think just gives it, it's incredible beauty. Tell me a little bit about Wildwood. So, I know Laika optioned the novel like a week after it came out. Before it came out, actually. Before it came out? Yeah. Okay. So, you know, were you familiar with Colin Molloy? Oh, yeah. Did you listen to The Decembrists? Oh, yeah. Were you friends? We were not friends. I did not know him. But, you know, I'm a Portlander. Colin Molloy is a Portlander. His wife, Carson Ellis, who's an extraordinary illustrator, she's a Portlander. So, I knew and I loved The Decembrists for years, well before I met Colin. And, you know, he's got a very idiosyncratic voice. He's a storyteller within music. And then I think with Wildwood, he had a story that wouldn't fit within the bounds of a song or a concept album. And so, I'd heard, no, so Coraline came out in 2009. And so, this was 2010. If my math is correct, that's a year later. We had, we, I had heard that Colin was working on a novel. And I was like, I have to see this. And so, I got a sneak peek at a manuscript. He was 133 years old. He was 133 pages in to a book that ultimately ended up being over, well over 500 pages. And I read it and I was completely in its thrall. And I think, you know, part of the reason was I was always a huge fantasy buff. I loved fantasy. I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. You know, that's one of the gifts that my mother gave me. She read, read me stories all the time. Tolkien was a huge part of our household. I absolutely loved these types of stories. And, and Wildwood felt like it was painting in those same colors. But because it was Colin, it had a weird idiosyncratic voice. Um, it was set in Portland, which of course I'm, I'm from Portland. It almost felt like it was bioengineered in a lab just for me. And, and so I, I read it and, and I knew, oh no, this is mine. I have to have this. I have to make this. And then, so I started talking to Colin. We agreed to hold hands and do this thing together. And then I had the horrible realization that I had absolutely no idea how to make this because it was just, it was too big. It was too ambitious. It was too sweeping. There were too many characters. There were too many set pieces. It, it was, it asked more of us than we were capable of giving at that point. Cause Leica was still really new at that point. This is almost at the very beginning of Leica. And so that began this 16 year journey of trying to figure out how we can trans, transmogrify this beautiful novel into a movie. And it was a challenge. Was there any part of you, I know you hadn't made, um, live action films, but at the time you adapted, was there ever any consideration of trying to do it in a live action way or a different style? No, because look, I was happy in my own little. You know, weird corner of the universe, making stop-motion movies. I love stop motion. And, um, I was just happy and content to continue to try to play around in this space and to push that art form forward as, as much as we can, um, with every, with every film and with every film, we would have these big seismic advances where we'd figure out new technologies, new tricks, new techniques, and then we'd apply that to the next movie. Um, and that was critical because this movie was so ambitious. It needed essentially all those other films. This sounds mercenary. It's not. All those other films as essentially R and D for what we needed to do to make Wildwood, uh, come to fruition. Yeah. I watched Kubo maybe like six months ago. And I had that thought, like, did, was this film made in part to figure out maybe some of the dynamics that were needed to create action in this style? Cause it's just, there's not a long history of proper action sequences in stop motion. Like, were you actively thinking about that when you were making some of the Leica films, like, well, I'll be able to apply this tool that we've just figured out here, it was always somewhere in my mind because you know, while we're developing the story and the script and the characters and the themes, we're starting to design the world. And you know, with, with each film that we do, it's, I'm always filing that away. Like, how can we use this new trick? How can we use this new technique to, to, you know, apply to Wildwood? And certainly with Kubo, Kubo was the biggest thing we'd ever done at that point. It was this big sweeping sort of Kurosawa epic in miniature. Uh, and, and we were really pushing hard on what the medium could do. And I felt, I felt like, yeah, this is a good training ground for what we want to do on Wildwood. Knowing Wildwood was much bigger. I mean, it turned out it was basically twice the size of Kubo. Uh, in the end, but, um, but yeah, you're always, you know, if this is an obsession of yours, which it was of mine, you're always thinking, how can you use life? How can you use art? How can you use the different things that you're learning, uh, to apply to this movie? And ultimately that's one of the reasons why I ended up doing a live action film, uh, after I did Kubo, which is just, I felt like I needed to learn more. Interesting. So one of the things that I've thought about a lot with this movie after having seen it was something that comes up that sounds pejorative, but I don't think is, which is, who is this movie for? And it's particularly, I've heard that many times, I'm sure, you know, it's, it's animated. Um, it seems like it's the sort of thing that should be for kids. And in fact, I bought the novel when I, not when I heard this was happening, but when the movie was getting closer and I started reading it with my daughter and I was like, oh, this is more mature than I expected it to be. And your film is more mature than it might seem at first, based on even some of the work that you've done as a filmmaker. So is it entirely because this story touched you and you wanted to make it, do you think about the. Market dynamics related to making a big film like this? How do you see that idea? I mean, you have to, um, you know, particularly you saw him running the company as well as directing the movie. So these are always considerations. You have to think about, okay, what's, what's the place for this thing in the, in the marketplace. Um, and it is, it's challenging. I mean, like we, you know, our industry is, is continuing to consolidate. There are fewer players. There are fewer decision makers in terms of like what types of movies get made. It's harder than ever to get. Original movies made, uh, you know, Hollywood has, has almost always been risk averse, and this was a risky movie. Um, Coraline was a risky movie. I remember when we, uh, when we were trying to find distribution of Coraline, um, the, we didn't, nobody saw the possibilities of what that movie could be. We met with virtually every distributor, every mini major, every indie, uh, uh, distributor, and nobody saw the promise. And it was like, it was exactly what you're saying. Who's this movie for? It's not for girls. It's too scary. It's not for. Boys because there's a female protagonist. They will not see it. Uh, parents are not going to take their kids. This is stop motion. So it's weird. One executive called it a Roman Polanski art film for kids, which is, uh, you know, that's not the kind of thing you want emblazoned on a poster. That's not going to bring the audience in. Um, but not necessarily inaccurate though. When you get down to the movie, he wasn't wrong. Um, but it's so funny though. I mean, that movie is now considered a total classic. It's considered a classic now, but at the time, like nobody saw the promise. Yeah. Of it. And so, but we persisted and eventually we found a great partner in, uh, in, in focus and universal. And part of that was because the people running the company at that time, James Seamus, who's an artist himself and David Lindy, they actually saw something in the film that other people that maybe didn't. Um, and, uh, you know, that movie ended up being a slow burn. It wasn't like this massive thing right out the gate. It just, just kept going. It kept having legs. People kept telling their friends, you have to see this movie. It's different. It's special. And it was different and special. And I, I, I feel wild. What is. kind of the same, it lives in that same box in that it's a different movie. sweeping fantasy is about very very different things but it's the kind of thing that if if people give it a chance you know older people younger people they'll they'll find something precious in it and um it's the kind of story that i would have loved when i was a kid kind of the kind of story that used to be made uh for fantasy big sweeping epics that were about something that just aren't made anymore and so yeah you always have to try to balance these things but in the end you just try to have to you have to make the decision like what what means something to us and those are the stories that we make did you have a mentality about maybe the way that when we were kids we were challenged by these kinds of films because as i've been going through this with my daughter like showing her labyrinth showing her ghostbusters things that i saw when i was five six seven that were maybe not totally appropriate but i think maybe educated me or got me more mature as a viewer like were you thinking about that in relation to this too that like maybe there is something to show seeing something a little earlier than you might expect yeah i mean look i uh i i i feel like i benefited greatly from the fact that my my parents were film buffs they were cinephiles so they would they would go to the cinema all the time and they would drag me along to whatever movie they wanted to see no matter how inappropriate it was and so i saw many many things that i should not have seen at a certain age things that scarred me uh and still live with me um but in some ways i think that was a gift because it just it kind of opened me up to different things and so i think that's something that i would have loved to have so i think there is something special about seeing a movie in a cinema because it's a safe space no one's going to get hurt uh you know you'll get through the end of the experience and and hopefully if you take great care like what we've done in this movie you can take the audience on a journey of something that is about something profoundly human it's about something meaningful to me personally it's about love and loss and grief and empathy and and you know this authentic stuff is in the movie and it's intense in moments and it's probably not for the youngest members of the family although everyone has to know their own kid and what they can handle i mean this is coming from a guy who saw exorcist when i was five so you know it's similar yeah so you know um but i do think uh you know i do think it's it's it is intended for families but it's intended for the entire you know the entire range of family and uh and i think young people um would get a lot out of it and i also think in a in a way now modern cinema really undervalues young people's values and and i think young people um would get a lot out of it and i also think in a in a way now modern cinema really undervalues young people's values and i think young people um would get a lot out of it and i also think in a in a way now modern cinema really undervalues young people's values and i think young people's undervalues young audiences i think they speak down to them in a way that that i actually find upsetting because um you know young young people they are they have emotionally complex in their lives just like we do we do not have a monopoly on big feelings they've been through grief they've been through sadness they know what it's like to feel alone they know what it's like to feel powerless um and because we're telling a story that lives in that space it was really important to me that we spoke to that portion of the audience uh with great respect and authenticity and this movie does that yeah i love that i feel like all the leica movies really do that which i really admire the other thing about this story in particular is a really interesting portrait of parenthood like kind of in two tracts and about how in my experience parenthood is really kind of about like trying to fail a little bit less every day you know like you can kind of feel that in in all the characters that are adults in this story like i don't know how do you relate to that do you think about that too of course yeah i mean it is you know there are layers to the movie on one level it is a you know maturation metaphor about these two kids that are crossing this rubicon from childhood to adulthood and the innocence that's lost and the and the things that were get that that you know that we gain but also the things that we leave behind and sometimes that's deeply sad um and then the film examines that from the other side too because it is about you know multiple sets of parents it's about you know peruse parents what they've endured what they did to create a family to begin with and then how they dealt with the you know the cost of that and and then on the other side we have our antagonist uh in in alexandra who uh like her whole life was was defined by her relationship with her child and when that was ripped away from her it completely reshaped her life and and it and it that absence became a a a presence that she ended up carrying always and couldn't get around it and um and that's you know an aspect of being a parent as well you hired caleb de chanel to be the cinematographer of the film you know shot the right the natural he's a legend many many legendary movies um you know he had worked on the lion king film that john favreau made but this is i assume completely new and different for him so i'm kind of curious about maybe what he had to learn and what maybe what you learned from him in the process of of doing this union uh it was a beautiful collaboration um and one of the reasons i reached out to caleb to begin with was something i alluded to earlier which is that after i made cuba on the two strings i went and made this big you know franchisee uh you know transformers movie in bumblebee and one of the reasons when they approached me for that i was first of all i was shocked like i'm like have you guys seen the kind of movies i make like this these things do not feel like they gel together i'm a bumblebee fan thank you i appreciate that um but but part of it was to try to prove a thesis like can i bring kind of a sense of tenderness and and uh kind of an emotion to this franchise that has largely avoided this type of storytelling and also can i can i even play in this space effectively i'd never done anything like that before i knew that i was going to emerge from the other side a better filmmaker because it was going to challenge me in ways that i'd never been challenged before i did i would and i didn't have the safety net of the team of people that i'd worked with essentially my entire career this extraordinary group of humans that we all support each other it was a whole new group of people that i'd never worked with before and i learned so much along the way it was a joyous process um it is very different process than working in stop motion but one of the things that i learned along the way was that you know it's very different process than working in stop motion but one of the things that had changed within me was my relationship with the camera and you know in stop motion um oftentimes these things look like they're shot on the tabletop because they are oftentimes the camera is completely static because that's the easiest way to do it anytime anything anytime anything moves it has to be essentially moved by hand it has to be thought through it has to be planned a camera move a simple camera move even if it's just a pan that has to be put on the camera to be put on a motion control rig it has to be programmed it has to be programmed it has to be programmed it has to be asked you have to do tests a frame at a time just to get the motion moving a frame at a time and then you if you start doing crazy things like you know like big crane shots it just amplifies the complexity so like on kubo i felt like we pushed the cinematography really far but you're still burdened by the knowledge of how what the limitations of the process are and when i worked on bumblebee my relationship with the camera changed because i really realized how the the the camera can really fundamentally be a a character within the storytelling and and and i wanted to bring that same sensibility to stop motion i wanted to bring that specifically to wildwood i wanted wildwood to feel like it was a big live action epic that we shot with real cameras and just approach it that same way so it was a fundamental way of a fundamentally different way of looking at the cinematography and so that meant i wanted to speak with different artists to see if they could help me bring that to life the first person i reached out to was caleb de chanel and for those who don't know he's an absolute legend one of the best cinematographers ever lived extraordinary artist and also a great dude he's just a cool guy and i didn't think he was going to say yes i mean i just thought it was going to be cool if i could meet him and hang out with him because he made some of the films i loved since i was a kid and we totally hit it off we had shared sensibilities um he dug the project and you know i didn't think the pitch of hey caleb come to oregon for a few years and shoot a girl the size of a burrito would be particularly appealing to this legendary cinematographer but he said yes i was like holy he said yes and it was a bit like the dog who chased the car then and then it caught it like well now what like i'm gonna work with caleb he knows so much more about cinema than i do um and he so he came to portland where we're shooting the movie and he had these insane ideas things that would absolutely never work but what i loved about caleb is that he didn't know anything about stop motion and this lifetime of experience and he dove into something he knew nothing about because he was excited by the challenge of challenging himself and learning more and to his great credit he he really pushed the team to shoot and think about light and camera motion in a way they never had before he also came to understand the limitations of the medium but he did not let that get in the way of trying to tell the story the most beautiful way and to our crew's credit um they rose to meet him and i think that's one of the many reasons why the film looks unlike any stop-motion film ever made is because of that kind of approach that that live-action cinematic approach that caleb brought to the movie i'm really curious about the idea of um patience through a process like this because like you said you've been working with this team for a very long period of time these are artists who know that it takes a long time to make a film i read i don't know if this is true that some of the eagle sequences took years oh yeah to perfect and and master what you see in the movie but i just feel like in contemporary times patience is the most hard one thing like everybody just expects everything immediately myself included yeah and so in that work like do people get frustrated do they lose their nerve like how do you hold so that everybody knows that we're kind of going in the right direction over a year's long period of time yes you are absolutely correct uh you know when a gestation period for a movie is as long as something like this um you know people often think patience is the thing and i don't i mean i do think that i am a patient person but i don't think that's kind of the critical attribute that somebody must have to work in this medium um what is it what is the well i think it's to me part of it is you just have to love the process because we do live in a time that's increasingly frictionless where things are easier and faster and more automated where you can order, order a Thai green curry while you're sitting on your toilet and it'll be there within 20 minutes. I mean, things are just meant to be easier for us with less labor, less effort, less, less, less devotion, less care actually. Um, and when I was a younger man, um, one of the most frustrating things to me was the time that how long these things take, because they take forever. Um, a standard stop motion film kind of from beginning to end will take about five years. This one was considerably longer. Um, but it always takes years. You're not talking about, you know, like a, like a live action film you can shoot within a number of weeks. And then at least the production phase is done on master of the universe. For instance, you know, it was 85 days. This was movie was in the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of weeks to, of a production period. So you get a sense of the scale, like how long these things take. Can you just drill down on that a little bit for me? So like, what was the first day of shooting? The first day of shooting, it's always, uh, it, it always kind of starts the same way, which is that you, you know, as you're building the stuff, um, you know, you're building your puppets, you're building your sets, you've storyboarded the entire movie. Um, you've, you've, you've cut it together. So you can watch the film from beginning to end and storyboard for them with sometimes with, with temp voices, sometimes with temp music. Um, but then you get the act, you record the actors, uh, very, very early in the process. We recorded all the actors during COVID so that, you know, we had to do that essentially over zoom, which was very weird. What was the first, um, the first voice record? It was kind of, I think it was late 2020, uh, 20 and then through 2021. So it was, it was, you know, what we were all in COVID, we were socially distancing. I couldn't actually be there physically with the actors because of all of that. Um, so I recorded or I directed them all over zoom, um, and they were never together. Uh, so every performance you would have to capture every performance 30, 40, 50 different ways, because you don't know what the other actor is going to do and they have to feel like they blend together. And so then you're finding that, that, that, that, that harmonious blend in the edit bay. Um, so you do all that stuff first and then you finally have, okay, finally we have a proof of it. And now we have, usually it's an interior set because those are the simplest things that come out first. So it might be, you know, the kitchen, the family kitchen set, and now you have a couple of puppets. And so you generally start with, you know, one animator, two animators, because that's the, that that's, that's all you have at that point. You just have a handful of things that you can start shooting because it's not like CG where, you know, you create a digital puppet and then you have a couple of things that you can and it's endlessly replicatable. If you build one puppet in stop motion, you have one puppet. And if you want another one, you have to build another one. So if you want another set, it's not a digital duplicate. You have to build another set. And so as we start building more of these, these, the, the units start to fill up as you build these sets, as they're starting to come out of the floor, then the animators start coming in. And so then at its peak, we had, you know, well over a hundred units. We had, you know, at any given time, we could have had, you know, 35 animators working on the show. Generally animators had about, had two units per, per animator. So like they, while they were working on one shot, another unit was getting set up for them. So as soon as they finished, they can go and bounce to another unit and work on another shot. And you're always trying to keep the animators moving because your animators are your actors. And, and if they're not working, you're not getting anything in front of the stage and animators love, love to create. And so it's just, we're always trying to keep the animators going. And it's a, it's a, it's a hard slog, but you, you do, you do have to love the process because at the, at the very beginning of it, you, it's like a mountain. You look up at the top, a peak, you're like, how the hell are we going to get there? We have to build the mountain and then we have to walk up it. You have to love the process of creation. You have to love what it is because for me, every handful of days, there's some little small miracle, whether it's a beautiful puppet or if it's, it's a prop, or if it's a shot, you see something handmade and it has life and it's miraculous. And that's what I love about this process. And so even though it can take a long time, it's, um, to me, it's always a joy because it's, you're, you're, you're just seeing incredible human beings create these beautiful things. The unit component, I think is a little bit under discussed in the general production of movies. You know, most action films have at least two, sometimes multiple units working simultaneously, or some people are off doing other things, but the director, like, and I especially like really valorize the director, who is responsible for everything, but you can't do everything. In fact, you don't really always do anything in some cases, but you're making sure that everyone is doing everything properly in a movie like this. Are there multiple sequences being worked on simultaneously and you can't be present for all those things? How do you present for all these things? It's that we are, you know, like in a live action set, you're generally, you'd, you'd work on it. It can change depending on the complexity of scene, of course, but like, let's take a simple, uh, you've got like a three or four page scene, uh, that takes place in one location. You know, you'll shoot the whole scene. It's down and you'll get all the coverage that you need for the day. And then that's your scene. And then you move on to the next thing in the next day. So you're working on this little chunk of the movie and then it's essentially done in a, in a stop motion film. You could be, you have to keep the entire movie in your head all the time because you could be working on a sequence from the, a shot from the beginning of the movie and then the middle of the movie. And then from the battle sequence at the end, and then from some, you know, quiet conversation that happens in the midpoint of the film. And so you have to know the whole movie. You have to have it in your head because you're working on these little, little fragments. It's like a little mosaic, all these tiny little pieces that you're, you know, you're, you're slowly cobbling together over the course of the production of the movie. So, you know, you are on top of it always. Um, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's happening kind of the whole movie is happening essentially all the time. What do you find to be the most challenging part of the production process of any movie? It doesn't just have to be stop motion. Um, well, stop motion, I, I, I will lean into stop motion because it is the hardest way to make a movie. And I've also said, it's the stupidest way to make a movie. It is ridiculous. Like it is, it is objectively absurd how we make these movies. Um, but, but I also think there's something extraordinary and beautiful and just fundamentally human about it because it's, it's the accumulation of all these acts of devotion and care. And that's why I think that as I've, as I've gotten older, I realized that the fact that stop motion forces us to slow down, to take our time and to really think about what matters, that that's one of the gifts of the medium. Everything's difficult to do. Um, it's, uh, I think that people understand the spectacle and stop motion is challenging, like a big battle sequence that goes on for 12 minutes with well over 400 shots. That's going to be hard. Um, that we have this big, you know, aerial chase sequence that happens in the middle of the movie with this giant golden Eagle, that's doing all this swooping and, and, and, and, you know, kind of, you know, flying around and, and doing all this beautiful kind of elegant animation. Um, challenging. Um, but I think the thing that people wouldn't necessarily expect is that the, and where I think the movie really comes to life is when you have these really quiet, subtle, intimate scenes where you essentially just have this assemblage of steel and silicon and fabric and which has no life of its own. All these materials would have been sitting on someone's workbench a handful of weeks before. And now here it is. It's a constructed thing that has no life of its own. And an artist persuades it. Otherwise an artist puts some of their own life into this thing slowly, a frame at a time. And, and, and it springs to life and it's magic. And then years later, someone sitting in the dark recognizes that as life. And to me, that's magic. And so I, a young, you know, teenage girl having a difficult conversation with her parents. It's not flashy. There's not explosions. There's like no sound. There's no music. It's just, you're hearing the actress performance and you're watching the animators performance with these really subtle movements. It's very, very difficult to do at this scale and this medium. And yet if we, if you pull it off, you fully believe these characters are alive. And to me, that's, that's really, that's magic. It's, it's beautiful. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring that, I mean, that conversation later in the film between Prue and her parents, where we sort of learn the toll of, of this family, um, is really powerful. And it is like in direct contrast to a lot of the bombast that's surrounding the film. And so I guess like, maybe did it take you longer to figure out how to master the subtlety of some of those things inside of this art form? Like, how do you learn how to be a good director of not showy stop motion animation? Well, I mean, the thing is, it's the hardest way to animate. It's, uh, it's kind of, it's easy to be broad. It's easy to go pose to pose. Uh, and that's, you know, these things tend to look like that because that's the simplest way. And to do it the way we do it, which is very naturalistic, it is absolutely the most difficult way there is to, to, to essentially make any kind of animation. But specifically stop motion. And so we, um, but we recognize that, you know, animators are, people tend to think of animators, particularly in this medium as technicians, but they're not, they are, it's a very technical process because, you know, you, you, you're working this progressive form, you're on frame one, you have to move a puppet a little bit, you move to frame two, move it a little bit, move to three. You just keep working through this thing in slow motion until it's done. Um, so it's technical, like you have to hit your marks, you know, the, the puppet do this thing. You got to move its body in certain ways. You have to adjust the fabric and the lapels and the hair and everything. It's very, very technical. Um, but it can never look technical. It has to be organic. It has to look like these characters have life and feelings and they move organically. Um, so it's the, the animators are their performers, their actors. They're just acting with their hands through another object. So we treat them as such. And so when I speak to an animator, I speak to an animator the same way I would speak to an actor. And, you know, you talk about kind of what's, what's motivating people. You talk about the kind of the emotion that's driving it. You talk about, you know, know, what they're feeling. And like, and then we, and then we start to think about how body language can communicate this. And then oftentimes I would find that like when we were doing some of this subtle stuff, that people start to default to kind of bigger and broader gestures. And I would always pull them back. It's like, no, you got to do less, do less, do less, do less to the point where like something is barely moving, but it feels human. It feels alive because that's how we move. So in addition to directing the films, you know, you mentioned you're also the CEO of so you have this sort of business initiative that is going alongside the creative. You made this really fascinating decision to distribute the movie with Fathom, which is sort of a consortium that is owned by the theatrical chains essentially. So why is it going as you expected? How do you feel about, you know, like tell me about all of that. I'm so interested in it. It's an unconventional pairing for sure. It's I mean, like I was saying before, Wildwood is, it's a risky film. And just like Coraline, we spoke with with a bunch of different distributors to see who would be the best partner for us. In the end, we ended up going with Fathom domestically. We have different partners internationally, but we went with Fathom domestically. Part of it was we'd already had a really healthy relationship with them. You know, Fathom has historically been what they kind of call event cinema. And so it's a very different model. And we've had, we've re-released some of our legacy titles like Coraline and Paranorman with Fathom. And so we've had a really healthy relationship with Fathom out in the theaters to great success. And because of that, we kind of knew how each other worked and we, and they were fully committed to giving this film the theatrical push that we felt it deserved. This was a movie designed to be seen on the big screen in the best theater possible, with the best projection, with the best sound, surrounded by a room of fellow dreamers who were completely focused on the story that's unfolding in front of them. It's not meant to be watched while you're sitting on your couch, doom scrolling and making your, your, your, your mushroom risotto in the back. It's a, you, we want people's attention and in the space, like the communal experience of watching the movie, which is something that I've always loved, something I loved since I was a kid. It's, there's something special about it. You can feel when people are leaning in, you can feel the audience gasp at something that surprises them. You can, you can hear them cry when something is moving them. That is that, that, that, that incredible experience of being with other people and watching this story unfold. I wanted that for this movie. And, and I knew working with Fathom that we would get that in, in a way that it deserved. So ultimately we, we, we ended up going with Fathom. It also allowed us to control the marketing. And I did not want this to be a rug pull for the audience. I wanted us in every piece of marketing that we did, every, every trailer, every, every poster, every image that came out, I wanted it to accurately reflect what the movie was. I did not want to trick anyone. I wanted, did not want them to come think this movie was going to be a baby for, baby. I wanted them to come think this movie was going to be a babysitter for their kids and then have their child walk out of the cinema traumatized. I want people to know that this is, this is the kind of movie it is. It is beautiful. It's moving. It's, it's got great light in it, but it has intensity as well. And that is reflected in how we treated the marketing of the movie, which is again, one of the reasons why we went with Fathom, because if you, you know, if you work with some of these other distributors, you do not get that. And they're going to push the film however they want to push the film. Yeah. That's really fascinating. The first teaser for the movie is like one of the best movies of the year. You know, it's like one of the most entrancing things. It's beautiful. Yeah. And it's, and I think it, it accurately reflects the spirit of what the movie is. Yeah. Um, we're at this interesting moment. You mentioned that some, some children's entertainment kind of talks down to kids. We're also at the onset of this massive AI moment and the kind of the intersection of those two things, I would say for me personally, as a parent is a little nerve wracking, um, in terms of like, not just what my kid will be exposed to, but what she'll like and like what she'll learn to like, and I'm curious, obviously the work that you do with the studio and the films that you've made run seemingly run very counter to, to all of that. Like how do you, how do you think about it? Uh, they do. They're almost antithetical to one another. Um, I've described the act of making a stop motion film in this modern era as a quiet act of rebellion. And I think that's accurate, um, because it feels like the tide is going one direction. Um, things are increasingly designed to be, you know, automated and algorithmically focused. Um, and we're kind of fed up things that, that, that, you know, this, the machine learns that even, even down to making the film, Sean, because if you, you know, if you work with these big studios, they run all these things through their algorithm to see if a casting choice is going to resonate with certain audiences. These are not necessarily human and creative artistic decisions. These are decisions that have been run through some, you know, the, the whopper it's been run through some kind of a, some sort of an, uh, a machine that's giving them feedback that they will then use to make a movie. Um, you have to trust artists like a filmmaking is yeah, sure. Look, it's, it is, it's show in its business, of course. And so you have to mitigate risk, of course. But in the end, the movies that move us, the movies that make us feel something are the result of a combination of all these extraordinary artistic, creative human beings making these choices towards a specific goal. Um, they're not built by machines. They're not, you know, it, they're not, you know, made by algorithms are made by people. And, and I think we, we are in danger of something going away. We are in danger of losing something precious. Um, artificial intelligence is a technological marvel. I think we can all recognize that. And I think there are great benefits that hopefully can come from it. Um, you know, I think things advances in science advances in medicine. You know, I've the guy that runs deep mind wants to cure cancer, which could not be a more noble goal. And I think, with this technology, those things are possible. So artificial intelligence can be an extraordinary boon to mankind, but we should not neglect the fact that it can be incredibly disruptive and destructive, which it will be. There's no getting around it. It will be, it will cause extraordinary pain. It will, it's going to change the world. It's already changing the world. It's going to disrupt all of our lives in ways I don't think we can anticipate and how it affects the industry that I've worked in, that I haven't spent my entire life working in. Um, I, you see what's going on. People have been very public about how they want to use this technology, not to advance the art form, but to supplant the artist, to take the place of the artist. And that's scary because, um, a machine isn't human. A machine does not have a soul. A machine does not know what it's like to fall in love or to have their heart broken or to lose a relationship. I do fear that if things go the direction, they seem to be going with people who are trying to push these things in that direction, that we are going to lose something fundamentally human as something very, very precious. And at Leica, it's antithetical to everything we believe in. And it's why we're pushing back as hard as we can. We are, but one voice, we need a chorus. Uh, this is not a call to arms, but, but I do think that we have to like both as, as, as, as creators, as people who make things, people who have a voice, and people that, you know, the movie going public, we have to say that we don't want this. We want human stories because if we don't, we're going to lose it. Well said. Travis, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? Ah, well, that's easy for me. Uh, because, um, because I've only seen one great thing recently because I've been in a dark cave making this movie. The unfortunate thing about making movies is that sometimes you don't get to see movies. I've heard that before. Um, it is, yes, it's a, it's a sad thing, but I happen to be in Telluride for the first time this year, uh, last month. Uh, amazing, beautiful place. And I had, uh, you know, you're working all day, you know, you're, you're doing your thing. I had an afternoon free. I had a couple of hours free and there happened to be a screening at the, at the, at the Herzog theater, which is this amazing theater. They built into an icing ice skating rink. So great. So great. It's one of my favorite, it's one of my favorite rooms in the world. It's insane when you see the beauty of the projection, the sound in an ice skating rink. It's incredible. But anyway, I knew nothing about this movie. I sat down, I'm like, all right, I'm just going to enjoy this without knowing anything. And it was Martin McDonough's Wild Horse Nine. And I'm a fan of Martin McDonough anyway. So I was like, when I heard it was his movie, he's like, oh, I'm inclined to like this. Um, and yet I, because I knew nothing about it, I was not prepared for the experience. And to me, that's what movies are. It's funny. It's, it's dark. It's deeply human. It's moving. It's beautifully put together, beautifully performed and acted. The craftsmanship is extraordinary. I absolutely loved it. And it re again, it reminded me of the magic of movies and that this is what movies are for is, uh, is, is, is experiences like this. And so I cannot recommend it highly enough. Uh, Wild Horse Nine by Martin McDonough. Go see it. You'll, you'll, you'll love it. It's a great recommendation. Travis Knight, thank you so much. Thank you, Sean. Okay. Thanks to Travis Knight. Thanks to Joanna. Oh my God. Well done. Thanks to you. You're the best. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders for his work on today's episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh for his production support. Thanks to Amanda Dobbins. You're welcome. Nice job, Amanda. You saw a lot of me. I did. This was, this was a hearty episode. Yeah. And your reward for that is no new recording on Monday. I know. Because at long last, we will be running the Gene Hackman Hall of Fame with our special guest, Tracy Letts. Hope you tune in for that. Quick in the Den number one. No spoilers. Okay. We'll see you then. Thank you. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Observe the North American dad. 50s. Great polo collection. 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