The Clint Eastwood Mt. Rushmore, and the Curious Case of  ‘Juror No. 2.’ Plus: ‘Heretic’!

Sean is joined by Adam Nayman to discuss the head-scratching rollout of Clint Eastwood’s justice system interrogation, ‘Juror No. 2’ and the movie’s successes, shortcomings, and Eastwood-isms (1:00). Then, Sean briefly discusses the appeal of ‘Heretic’ (55:00) before being joined by the film’s directors, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, to talk about their writing process, Hugh Grant’s lead performance, the state of getting movies made, and more (58:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Adam Nayman, Scott Beck, and Bryan Woods Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everybody, Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and The Mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I can't wait to link with you twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday, right here on The Mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's at Ringer NBA and check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting right on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel.

• 0:46Sean Fennessey?

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• 2:19Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Clint. Later in this episode, I'll be talking with Scott Beck and Brian Woods, the writer-directors of the new Hugh Grant horror thriller Heretic. Scott and Brian wrote A Quiet Place. They directed a clever 2018 horror flick called Haunt, and they're hardcore cinephiles. Stick around for more chat. But first, interesting conversation today. We need to talk about Clint Eastwood and his new film Juror Number Two, which you may have seen if you live in France or within driving distance of one of the 38 screens that are showing this film in America right now. We'll discuss why the movie itself is not available to the public at large and what is going on in the film, and we'll also talk about Clint Eastwood's

• 3:00Sean Fennessey?

  legacy. We're doing so with the not-so-mean pod guy, the wonderful pod guy, Adam Nayman. Hi, Adam.

• 3:06Speaker 04

  Hey, Sean. How are you?

• 3:07Sean Fennessey?

  I'm doing splendidly. I'm so happy to be back talking with you about Clint. You know, me, you, and Chris Ryan, some years back during the COVID-19 pandemic, recorded an episode about the film Cry Macho, and we talked about why we love Clint Eastwood's movies. And we're back here. Clint's back with another film. And boy, this sure is a pickle in modern entertainment times. What the hell is going on with Juror Number Two?

• 3:31Speaker 04

  What the hell is going on with Juror Number Two? I live in Toronto, where one, you know, Canada, that's your neighbor to the north.

• 3:38Sean Fennessey?

  Is it now?

• 3:38Speaker 04

  You know, is it now? One theater in Toronto showing Juror Number Two, and I was lucky enough to see the movie at a press screening that seemed to be arranged very hastily. But my timeline on Friday was filled with the cream of Toronto's film community turning up and paying their hard-earned money to see Juror Number Two, and then people tweeting at me being like, "I live in other parts of Canada. It's not playing here." And then people tweeting, "I live in other parts of the States. It's not playing here." You said 38 theaters. That's apparently the number, right? This is a "stop the steal" situation, you know? We have to count the theaters. But it's less than 50.

• 4:18Sean Fennessey?

  Less than 50.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  And that's an astonishing thing for any movie by one of the major studios, a studio whose whole existence is built on size. They're huge. Warner Discovery, they make everything. They do everything. Why would anything be in 50 theaters with no plans to roll it out larger, but I read today to just get it out of theaters and on to Max by the end of the year? And why indeed Clint Eastwood? And the question that this is a really good movie, which we'll hopefully get to later, isn't even what we're talking about yet. It's just why? Do you know why, Sean? You, you, in my opinion, you, you, you pay attention to the industry. Your job requires you to.

• 5:00Sean Fennessey?

  I have some, I have some theories. I have no hard reporting. Um, I think you've got two competing things happening here. One, you've got Warner Brothers' recent merger with Discovery, leading to an extraordinary amount of debt. And so that debt has, um, I guess encouraged some of the leadership at the studio to cancel the release of certain movies like Batgirl, or like the reportedly great Coyote versus Acme film, which apparently we're never going to see. And then in this case, and in the case of a couple of other movies, though not many, uh, a very, very, very, very modest theatrical release before making this officially a streaming film. Um, you know, Warner's is doing a lot of, uh, straight to streaming movies. They

• 5:42Sean Fennessey?

  just released a Salem's Lot film that seemed like it was intended to be theatrical originally and went straight to the service. And so we've been going through this for years. Warner Brothers, in particular, has been at the center of this kerfluffle of streaming versus theatrical since the pandemic, in part because of the Project Popcorn Initiative, you may recall, wherein all of the 2021 slate films were sent directly to Max. That wasn't ideal for movie going at all. And Warner Brothers, even though there's been some, a regime change, some confusion about what is the right way to platform movies. Also, Warner Brothers is having a tricky year in terms of its theatrical releases writ large. You know, they have had huge success with Dune Part Two, Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice

• 6:25Sean Fennessey?

  has done pretty good business, but if you look at Furiosa, if you look at Horizon Part One, if you look at Trap, these are movies from big legendary filmmakers that did okay to poorly. And I sense that the leadership that is not the top line leadership, the sort of CEO David Zaslove type figures, but even just the film studio leadership is a little unsure of what it means to be a master these days and whether or not masters deserve to be platforms the way that they used to. Now, We can talk about what Clint Eastwood means to the movies in this conversation and we should. But one thing that's interesting about Clint to me is that within the last six years, he made a bona fide original hit for the movie theaters in the movie The Mule.

• 7:07Sean Fennessey?

  Like that, he was in his late eighties when he made that movie and was still able to draw audiences. So I find this decision to be flummoxing at best, deeply discouraging and maybe even crisis like at worst. I think I like this movie. I know that I don't like it quite as much as you, but there is, it's so obvious that a movie like this has commercial potential because you can just look at all of the other movies being released around it and how they're performing. So I find the whole thing a massive, massive bummer. What do you think?

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Well, well, to give credit, because you can't do, you can't discredit someone until you give them the credit where it's due in the first place, right? And Warner Brothers historically, not solely, but historically is the place where a kind of master filmmaker works. They're not the house that Stanley Kubrick built, but he certainly paid some of the rent in the seventies, high overhead with Stanley Kubrick, you know? But, but, but, but the artistic currency of Kubrick is a lot. And so is Clint Eastwood. And you mentioned some more contemporary people. I think it's interesting that filmmakers who, listeners of this show are probably more fond of than I am, but who you have to take seriously, like your Christopher Nolans and like your Denis Villeneuve are the filmmakers who Warner has like cultivated and alienated in a very short span

• 8:21Speaker 04

  in the last couple of years. So you don't even have to drill down to the kind of commercially dicey masters like a George Miller or even a Shyamalan to talk about the idea that like this is where Nolan supposedly was going to make movies and where Denis Villeneuve is making movies that work. And every skirmish with Warner Brothers ends up like these people not liking the studio and its leadership or feeling compromised. I put in my piece on juror number two, it's a throwaway joke, but it's not funny. Two jokes, which is, why is Tom Cruise, who I think only believes in movies, I don't know what values or, or, or, or human feelings he has beyond the fact that he likes movies, working with someone treating them as a tax write-off? And God help us with Paul Thomas Anderson's movie.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  This is not based on any knowledge. I have no knowledge of anything, except that I really want to see this movie. Hundred and forty million dollars, big tax write-off. You know, I'm not being stirring stuff by saying it. I'm like, what trust do we have? What happens when Warner Brothers cancels Wile E. Coyote? You can't actually cancel him. He has to keep coming back. That is the that's the fucking point of the character.

• 9:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Is he, he keeps coming back and they're like, actually, no, Wile E. Coyote, you can't exist. For me, spiritually, that was the last straw. You don't let me see a Wile E. Coyote movie and you're an enemy of, of art. And Clint Eastwood is in that same category. And The Mule was a big hit. And whatever else you think of his recent movies, and we can talk about this whole idea that he still makes movies and not content, which is a shriek, a shrinking list of, of, of anybody. But you would think that if you've spent the money on the thing, you'd try and make the money back on it. And the idea that this all happened supposedly, and I know it's more dramatic to boil it down to a single exchange and it's a little glib, but like,

• 10:11Speaker 04

  the idea that the, the studio exec who will not be named, because if I say his name three times, he's going to come around and cancel a movie that I like. You know, responded to the idea that you should maybe be respectful to Clint Eastwood with like, we're not here to make friends, you know, this is show business, not show friends.

• 10:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, quoting the great Bob Sugar.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what the fucking bad guy in Jerry Maguire says. It's not what Jerry Maguire says. It's the guy who we don't like in Jerry Maguire. By the way, does Tom Cruise know that he said that? Because Tom Cruise, who I think can't, can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy sometimes, might be like, someone said that to me once. I didn't like that guy.

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  You know?

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  Tom Cruise of the fewer clients, less money verbiage in that film.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  And, and yeah, I mean, I know we're talking about Clint and not, not Tom here, but it's like, Cruise has now crossed that Rubicon into being more of an East Woodyan figure because he is kind of standing up for like the movies.

• 11:05Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  You know, this is like Cruise's stump speech. And I don't like thinking that he might be collateral damage in this same idea of a studio that is from the very foundations of movie making now kind of being like, we don't know if we make movies anymore. And if we do, should we really release them? And do we trust when critics say something like trap is good? Because without Putting too fine a point on it, that wasn't press screened either.

• 11:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, there's like the very small experiences that folks like you and I are having with a particular studio at a given time. And then there's the the history of that studio. And then there's a kind of tech incursion in the way that the entertainment marketplace has been wildly disrupted in the last 10 years. The ironic thing, I think, is that it's not just that Warner Brothers has this extraordinary history of supporting great filmmakers who are very audacious. You know, this is the studio of like John Calley, like one of the great creative executives in movie history. But it's also, um, you know, Mike DeLuca is is one of the studio chiefs there now. And Mike DeLuca is renowned for having tremendous taste and for giving filmmakers a chance. He worked at New Line for many years. He, of course, is responsible for getting Boogie Nights into the world. He brought Paul Thomas Anderson to the studio.

• 12:14Sean Fennessey?

  He is in part responsible for bringing Tom Cruise to the studio on a producing deal. He brought M. Night Shyamalan to the studio on a new deal, removing him from, you know, other agreements. Like, he is a, at least for us, that very delicate intersection of auteur craft and entertaining mainstream movie going. Like, Mike DeLuca is one of the good guys in that equation.

• 12:37Speaker 04

  He wrote, he, he, he wrote In the Mouth of Madness.

• 12:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  It's a life, it's a lifetime pass. Everything you've said is probably higher up on the resume, but like dude wrote In the Mouth of Madness. Toronto shot classic, by the way. I mean, that's a life, that, that's a lifetime pass. And I don't speculate on the psychology or how these people feel in their heart of hearts. But sure, he's not thrilled, whatever he might think of a juror number two. The press is bad.

• 13:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  Right? And I, and I know it's easy to create these institutional villains and, you know, go after Zaslav as an embodiment of something bad. The same way it's easy to prop up Eastwood as something good. But it's like, what else are we supposed to do? We're not supposed to know how the omelet gets made. Our job is to be critics and commentators and. Weigh the evidence and read the tea leaves like jurors, you know, and ascribe guilt and innocence. And I find Warner Brothers guilty of doing Clint Eastwood dirty, you know, like hard, seriously. Here, this makes, this is awful.

• 13:38Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know what the sentencing will be for this crime, but it isn't good. Let's just give it some context too, for the contemporary times. The movie reported, we're recording this the week after its release. This episode may not come out until the following week, we'll see. I think by the time this episode comes out, it may not even be in any movie theaters anymore. It may be completely pulled from movie theaters. And so it makes having a conversation about the film complicated. But at the time that we're recording, Conclave has already made north of 15 million dollars in movie theaters with a wide release. A movie that even though it's a papal drama, that is a mystery movie, is essentially appealing to the same audience than a movie like Jury Number Two is appealing to. Conversely, the film Here did not perform nearly as well as it would have liked to.

• 14:20Sean Fennessey?

  And that is a film that is sort of like a technocrat's idealized dream versus Clint's style, which is this very forthright, typical, sturdy, dramatic genre picture, which he has thrived with for decades. You know, you've also got to consider this movie made $5 million internationally and millions in France, his beloved France, where Eastwood has been venerated for decades. So, you know, and also we're in a time where it's so clear to me, based on the success of a show like Presumed Innocent, that we're like, we're in the mode, we're in the mood for the Scott Turo, John Grisham, right down the middle legal drama. This is something that people have liked and have always liked. And for whatever reason, it was cast off to streaming television and it very much belongs at the movies.

• 15:06Sean Fennessey?

  So I find the whole thing bewildering. It feels like ultimately some combination of contempt and negligence. And I don't know what the percentages are in those two directions, but it is, it is, it is frustrating.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  And I think there, there is, there is maybe a, not a point of view, but there's like some rhetoric, which is like, well, okay, so the law of averages has to come for Eastwood eventually, and he's been insulated for so long. You know, Malpasso with its deal with Warner's, he gets to make whatever he wants. He makes it how he makes it. But I don't really know how many people making that argument can square that with just the tension we all live under, which is it's an industry, it's a mercenary industry. And if Clint's movies provide return on investment, they're never gonna stop giving him that freedom. If he happens occasionally, more frequently than most to make either good product or arguable art, I mean, that's a whole other discussion.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  I don't think the problem here is that Warner Brothers or its executives have bad taste and don't see that juror number two is good. I'm like, my argument is they spent money on it. They could potentially make money on it. Leave the adjudication of whether it's art to, you know, the jurors who work as film critics, but just like let audiences see this movie. I think this movie shouldn't go to Max. This movie should be put in a time machine to 1997 and played with commercial breaks on TBS. That would actually be a good thing because back then I think we were all taking the idea of like well-made, self-contained, movie-shaped objects for granted. We didn't know how good we had it, not just with Eastwood, but sort of in general. Like this movie made me feel to some extent, it's much better than this movie, but they're sort of like, hell, like it's like watching Primal Fear.

• 16:47Sean Fennessey?

  A hundred percent.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  And it's also like if Primal Fear was sort of Bressonian, but that's the pretentious critic part of it later. But it's just like, this is just an entertaining movie, man.

• 16:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I wonder if, and I, you know, this can lead into a conversation about the film and some broad strokes, and then maybe we can just locate five minutes that people can skip over if they want to, to talk through the ending a bit, because I'm fascinated by the ending of this movie.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:11Sean Fennessey?

  But the movie itself is not sexy at its core. It's, it's a really classic moral exploration of personal and institutional failure. Like those are clearly the thing, and those are things that he has been interested in, maybe even obsessed with for roughly 20 years now in his films.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  With an extremely sexy frontman, because Nicholas Holt, he of the blue eyes, they are Clint's, Clint caliber blue eyes.

• 17:37Sean Fennessey?

  Clintonian even.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Clintonian blue eyes, Clint and Clintonian, but yeah, not, not the sexiest, uh, not the sexiest movie in a lot of ways.

• 17:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's also a movie that's very formally made. It has some interesting moves. You know, there is a clear like noir Hitchcock thing going on inside the strategy of the movie. But it's just a lot of interiors. It's a lot of archetypal characters. It's it moves in patterns that are familiar. And so because of that, sometimes that can be a good thing. Sometimes an executive can look at a movie like that and say, like, I know what this is. I know how to program this. I know how to market it. I know how to get it out into the world. And sometimes that might make them think like, this is a seen it all before kind of a situation. This is a guy working in an old register that doesn't get what modern entertainment culture is all about. And so I think because of that, even just the way that like scenes are blocked.

• 18:29Sean Fennessey?

  They feel like a Malpasso movie from if not nineteen seventy two, then certainly like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. You know what I mean? That's a movie that this is in relationship to another southern set, legal drama. And so maybe it just feels like passe to them. To me, it was very comforting.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  It's comforting and it's also troubling because one of the things this movie argues, it's not a movie. That's that subtle in some places. But the classicism of it and the familiarity of it is subtle because it's basically saying, yes, this could have happened in nineteen fifty five. Or ninety two, because our legal system has remained, not our, I'm Canadian, anyone listening, I take back the hour. I'm not the one having an election today. Good luck. But that the the American legal system, which ours resembles in a lot of ways, is a set in stone. And a lot of things about the United States and its its values and its processes and its assumptions are set in stone. So in that case, it's not the movie's familiar or derivative. It's like eternal.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  And the moral crisis that this movie pivots on is not something that was invented yesterday. Nothing's ever invented yesterday, but people like to convince themselves that certain themes like, oh, this is topical. And it's like, no, it's this is topical, the way like, you know, Genesis is topical, the book of Gen, you know, it's like, it's pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty. This is like, am I my brother's keeper stuff?

• 19:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  You know?

• 19:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  And I think being a bit of a monument and a monolith himself, being a Mount Rushmore unto himself. Clint Eastwood is very interested in how things change or don't over time. And that's the kind of lens that you talk about the movie through. Yeah, it could play on TBS in like nineteen ninety five, but I mean, it would be a pretty profound movie even then, I think.

• 20:13Sean Fennessey?

  I think so too.

• 20:14Speaker 04

  You know?

• 20:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think, well, I don't know if I would have said that. Until I got to the conclusion of the film. Like, I think the obviously kind of the emotional quagmire that the character finds himself in is certainly

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Should we tell?

• 20:28Sean Fennessey?

  It's rich. It's definitely rich.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Should we tell people what it's about?

• 20:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we should.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  The trailer's interesting because you'd think it spoils the movie, but the best thing about the movie is even if you know the premise, it's still interesting.

• 20:40Sean Fennessey?

  So it's about a juror for a high-profile murder trial. This juror is a successful freelance magazine writer of some kind, living in Georgia, who finds himself struggling with this dilemma, which is that he is on the jury of a case in which he may or may not have played a major and potentially devastating role. And there's a man on trial for his life for murdering a woman who was his girlfriend. And Nicholas Holt was present, seemingly, at the events that are depicted in the film's case. So Nicholas Holt's character has to determine how to operate inside of this situation.

• 21:23Sean Fennessey?

  The case that is presented feels very open and shut. It appears that the man who is on trial is guilty. And then invariably, the movie, roughly a third of the way through, becomes a 12 Angry Men-style disquisition on guilt and truth and reasonable doubt and how we can know what's real and what's not. And also, I think, has some very clever contemporary spins on how everyone thinks that they understand everything about true crime, but also people who get called into jury duty just need to go home and take care of their kids or go take care of their pregnant wife, which Nicholas Holt's character has with a high-risk pregnancy, played by Zoe Deutsch. And so it's a, it's a straight-down-the-middle pot-boiler drama.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Well, and I was grateful to get to write about it at some length for Ringer. You know, it's wonderful to get to write 2,000 words on a movie. It's hard to do that almost anywhere else. I'm just saying that out of gratitude.

• 22:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great piece.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, the 12 Angry Men thing is interesting because I know we're treading on spoiler territory. We're actually being more careful than the trailer, which kind of comes out and says what it is.

• 22:27Sean Fennessey?

  It really does. It spoils the shit out of it.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Spoils the shit out of it, but I still think the movie's good. But let's just say that, you know, in 12 Angry Men, the legacy of that movie, and it really is a kind of centrist lib legacy. 12 Angry Men is like the boomer centrist movie Hall of Fame. It's also one of the 10 most popular movies, highest rated movies on Letterboxd, which obviously means that the kids still relate to it.

• 22:49Sean Fennessey?

  I have noticed that, and I think part of that is because that movie, like this movie, is genuinely entertaining.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Genuinely entertaining, but I mean, in 12 Angry Men, you have Henry Fonda in his white suit. He's the only one in the jury room who looks at this Puerto Rican kid in the defendant box and imagines, I, that could be me. And if it was me, uh, would I want us to talk more about it? Suffice it to say that in juror number two, Nicholas Holt comes to the same conclusion, but not because he's the best person in the world. He has other reasons for maybe putting himself in that defendant box imaginatively. And sort of, you know, what, what, what, you know, what is his duty to this defendant? What is this duty to himself and to his country? Suffice it to say, country is not at the top of his list of priorities. I think the movie suggests maybe nor should it be, nor can it be, nor will it be for any of us.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  I'm not trying to tip our hand about when we're recording this, but like, it's an interesting election season movie about self-interest. Where does self-interest lead? Do you vote for yourself or do you vote for, for, for, for, for the idea of other people? Which is like at the core of every ideological and policy debate in American history, you know? So yeah, it's Scott Turo, but it's also a philosophical treatise of a movie.

• 24:03Sean Fennessey?

  It is, and it's not a mistake that the character that Holt plays is, uh, in recovery and attends AA meetings throughout the film. Yeah. One of the funny things about the movie is that. Eastwood, because he's Eastwood, is able to cast these extraordinary actors in minuscule parts. So you've got, in particular, you know, Toni Colletta has a big flashy part as a prosecutor. She's obviously wonderful. Then you've got J.K. Simmons as a juror, who is also, has some expertise that he brings to the case. And then you also have Kiefer Sutherland coming in for basically two days as both sort of an AA counselor and an attorney. And that

• 24:46Sean Fennessey?

  is the character for whom, he's sort of like the therapist of the movie, sort of receives Nicholas Holt's guilt and tells him what to do with it. And-

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Kiefer, Kiefer Sutherland comes off the bench in this movie with like four, four, four for four from three in like five minutes.

• 25:02Sean Fennessey?

  It is a true Dion Waiters. He goes crazy for a few minutes. It's just nice, it's just nice to see Kiefer Sutherland in like a, a, a big fancy Hollywood movie, you know? It really reminds you just like what a, what a dependable screen presence someone like that can be and that, you know, I don't know if he would have done a part like this for almost any other director, but it just, it raises the stakes. It raises the sense of importance when you're watching a movie like this, too.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there's so much pleasure in watching people like Toni Collet and J.K. Simmons, who are always good, but sometimes it's not, I believe it's not about taking them for granted. It's more that, I don't know, the movies that, it's more of an issue with the movies that they're in. Like, in some ways, the movies are not too ambitious or too pushy, but they're just so, like, I like, you know, J.K. Simmons recently being in Saturday Night. Like, I couldn't enjoy that. But, but him coming into this movie, his character, and I know we're trying not to spoil it, but it's the most brilliant characterization in the entire movie, which is what if someone who could potentially solve the movie is going to show up, but this movie still has to be two hours long? What is the movie going to do with that? And I love what it does with it because it's

• 26:07Speaker 04

  both incredibly clever and innovative in a kind of storytelling way. And it's also very telling about what happens in life, which is often people who are in the best position to understand something or do something are prevented from it. And there's a bureaucratic reason for it, which really ties to sort of Clint's conservatism, but is also not wrong. Like, people are punished in some ways for having an intelligence. We're not punished, but people are prohibited from having an intelligent, informed perspective on something, even something important.

• 26:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you just hit on something that I think is important. Obviously, one of the stranger moments of Clint's career is the speech to the empty chair that he famously gave at the Republican National Convention that codified him clearly in the mind of many Americans as a far-right-leaning demagogue-type, you know, reasonable people can disagree. I think his politics have always kind of shifted pretty dramatically over the years, and in some cases, he's portrayed as like a lout when it comes to women. In some cases, he's portrayed as wildly progressive. So, he's a bit of a difficult nut to crack. I think that a movie like this, depending on what you want from it, it can be read as a classic libertarian interpretation of the way that institutions operate.

• 27:22Sean Fennessey?

  It could be seen as like a necessarily reformist portrait of the way that institutions need to change. It could be seen as purely, like, as you said, the sort of Bretonian moral exploration, which is much more about the self and is a little bit less interested in ultimate. It's essentially like, we can build around the way that these institutions insist on holding us back. If you look at Richard Jewell, if you look at 1517 to Paris, if you look at American Sniper, if you look at The Mule, if you look at all these movies about these people that are trying to operate inside the system to a point and come to a realization that the system cannot contain their own perception of rightness, then that really is where Clint always lies. Like, Sully is very much about that, another movie about a character who goes on trial

• 28:07Sean Fennessey?

  wrongly and needs to, you know, get restitution for the misdeeds of the institution.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, he's very interested in why people try and do the right thing, should they try and do the right thing, what is the right thing? That's the common thread to almost all those movies. And there's a couple of movies in there I really don't like. I'm not a fan of American Sniper, but I'm very fond of its weird spiritual doppelganger, which is 1517 to Paris, which I think is the better version of that story. And this one is weirdly similar to Richard Jewell.

• 28:40Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Very, very similar to Richard Jewell, which is a late Clint I like. But, boy, does he drill down to the personal. Like, again, it's not a spoiler, but it's a way of describing the movie. There is no more resonant image in this movie than that of an empty chair. And anyone who's going to tell me that he doesn't know that and that he is not whatever his age, you know, that a lot of the positive rhetoric around Clint almost verges into a kind of reverse ageist criticism where everyone's just trying to celebrate him because he's kind of old. And it's like, he's old, but he's smart as a fox, man. I mean, that, that, that shot of the chair, which is not the second unit. You can tell me that the second unit directed the battle scenes in American Sniper if you want. That empty chair is Clint.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  And it, the empty chair points pointing towards him in a way. Not that he's the man who isn't there, but that that's significance of what it means to question institutions. What happens when that questioning gets turned around on you? And it's not a word I usually apply to Eastwood because I'm a, I'm a critic. I don't love all of his movies, but there is something kind of heroic about the fact that he still wants to try and make movies about serious things. When even the best filmmakers that we deal with that we have put everything in quotes, or face away from the present because they want to, to do these luxuriously subsidized period pieces. I love how contemporary Juror number two is, even though it's obviously quite classical. He's not given up.

• 30:09Sean Fennessey?

  I think that lack of irony or hipness is part of why it is in this position that it's in. It's an interesting movie too, because let's, let's just tent five minutes around the ending of this movie. Um, if you do not want this movie spoiled for you, and I fully understand that you do not, because in all likelihood, you have not seen it and you want to wait until it comes to max. And, and, and Adam and I would both encourage you to see it. Just fast forward five minutes.

• 30:38Sean Fennessey?

  Spoiler warning. I was, I would say I was enjoying the film with some reservations because of some very stilted characterization, especially in the jury room, a handful of performances that felt very much not able to achieve what they needed to in the Clint filmmaking style, where you're like getting one or two takes and they're moving on. Couple of actors who could have used more. Not, this is not the case for Nicholas Holt or J K Simmons or Toni Collette or Chris Messina. Like the, the stars of the movie, I think are uniformly excellent in the movie, but there are supporting characters who needed a little bit more time to shake things out. And maybe the script might need another pass too. Nevertheless, when we got to the ending of the movie in which.

• 31:20Sean Fennessey?

  By some chance, the Nicholas Holt character has been able to extricate himself from deliberating at the end of the jury, and the jury has convicted the man who is on trial. And he has returned to his quiet life in the suburbs with his wife. They give birth, they have a child. All the while, the prosecutor, played by Colette, is having serious doubts about the case, which went after she's confronted by J.K. Simmons's character, an ex-cop. And she goes to great lengths to look into the research that Simmons's character has unearthed. And she does finally realize that, in fact, the case is a hit-and-run and not a murder with a blunt object. And the hit-and-run was perpetrated by Nicholas Holt's character.

• 32:05Sean Fennessey?

  And so the film has this drawn-out conclusion over the course of seven or eight minutes, where we're not entirely clear, after sentencing has transpired, where we're going to go and what's going to happen to Holt. We see him with his family and his baby. We're waiting and waiting and waiting, and finally, there's a knock at the door, and Holt answers the door, and standing in the doorway is Toni Collette. And she is there, presumably, to tell him, "We will not be battling the appeal of the convicted man. We're going to let him free, and you're going to be tried for this case." Presumably, that was my interpretation of it. But the movie stops right there before Toni Collette says anything.

• 32:47Sean Fennessey?

  And she just exists as this representation of moral return, essentially, that like, you can never really escape what you have done, and you may spend the rest of your life feeling chased by it. And I was, like, blown away by this ending. I thought it was incredibly bold and really put the onus right back in our laps and just said, "Sit in that. Sit in it. How does that make you feel?" Which I just, I absolutely loved. Do you agree with the way that I read it? What do you make of it?

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree with the way that you read it, right up to the fact that it is, you know, moral return, and yet, no confirmation of where that moral return leads.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  The Colette character to me is one of the most admirable things about the movie because there's another era of Clint's filmmaking, including fairly recent ones, where this would be a Hillary or God help us, you know, Kamala coded character, the way that that Judy Davis was quite brilliantly in Absolute Power, where it's like, you know, that's like Norm MacDonald's version of Hillary Clinton. He's just like, cover up this murder, cover up that murder. We gotta cover up the president's murder. I mean, you know, Clint is not, he's not not funny about those things. But that in this movie, she is set up to be a hypocrite, which is her name is Faith, and she's trying to prosecute domestic abusers, and she's trying to be a sort of progressive liberal DA. And you feel, not just because of Eastwood,

• 34:16Speaker 04

  but because of the genre, that this may be a movie about how she is just as willing, if not more, to sweep things under the rug. You are led to think she is going to be someone whose ambitions to do good make her do bad. And she's not. She is someone who comes to a realization that, you know, her desire to do the greater good is going to be compromised if she maybe doesn't investigate this one small thing that she could get away with. I am not sure that she has showed up at Holt's door at the end of the movie to bring the house down on him. But it's to see him, you know? And the staging, I don't think Eastwood is is doing this movie, but the staging reminded me of the end of Taking Appell on 123, except at the end of Taking Appell on 123, you know Walter Matthau's

• 35:01Speaker 04

  gonna call the cops on Martin Balsam. I'm not sure she's gonna, who's, by the way, is from 12 Angry Men. I'm not sure she's gonna call the cops, but she sees him. So what does it mean to be seen? His son, who's looking up at him in that last scene, all he sees is his dad. And what's the dialogue in that scene? Oh, he has your eyes. Oh, I hope he doesn't have your mouth. Oh, he's got my elbows. I mean, his son is inheriting all these things about him and his wife, who has every reason to have not wanted him to serve on that jury and to help her through a difficult pregnancy and every right to not want to raise that kid alone. I know people are gonna say Clint Eastwood can only conceive of pregnant wives as being a burden, but I don't, I don't see that.

• 35:42Sean Fennessey?

  I think he has empathy for that character, for sure.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  I think he has huge empathy for that character. And I think that she's judging him too, because there is so much about that ending and so much about the whole plot mechanism of the movie, which is both contrived, but also a comment on the system that it's because of his history of alcoholism that no one would believe. He wasn't drunk when what happened, happened. The same way that Gabriel Basso, not insignificantly JD Vance on the stand in this movie. I mean, it is Mr. Hillbilly Elegy playing that part. But the same way that people would just assume he's guilty because of his past, the whole character's never going to get off on a drunk driving charge because people assume that he's an alcoholic. He tells his wife one truth at the end of this movie while denying her a larger truth.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  And I think the truth changes depending on who we tell it to. But he is seen in that last shot by her and we see him too, but we've seen him all along. It's not a twist ending. It's the only ending. We've seen him all along and we're asking ourselves how we feel. So now within the world of the movie, he's been seen as well. And that's horrifying.

• 36:49Sean Fennessey?

  I hadn't considered what you just said about how he very easily could have made this a portrait of a failed progressive. But the fact that she not only confronts him on that park bench in that critical scene, but then follows up and pursues it is another one of those up endings of our expectation. You know?

• 37:09Speaker 04

  But you know, I also, and this is, you know, this is obviously that that incredibly pretentious place that everyone, you know, doesn't want a film critic to go. But I just thought of, I think you should leave. You know, I thought of the sloppy stakes sketch where Tim Robbins, where the old guy is like, you know, looking at the baby is like, this baby knows I'm a piece of shit, you know?

• 37:28Speaker 04

  That's what I thought of at the end of your number two. Not only was I laughing about the fake baby from American Sniper, because this is evidently a real baby at the end and quite a beautiful one. It's like a much more realistic ending than the end of Megalopolis involving a baby. At the end of Megalopolis, Copel is like, ah, we got to save the world for our kids. Our kids are beautiful. We need to freeze time for our kids. And Eastwood's like, actually, the second we have kids, we lie to them about who we are and what we've done. And if we ever get called out on that lie, that's going to ruin that kid's life. So of course he lies. The fact that that whole last scene is that baby looking up at him, seeing one thing, and then Toni Collette at the door, seeing something else. I'm not trying to be lofty here, but it's like, that is life and that is art. I'm sorry.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  I don't care that Clint's 94 and I don't care that David Zaslove can't see it. I don't care. That's art and it's very moving to me to see it that way.

• 38:20Sean Fennessey?

  Hell yeah, Adam. I couldn't, I couldn't have said it better. It is art. Um, Clint, do you think this will be his last film? Presumably, right?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  I hope, I hope not. I hope he makes a documentary about an insurrection on Warner Brothers, you know? The, I know, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm kidding, but no, I don't want him to stop making movies. I don't want any of these guys, any of these filmmakers to stop making movies because it feels like beyond their own filmmaking, which is, needs to be taken on each term. We can't totally heroize these people. Whether it's in Eastwood or a Scorsese or Elaine May, who's really Eastwood's generational contemporary and is also being prevented from making movies institutionally, I think has a lot more to complain about over the years than Clint Eastwood. I wish Elaine May had 35 movies to have her 36th taken away from her, you know?

• 39:07Speaker 04

  But these are the filmmakers who, um, I think they still see movies as movies and not as, uh, you know, widgets. The, the self, self-contained movie-shaped objects, make them great again, man.

• 39:20Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I ask because this show has inadvertently become a series of Viking funerals or analyses of the closing moments of a lot of the great masters. And I think probably one of the reasons why I'm doing it is because I was, I've been obsessed with those figures for a very long time. And so now a Killers of the Flower Moon arrives, a Gladiator two arrives. Uh, there have been a lot of examples of it. Obviously, Megalopolis is a representation of this. There have been a great many over the last five or six years of these octogenarian, septagenarian directors. Clint is the oldest active filmmaker, um, as far as I can, I don't know, is Frederick Wiseman? He's probably roughly in this zone as well.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  What, what Wiseman, Elaine May, I mean, if you go international, it's a wider, it's a wider group. You know, but he's, he's pretty much at the, he's at the top of that, at the top of that pecking order.

• 40:18Sean Fennessey?

  Right. He was, he was. Almost a grown man at the advent of television. So he's really, he's really been around for some time. Um, and yeah, I don't know if this is necessarily like a fitting capstone. But I think any of the last seven or eight movies would have been fitting capstones. You could have read them in a way that allowed you to say, well, this is like the final note about his like, how his moral universe bends, I think is where a lot of these films are.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Well, and he's a filmmaker who's spiritually indebted to John Ford, who it's not as if he's been forgotten by the world because two years ago in Eastwood's, Spielberg's, you know, semi valedictory movie, he had David Lynch play John Ford. I mean, these people aren't forgetting their history. But Ford's a guy who, when he made Man of Shaw Liberty Valance, had the moment that I think Eastwood's whole career keeps reflecting, which is that idea of printing the legend, which is what Americans do, feels good to. And in printing it, you do kind of burnish it and build it up. I mean, Eastwood's movies have an awful lot to answer for in some ways, in terms of glorification of police violence and myths about the old west. But you know what? As he's become a filmmaker, rather than just a movie star,

• 41:30Speaker 04

  he's at least questioning them a little bit sometimes and questioning them a lot. And what else are we supposed to expect from the most famous, successful, you know, public people? I mean, this is not a complacent filmmaker. He's never been complacent. I wish that the multiple generations that might look back at Clinton, you know, think of him as a dirty grandpa or whatever, had a fraction of his curiosity about different things in the world. It doesn't mean that he always treats them well. Not all his movies are good. Some of his movies, including those early 2000s Oscar nominated movies, to me, I think they're quite bad, some of them. But like really, I think Mystic River sucks. I think some of his movies from that period have not held up, but he's always interested.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Imagine staying interested in tier 90s in anything.

• 42:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm just trying to get to my 50s here. So

• 42:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  Tacking 50 more years on top of this is fascinating.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, good, good, good, good, good, good luck to all of us, you know?

• 42:31Sean Fennessey?

  Will you do a big picture exercise with Clint's career for me?

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so it is, it is actually election day on the day that we're recording this episode. And so I want to build a Mount Rushmore. We did our top fives last time. We could do a Clint Hall of Fame, but that's, that's frankly a two hour episode. And I don't think we're prepared to do that right now. Maybe, maybe after everyone sees juror number two, that could be something fun to do to say these are the 10 films that best represent.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Is Chris, is Chris around? Text him. What's he doing?

• 42:59Sean Fennessey?

  Chris is actually on his way to London. He has abandoned America at this.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Is he, is he, is he, is he watching the Sixers lose?

• 43:06Sean Fennessey?

  When is he not this season?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  When is he not? Sorry, go on.

• 43:09Sean Fennessey?

  Did you, did you just get a Raptors Sixers dub?

• 43:12Speaker 04

  Hey, man, we're, we're, we, we, we just want ping pong balls.

• 43:17Sean Fennessey?

  The Mount Rushmore for Clint Eastwood, the four, four films or four roles. I, let's, let's do roles because I think that's actually a little bit easier to navigate in this conversation. That's sort of best represent the East Woodyan iconography and also the ideas of his work. Like I found this to be a little bit more challenging than I would have expected, even as I set out on some contenders. I'll throw some contenders at you. And if you have something else that springs to mind, feel free to make the case. But to, to me, there's eight contenders. There's the man with no name from any one of the Dollars trilogy films.

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 43:54Sean Fennessey?

  There's David Garver from Play Misty for Me. There's Dirty Harry, of course. There's The Stranger from High Plains Drifter. There's Josie Wales from The Outlaw Josie Wales. There's Philo Bedeau from Every Which Way But Loose.

• 44:11Sean Fennessey?

  There's William Money from Unforgiven.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:14Sean Fennessey?

  And there's Robert Kincaid from the Bridges of Madison County.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 44:18Sean Fennessey?

  Now, there are four presidents on Mount Rushmore. I fear that some of these Eastwood icons are duplicative, but perhaps not. And have I forgotten anyone or anybody else that you'd like to throw on top of the pile?

• 44:30Speaker 04

  No, they are duplicative, which is why I think the man with no name and William Money kinda have to be there.

• 44:39Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  And the idea that the man with no name grew up to be William Money is why Unforgiven is a movie I have a hard time talking about with a, you know, without a little tear in the corner of the eye. But also because, man, imagine reckoning with your career and legacy and then just doing it for another 30 years.

• 44:58Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  I mean, Unforgiven, Unforgiven, everyone was like, cool, he did it, he threaded the needle, this is who I, what's the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, I think you should leave that. I used to be a piece of shit, you know, I still am. I mean, that's the thesis of Unforgiven.

• 45:12Sean Fennessey?

  But also the thesis of juror number two.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Well, it is, but I think man with no name and William Money have to be there. And then at the risk of trapping us with only one other, uh, you know, president or or birth to use, you can't not have Dirty Harry.

• 45:28Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Who has more to answer for than the Western characters, because in the Western films, that's the society that's in formation and anything goes. Dirty Harry is sort of like, okay, well, we have rules and laws and institutions in America now, and they're keeping this guy from shooting people. So, you know, Dirty Harry, problematic fave. Problematic, problematic fave of mine, both the movie and the guy. For the fourth one, I got a fun one for you. How about Bronco Billy? Cause all he wants to do is put on a show about America with his friends, who are more diverse than you would guess. And if they have to like rob a train, then they'll do it. But they mean well. So that would be one.

• 46:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, I will definitely entertain that because I like how you're thinking.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  And I would also suggest that it's a movie that I should like more than I do and I take seriously as a cultural totem, but I'm sorry, my friends hate me, but I just think it's bad. Gran Torino.

• 46:29Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Which is very much the empty chair era Eastwood, but also the halftime in America era Eastwood where it's like, oh. This guy needs to comment on American affairs. And Gran Torito, not an insignificant film. I think it also made like 290 gazillion billion dollars. It was a big hit. So Walt Kowalski is knocking on the door.

• 46:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, those are incredible additions. Walt Kowalski is an interesting choice. We don't have Craggy Clint and Craggy Clint got a lot more mileage than I ever would have guessed in 1993. The idea that he went on to star in several films in the 2000s is fascinating.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  Or pre, or pre Craggy Clint in the best movie he's in that he never directed, which is in The Line of Fire. Where literally it's like only Clint Eastwood can keep Kennedy from being assassinated again, you know? Uh, I love In the Line of Fire and I love Eastwood's performance in it. If there was justice, he'd have probably been Oscar nominated for that movie in 93 ahead of, I don't know, Daniel Day Lewis or something. I mean, you know, he's, he's great in In the Line of Fire. But yeah, super Craig Eastwood. You'll notice I'm not mentioning Million Dollar Baby, but other people might, might feel that that character's there. The, the, the politically unpredictable Clint.

• 47:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think that that character is actually an interesting representation of director Clint. That like, in fact, his role in that film is in line with the sort of the way that he shepherds projects and manages actors and trains people to be able to do the work. And has a team and people he relies upon for years and the Morgan Freeman character. Like it's, you can read that movie that way, which I think does have some, kind of helps. The Mount Rushmore case, I've never been a huge, I do quite like Mystic River. I do not like Million Dollar Baby. I've always had a hard time with that movie personally.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  There was a feeling when those were all coming out in the 2000s that everyone was sort of overcompensating for him not being taken seriously outside of France. Sure, outside of the Oscars, right?

• 48:32Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Cause you, you mentioned Kincaid and Bridges. I don't know if that's one of my Mount Rushmore Clint, uh, characters, but it's one of his best movies.

• 48:41Sean Fennessey?

  I,

• 48:41Speaker 04

  And it's, it's a great movie, The Bridges of Madison County.

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  When I, when I made this list, my heart was telling me that that is the best fourth choice because it's the only one of these. Other iconic figures that shows a different side that shows that there is a clearly a romantic Clint. There is a, and you know, in that film, he's a photographer, he's an artist, he's a person living, attempting to live a kind of quiet life like Clint, despite being a former politician and somebody who is, you know, at the center of American culture for years and years, does sort of just seem like a guy puttering around his house sometimes?

• 49:17Speaker 04

  And Well, yeah, sure. With interests.

• 49:20Sean Fennessey?

  With, with

• 49:20Speaker 04

  With real, with, with real, with, with, with real interests. I mean, it's funny. I mentioned the juror number two review that, you know, Unforgiven, Perfect World, Madison County, no one puts these on lists of great runs by directors because they're so unflashy. But those are some really good pieces of keynote, you know, those are really good movies.

• 49:42Sean Fennessey?

  I'm with you. When we were doing a lot of Kevin Costner coverage, I was really pushing A Perfect World hard as sort of like the, an exemplar of quality thriller mythmaking, you know, like that is a thing that they are, like he is once again, operating inside of iconography and then trying to like upend it at times too. And by letting Kevin Costner play a Clint Eastwood part in a way that is so fascinating.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  I've, I've never used the word take in my life, but can I give you, can I give you a take?

• 50:09Sean Fennessey?

  Let's go, man. Give me your first take.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  That Horizon solidified for me, which is that Kevin Costner is, we have Clint Eastwood at home, but that's not, but that's not nothing, you know? And I was thinking about, I was thinking about Horizon as earlier. I didn't put it in the juror number two piece, but that belongs on that list of like Viking funerals for movies. It's not gonna, I mean, that's the one that's not going to get finished. Coppola took himself out of this problem by just paying for it himself, you know? Good job, but, but

• 50:43Sean Fennessey?

  Costner tried. He put as much money as he felt he reasonably could without detonating his children's inheritance and then he had to go elsewhere to get the money. I, that one is interesting though, because that is like, that is a different representation of what this era of Warner Brothers represents, which is that that movie was not financed by the studio. In fact, it wasn't even financed by one of the studio's big production partners. It's just a distribution deal because Costner and Zaslov have a relationship.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:09Sean Fennessey?

  That to me is a sign of like, it is a kind of an old hot, old world Hollywood move. But it's also a sign of the kind of like cronyism that is fucking with the, the movie business right now that I don't like.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  The cr- the cronyism, but also this idea of scale, which is that Eastwood supersedes so many of these filmmakers. They kind of want what he has and what he has, when you look at it is actually very small scale. I love the idea that Cry Macho was seen as some big waste of money at a thirty million dollar budget. You know what? If this was nineteen eighty seven and he was making Ishtar for thirty million dollars, great movie Ishtar, by the way. Yeah, I, I understand this. His movies are so cost effective.

• 51:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, look at Unforgiven. Unforgiven is a, is a simple Western, you know, it's an American epic, but it, what, what, what was the budget for Unforgiven relative to Horizon?

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Well, that's what I mean. So Horizon is sort of two, it, it's, it's the East Woodyan syntax of the Western and manifest destiny. But it's the megalopol- megalopolitian, you know, Copola scale where you want to get a cookie for kind of, you know, wasting money. Or spending money, not wasting, waste is in the eye of the beholder. And then you've got Eastwood off to the side with the exception of the World War Two epics, which I don't love either. But with the exception of, you know, Flags of Our Fathers and Iwo Jima, like, these are pretty modestly scaled movies. Even American Sniper is not like a widescreen sweeping epic. And so in that sense, it really should be a closed loop of like, leave the guy alone. Not because he's great or an artist or because we need to prop him up.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  And a lot of filmmakers would and should kill to have the resources that he's had. I'm sympathetic to that argument, which is it's hard to cry for Quinn Eastwood. But like, it's a business, at least from the studio point of view, if people make you money, leave them alone.

• 52:56Sean Fennessey?

  That's how I feel about you, Adam. Just making dough.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Do I, I, I, I didn't check. Do I have a 30 podcast deal with, uh, meaning what?

• 53:05Sean Fennessey?

  You, you host 30 individual podcasts or you appear on 30 episodes?

• 53:10Speaker 04

  I don't think the former could, should, or would have. And the latter, I think we're getting, we're, we're getting towards. I like to think of this as the Malpasso production side of, uh, the big picture, as I retreat into my fortress of regret and conservatism, which is definitely how people know me, describe me. I'm, I'm like, oh, woke. You know, just like, just like Clint.

• 53:29Sean Fennessey?

  You've done wrong and you should not be forgiven, but you can be accepted. That's the truth about you. Wait, so who's the, what's the fourth? Is it Kincaid? Is it, is it Kowalski? Is it Bronco Billy?

• 53:40Speaker 04

  I like you. I like you putting every which way but lose on there, just as a reminder that Clint, Clint is humble enough to always win fights in his movies, but like he needs an orangutan's help every so often, which I think is deeply, uh, deeply, deeply endearing. Here's, here's the other fun question, not to make this go longer, but to think about, maybe leave the, the readers, the, the listeners to think about too. Is there anyone else you could do this with?

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Is there any other actor, not just actor filmmaker, but who truly, if we're not lowering standards or moving goalposts, has a Mount Rushmore of characters that tell the story of a half century of American cinema? And before you all jump and say De Niro or Pacino or Cruise, it's not the same thing.

• 54:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think you probably could find actors from the middle part of the 20th century who do this, you know, I think

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:33Sean Fennessey?

  Jimmy Stewart has, you could do this for him very easily, you know, Henry Fonda, you mentioned earlier in 12 Angry Men. There are a handful of characters who portrayed Abraham Lincoln, you know, or who portrayed, uh, Wyatt Earp, you know, and that they, they are representational in that way. Contemporarily, I mean, we'll do it. We did it for Michael Keaton and we put fucking Mr. Mom on there. So we'll do it because we're, we're a podcast and we gotta have, have bits.

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Where was, where, where was Gung Ho? I didn't hear that one.

• 54:56Sean Fennessey?

  Gung Ho didn't make a cut.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 54:58Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't, was not represented by one of the presidents in Mount Rushmore. Gung Ho, uh, not a terrible film. I would say it has a very awkward portrayal of our relationship with Japan.

• 55:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's an awkward portrayal of everything.

• 55:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  But it's, you know, but, but, but it's certainly a movie. No, I mean, I just, I, I just mean that with Eastwood, the expansiveness is also the limitation. Because all the other people you'd mentioned as better actors, like one guy I was thinking you could actually do that with in a way is Denzel Washington, who really is the heir to a lot of those actors put together, not just Stewart and Poitier for obvious reasons, but like, he's the great movie star, I think. But with Eastwood, he doesn't have Denzel's bag, you know?

• 55:41Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Denzel can, Denzel can play anything. Uh, we, Eastwood can't, and yet, he does, you know?

• 55:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's a testimony to breaking beyond your own expected limitations, which is something you always do on the big picture, Adam.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Oh, this was, this was fun. And you've done a great service by talking about, uh, your number two to a big listenership. I hope that they, I hope they watch it because it's going to be, it's going to be on that Ringer year end list. I don't know where.

• 56:09Sean Fennessey?

  I hope they do too. In fact, I think maybe the next time I see you, we will be talking about our favorite movies of 2024. So I look forward to that, Adam.

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Saturday night, number one, uh, with a bullet.

• 56:21Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, bye, Mean Pod Guy.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Bye, see ya.

• 56:35Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends to support whatever you're into, like rewatching a director's entire catalog in the lead up to their latest release. And like those friends, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need. With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at statefarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. 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 reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great.

• 57:19Sean Fennessey?

  Conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that. Bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? 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/thebigpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/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.

• 58:03Sean Fennessey?

  What pairs with 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. Okay, guys, I want to tell you just a little bit about Heretic before we go to my conversation with the writer-directors Scott Beck and Brian Woods. This is a new thriller from A24. There's only three actors in this movie, pretty much. Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, and Chloe East. You may remember Sophie Thatcher from The Boogeyman in theaters last year or from that Showtime series about the flock of girls who are cannibals, whose name is escaping me right now. Bobby Wagner, do you know the name of that show?

• 58:45Speaker 05

  I do not.

• 58:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, not ideal. And Chloe East, who you may remember from The Fabelmans, who played the puckish young girlfriend of young Sammy Fabelman. This is a movie about two Mormon missionaries who attempt to convert an English guy who lives in their neighborhood in Utah.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  The show is called Yellowjacket.

• 59:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yellowjacket.

• 59:04Speaker 05

  That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure.

• 59:05Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you, Bobby.

• 59:06Speaker 05

  Didn't want to get it wrong. That's what I'm here for, you know, to look things up 15 seconds after you ask me the questions. So, they pay me the big bucks.

• 59:13Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe I should start again on what this show is about. The movie's about two Mormon missionaries who stumble upon an Englishman who lives in their town in Utah, who is interested potentially in joining the Mormon church. And they knock on his door. It's a cold and wintry night, and they enter his house. And very quickly, it's clear that something is not right. It's become a bit of a joke on the show recently to say that movies are becoming increasingly more about podcasters. Hugh Grant's character in this film is not a podcaster, but boy, he sure talks like one. He's got a lot of ideas and a lot of speeches and a lot of strong feelings about the way that faith and truth operates. This is an interesting movie, actually, to pair with juror number two, because what's

• 59:56Sean Fennessey?

  really true and what's really faith in our imagination is at the center of the movie. I thought this was a really entertaining film. Hugh Grant is on one. It's genuinely a tragedy to me that Amanda is not here to talk about Hugh Grant and what Hugh Grant has done in his career and what he has been up to, especially in the last 10 years, when he has completely resigned himself to being a romantic, leading man, and is now fully in freak mode. Every movie he makes, from the Paddington films to his work with Guy Ritchie to this movie, Heretic, every character is a fucking weirdo, and I love it. And he's so at ease with this combination of, I don't know, there's a little bit of

• 1:00:39Sean Fennessey?

  Jordan Peterson in this character, there's a little bit of mansplaining guy that you stumble upon at the bookstore, there's a little bit of a professorial dickhead quality to him. Really, really interesting. And so this movie is a series of conversations between these two young Mormon missionaries and this learned Englishman, and as they walk deeper and deeper into the world of his home. So I really enjoyed this movie. I think it has, you know, it's not, it's not perfect. It definitely has some flaws in the telling and, you know, it steps towards something that is more hard genre at times. And whether or not that appeals to you, your mileage may vary, but I had a really great time with it. So let's now go to my conversation with Scott Beck and Brian Woods about Heretic.

• 1:01:30Sean Fennessey?

  Scott Beck and Brian Woods are here. I'm very excited to talk to them. A thorny new feature that I really liked called Heretic. Guys, did you meet in college or did you meet before college in Iowa?

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  Before college, Brian and I, we met in sixth grade. We were 11 years old. Sixth grade, yeah. So we go way back.

• 1:01:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, when I met Scott, I was like, oh, you make movies with your Star Wars action figures too? Like, oh, cool, let's combine our collection and have bigger battles. It was kind of like, we were like pathetically still kind of playing and making movies with our toys at maybe a slightly too old of an age.

• 1:02:06Sean Fennessey?

  Well, then that actually changes the expected answers I was thinking for this question I'm going to ask you. But what were the movies that you bonded over then when you met in sixth grade?

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  I mean, it was very much sixth grade movies. So, you know, it's like Billy Madison.

• 1:02:21Sean Fennessey?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  Armageddon.

• 1:02:23Speaker 07

  All of our credibility is going out the window. We did actually bond over that really was actually like led to Heretic in a crazy way. In seventh grade, when we were 12, we both saw Robert Zemeckis' Contact. And absolutely adored that movie, adored that it, even at a young age, it felt like, wow, this is a adult conversation about religion in the guise of a popcorn movie. And what else do we love? I mean, when you grow up with somebody that loves movies, your taste kind of develops. And we have this like, our taste really runs the gamut between lowbrow and highbrow. And we kind of like it all. And our hope is that our work is kind of a mishmash of all of that as well.

• 1:03:05Speaker 07

  So you basically name a movie, we're probably a fan of it.

• 1:03:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I've been accused of the same thing. What, when did you guys realize that you could and should actually work together and try to make films together? How long did it take before that crossed your minds?

• 1:03:21Speaker 06

  I mean, we were, we were technically like making films together when we were 12 or 13, like these short films and, and we would act in them. We'd coerce our friends in them against their, their judgment and their will. But I think it was like really in earnest in, in high school. I remember like sophomore, junior year, digital editing was starting to become a thing and we were going over to each other's house and like workshopping a movie. And it just felt like, oh, wait, maybe this could be a career path. And we would join forces finally to like write scripts together and, and actually co-direct at that point.

• 1:03:58Speaker 07

  The movies would get increasingly more and more ambitious. Like in high school, we did like our version of Magnolia. It's like a feature film hyperlink ensemble piece. And all of our parents and friends were like, what the hell is this? Pretentious.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, but we'd, we would like put on screenings at like the local IMAX theater. We even went to local community colleges, like their film courses and handed out scorecards along with showing the movie. And we would like emulate the, the studio process because we were kind of just learning it from reading books or listening to DVD commentaries and trying to take it very seriously at, at, at that teenage, teenage age.

• 1:04:40Sean Fennessey?

  So how did you crack in? Like, how did you eventually, did it seem impossible from where you were coming from to actually break into the business?

• 1:04:47Speaker 07

  It did seem impossible. We grew up in Iowa with no connections to the film business. We didn't have any like family or friends. So we would just, you know, we'd study a lot online and listen, you know, watch DVDs and filmmaker commentaries. And I think our break in was probably in college, we won a content, like a filmmaking competition through MTV. And the prize was like a nationwide contest or competition, rather. And the prize was a development deal with MTV Films. And that development deal was not real. We later learned, like it was like, they were like, yeah, here's $2,000. Like, get out of here. It was like basic prize, but, but we pretended like it was real and we treated.

• 1:05:31Speaker 07

  Did it like it was real and we used that to get meetings with managers and agents who definitely did not sign us at the time. But it was like, it was, you know, it was like the first little like piece by piece. We would kind of wedge our foot into the door.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  And one of, one of the first people in the industry that really, um, you know, opened the door for us was, uh, David Gale. He used to be an executive, the head of MTV Films and produced movies like Election, one of our favorites from Alexander Payne. And he, he saw that we were trying to find a way to turn this development deal into something legitimate. Like we wanted a career in, in the arts. And he, he said, if you pitch me an idea, let's, let's put something together. And we shot like this tiny pilot, um, for this, for this, uh, idea that we had. And we were able to, um, use that as like a directing sample that ended up getting us like our first, um, low budget feature film. Um, this movie called Nightlight and, and step by step, um, it was like the door started cracking open.

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  And then it would shut just a little bit and we'd crack it open further and it shut a little more. And like, just it was, it was an ever evolving process. So.

• 1:06:35Speaker 07

  And it, and it definitely took years. I mean, it was like we've, I mean, I don't know. We wrote at least 40, um, screenplays before we ever sold the screenplay. Like it was, um, it, it took a long time, but it was fun. We love, we love movies.

• 1:06:48Sean Fennessey?

  I'm always interested to have, uh, writing, directing duos on the show. So I'm curious to hear how you write together and how you direct together. So, you know, I always joke that it's like, is it two men with their backs to each other, banging away at their typewriters, throwing ideas out in the room? I don't, how do, how do you guys do it?

• 1:07:05Speaker 07

  It's a lot of laughter and a lot of, you know, debate and, and kind of, you know, pitching. We, we, we feel like our process is a process of competition. So it'll be like, um, you know, when we're like getting excited about an idea, like, like a quiet place. It's like, oh, okay. Like maybe it's like a modern day silent film. And we kind of like talk it through and talk it and talk it sometimes over the course of years. Like what if, what if this happened and like, what's the worst thing that could happen if you couldn't make a sound? Well, what if you had a baby, you know, and like just batting ideas around. And then when we get into the writing, it's, you know, somebody will write five pages and then send it to the other person. And then they'll revise those five pages and. Kind of challenge those pages and pick it apart and and then write five more. And so it's always a process of

• 1:07:47Speaker 07

  of pushing each other to to do better. And and then as directors, we just, you know, on set, we have a umbilical cord between the two of us. Basically, we just like, we're always like side by side and we have every conversation with every department head and, um, you know, actor together, uh, so that we're always in on it. And, uh, I don't know, it doesn't feel it doesn't feel like less work. Doesn't feel like, oh, there's like half the work because there's two of us. It feels like, um, we share a brain, but it's like a the kind of a collaborative, uh, conversational, uh, uh, process.

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  Well, I think it's because it it demands for us to scrutinize each decision that much more. Um, you know, if I if I have an idea and I pitch it to Brian, he's going to look at it um, from his own lens, which luckily we share a sensibility. So it's it's usually not that far off the mark, but then I'll add to that. And then we kind of come to these, um, these ideas or visions or conclusions of what artistically we think is the best move for the movie. And then, of course, you, once you're on set, you open yourself up to the the rest of the collaboration. But it feels like we already started collaborating from the get go.

• 1:08:53Speaker 07

  And it's super cool because you're not precious about any idea when somebody else is involved. It's very easy to be like, you know, work on something like this is terrible because it doesn't, it you don't have the like, kind of, it it's just a different ego, a different pride of authorship. It's it's shared and you can and you can be a little more critical. It's great.

• 1:09:11Sean Fennessey?

  So tell me a little bit about where this movie comes from. Are you are you guys religious? Are you people of faith?

• 1:09:18Speaker 06

  We grew up, uh, Christian. Um, like I would go to church every single Sunday, um, up until like I I went into college. And, um, growing up in Iowa, like it it very much was just like it's a it was a Christian place. But then as we got older, um, we both married into families that came from different religious backgrounds. Our our circle of friends expanded from nonreligious to like religious and other, um, belief systems. Um, we even have friends that are like in Scientology. Like it really

• 1:09:52Speaker 07

  Name a religion, we we probably have a friend or family member a part of that. And that's wonderful because it like it expands your mind and you kind of you can approach kind of each thought process with empathy. It's kind of our jobs as writers anyways, like putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. And and so, um, you know, our religious journey is like extremely complicated. It's one of like, it started as a, I think when we were younger, a place of fear, which I think is maybe universal, this kind of universal human fear of what happens when you die. That's kind of what we're all afraid of. And really, religion is, um, you know, a medicine for that fear.

• 1:10:32Speaker 07

  Um, as we've gotten older, I have to say, um, I think we find ourselves more excited to embrace the mystery, embrace the the kind of idea of who knows? It could be this, it could be that, it could be nothing, it could be something and and trying to come to terms with that. But, uh, but definitely the the movie Heretic is, um, you know, an exploration of those anxieties if nothing else.

• 1:10:55Sean Fennessey?

  Is that where it started with this sense of trying to, you know, collate all these different ideas about faith that you've been hearing or that you've been exposed to in your adult life and trying to find a way to blend them up into a movie? Or did it start as like a thriller horror movie about two young women who come to a guy's house? Like, how do you, do you think in that that way?

• 1:11:15Speaker 06

  I think I think it comes first and foremost from like a very personal place, uh, the same way that like an inspiration point like Contact or, um, Inherit the Wind with with, uh, Stanley Kramer's movie with Spencer Tracy, where you're you're debating and having a discourse of ideas. And that's an extension of so many things that Brian and I have wrestled with over the decades that we've, we've known each other, trying to get to the bottom of basically unanswerable questions and and the unknown. Um, so I think it starts off from that. And then I think we can't help but shake the idea that the questions that we've been consumed with that have to deal with cult or or what's out there and and what's the true religion, um, or is there none?

• 1:11:56Speaker 06

  That stems from like those ideas kind of being scary to us because it's real. There's something relatable and there's something that we're searching for and can't quite scratch it at the truth. And so I think the vessel of it being in a horror movie kind of complements that. But also there's, there's a history of the horror genre that we love where Trojan horses in ideas that might not be tackled best in like straight dramas or straight stage plays. Think about movies like Night of the Living Dead and how it tackles the idea of racism or Invasion of the Body Snatchers and tackling like the Red Scare of Communism back in like the 60s.

• 1:12:35Speaker 06

  And so it's, it felt kind of like a perfect fold to talk about religion, but in the body of a thriller.

• 1:12:43Speaker 07

  And we'd also been wanting to attempt, we had this kind of notion that, you know, horror is so cinematic. It's so, it's so perfect for jump scares and monsters hiding in shadows and all these kind of cinematic conventions that create tension and scares. We were kind of like, are we overlooking the psychological component of horror because these other elements are so exciting as filmmakers? And, and so we got excited about this idea of can we do a movie that's almost exclusively dialogue in terms of how the tension and terror is activated in the film? And it was a question of like, can you replace a jump scare with a, with a philosophical thought that's equally as terrifying, if not more so?

• 1:13:28Speaker 07

  And yeah, it was just, it was a fun experiment.

• 1:13:30Sean Fennessey?

  I love that approach. Mr. Reed is an interesting character. He is an incredible star part, like just in terms, as writers, I'm sure you guys were just like, we are spring loading this with the most charismatic person possible. And he's, you know, smarmy and he's a know it all and maybe evil. But is there any, does he have a point though? Like, that's something I was wondering about as I got to the end of the movie. Like, is there like, is he right about?

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Some of this. Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 07

  I mean, I think, yeah, I think he's, I think he's making, I think he's, he's, he's testing his hypothesis. He has a theory, he right, he's been, he's, he's spent his entire life studying religion and he has a theory that he is testing on this night and he's, you know, he's not, he's not positive he's right, but he thinks he's right. And I don't know.

• 1:14:16Speaker 06

  But I, you know, I think with the character of Mr. Reed, but also the, the other two characters, sister Pax and sister Barnes, like certainly from a, from a personal standpoint, like there's a little bit of us in, in all of these characters. Like there's, there's part of us, you know, with, with Mr. Reed, that's like, yeah, there's some of these things don't all add up. Or you take things for granted and you really need to scrutinize them more closely to really come to your own summation of, of what your, your value system is. But there's also the degree of like Pax and Barnes where maybe there's certain things that, that are beautiful about being a good person and, and that's kind of at the root of things. So I think it's like, we say that like heretic is kind of equal opportunity at both supporting certain beliefs,

• 1:15:01Speaker 06

  but also kind of coming down on them. And, and we're certainly asking questions that we, we are purposely aren't delivering answers for, because the core ambition of this movie is really if you engage in it, hopefully you're engaging in it at a level of introspection where, where you're able to reflect, even if it's just for like five minutes as you leave the theater, reflect upon why, you know, what makes you you as, as a human being and, and why do you believe or don't believe the certain things that have been presented to you in your life?

• 1:15:33Sean Fennessey?

  I had an interesting experience with your movie. I saw it the, the day after I saw the director of Contact, Robert Zemeckis's new film, Here.

• 1:15:41Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:42Sean Fennessey?

  Both of those, both your movie and, and his new movie are in really confined circumstances, you know, a really constrained environment. Obviously his is just in literally one space, but yours is not so far from that. I mean, you spend a lot of time in two rooms in the Reed house. Um, and that's pretty challenging to make cinematic to your points. Can you talk about how you sought to make this movie look and feel and be like edited and paced as well as it is, given those constraints?

• 1:16:11Speaker 07

  The movies also both share the first four letters.

• 1:16:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 1:16:16Speaker 07

  By the way.

• 1:16:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's weird, just in the listings right now with the movies.

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  It is, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:21Speaker 07

  Probably not great for us, but I cannot wait to see the Zemeckis movie. I love the bold swing of it. The gimmick of it is so, so cool what he appears to be doing in that film. And yeah, I think our biggest fear, like we had no, even though we had some kind of stage inspirations for this film, like Mamet's Oldiana was a touchstone for us. There are some like kind of theatrical pieces, Death and the Maiden, the Plansky film, I believe is based on a stage play. Like we had those kind of things swirling around, but we really, really, really did not want to have the film feel like it was this contained thing. We wanted it to feel large in scope. So that's when you hire the greatest cinematographer on planet earth for our money, Chung Yung Chung,

• 1:17:05Speaker 07

  who shot Old Boy and, you know, Last Night in Soho and a million other beautiful things. And he came in and first of all, he's a great collaborator, a great partner, wonderful person. But he really pressured us to ironically make sure that the film feels boring at first and that we're kind of flat and simple for the first, you know, 15 minutes of the film so that we have somewhere to go. He was very aware that, you know, the movie is a lot of, it is a lot of, it is dialogue driven and it is contained and the kind of claustrophobia will naturally come out, but we had to, you know, create an arc for the style.

• 1:17:45Speaker 06

  It was, and that, that rule really fell into all the other departments as well, meaning sound design. Like the sound design starts getting heavier and more subjective as, as the movie goes on. And even the music, the music, there's some music at the beginning, but then it kind of disappears. And we're not trying to go wall to wall music during some of these dialogue and just let the, the voices and the actors really carry the, the sense of tension. Even, you know, the costume design, like there's certain layers.

• 1:18:21Speaker 06

  That that are purposely put on the characters so that over time like they start literally shedding more layers as as metaphorically they get to know each other a little better and there's more mystery that's unveiled. So everything was really engineered in a way that there wasn't a predictability, that there was an evolution so that hopefully it wouldn't have a feeling of sameness like room after room or conversation after conversation.

• 1:18:48Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I watched Hugh Grant talk about reuniting with Chung after working on Wonka, which is like the most different possible kind of movie than your movie. And that, you know, had me wondering just how Hugh came involved and, you know, it seems like it is written for him in so many ways because he's just this like incredible deliverer of sharp dialogue. What was, what was the process of him getting involved as Mr. Reed?

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  So, um, in retrospect, we can't imagine anyone else playing Mr. Reed, but like when it came time to casting the project, it was a blank slate. Like we're, we're not the filmmakers that are writing with anybody in mind. And that's partly because like whoever you want to get, you usually aren't going to get. But in this instance, we were like, I don't like, I don't know who's, who's going to come in and be able to recite 120 pages of dialogue, but perform it with like an evolution of the character. Who's going to be able to be charming so that Paxton Barnes and the audience willfully puts themselves into these situations that may or may not be dangerous. Like who's going to weaponize dialogue?

• 1:19:52Speaker 06

  And, um, it was one of those things like with our producer Stacy Cher, like we started creating a list and then, uh, we had a 24 that came on board. We're looking at these lists and, and the name Hugh Grant stuck out to us collectively because we were like, that's interesting. Like no one initially felt like, oh, Hugh Grant is, is the top of the list, but as soon as like Brian and I started thinking back of him being in Cloud Atlas 12 years ago and disappearing into a multitude of roles and then looking at the, the various turns that he's had in his career where he's played darker and edgier characters. We started rereading the script with his cadence in mind and, and it's Just it it basically was like plucking Hugh Grant out of Notting Hill and imagining him reading that dialogue.

• 1:20:37Speaker 06

  And all of a sudden it felt scarier and we're like, this could be really incredible and and wonderful. And then at that point, we were like, there's no one else to play this role. And we kind of moved all our chips into the Hugh Grant uh camp with fingers crossed that he would do it.

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  And the irony too for us is that the only holdback for us with Hugh, and it was a very minor one. But the thing that we were debating, we were like, ah, like, we didn't really see him as like, somebody from England. We didn't see him as a Brit and then and then we had to like, think back and we're like, what are you talking about? Like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, like all these like, great, um, you know, British thinkers were like, a huge influence on the role. And then once we like, once that popped into our head, we just felt stupid for not having written it for Hugh.

• 1:21:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that was gonna be my next question was, did he start out as an English guy, but I guess not.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  No, no, I think that's partly because um brush, maybe it's short sighted, but like growing up in Iowa and and it feeling like religion is a hot button item to like bring up at the dinner table. And so we felt like, oh, it's total Americana, like this is, this is um a powder keg and and Mr. Reed has to be built into Americana. But then we're like, no, there's something disarming about um Mr. Reed being British. Like when you're sitting, when Paxton Barnes are sitting across from him and he seems a little eccentric at times. It's like, do you just write that off politely as, oh, it's just like a slightly different culture that that he comes from? And it it ended up being like a secret weapon for for the character.

• 1:22:03Sean Fennessey?

  There's something kind of alien about it. I was hoping you guys could maybe help me understand what it is I'm trying to say. But you know, there's like a little bit of like Jordan Peterson in this character. There's a little bit of like your favorite like history podcast telling you about Napoleon in this character like. It's just like a this confluence of mansplaining culture over the last 10 or 20 years. And I it felt like you were riffing on that and obviously you've got these two young women who were subjected to all of his shit. But I assume that was on the surface when you were writing it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 07

  Totally. I mean, I'm happy to hear that you picked up on that. I'm curious if you also felt any traces of Keith Raniere from the NXIVM cult.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  Totally.

• 1:22:42Speaker 07

  Somebody else who we talked about who, you know, is kind of capable of generating word salad that sounds really thoughtful and intelligent, but maybe upon reflection, it's a little hollow. He was kind of an amalgamation of a lot of different figures, even like religious or cult figures in, you know, you know, recent history, like an L. Ron Hubbard. Like we were, it was just a melting pot of all these people, but I, but I do think like, there's an element of the movie. This is a talking movie and it's a movie about big ideas. There is an element that we're recognizing. That's maybe a bit more of an afterthought, I have to admit, but we're recognizing that there's a bit of this kind of podcast culture that, that is represented

• 1:23:23Speaker 07

  in heretic on, on some kind of weird fucked up level. But, uh, yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, that occurred to me, obviously as someone who does this and, and I'm probably receiving ideas, regurgitating them on the podcast. And then people are going out into the world and regurgitating the thing that I'm saying on the podcast. And it's all this like thought that we imagined to be our own, but is not. And Reed feels like this representation of a person who's like, I am the one who has come to the proper conclusion about the nature of faith in our world. And it's like, he's just another guy who just read a couple of books. So I totally, yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 07

  And that's one of the things we're definitely scratching out with the movie is this kind of idea of certainty and like the danger of certainty, the danger of going, I'm the one who knows the true answer and you do not. And, um, yeah.

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, I mean, also the movie delves into the idea of iterations. I mean, the iterations of religion over time and how there's comparisons, but also like to, to exactly what you're saying, like, uh, there's a degree at which if you crack open who Mr. Reed is like, he's iterating on these certain ideas. Like, does he have all his facts right? Is he making compelling arguments? Or is he making arguments for the sake of rhetoric to just simply convince in the room? Like these, these are all things that are, um, layered subtextually to, to this character, but absolutely kind of comment on, um, what we're feeling and just the, the. Day to day discourse, whether we're talking about politics or religion, like there's, there's a divide. And there's a degree of many people that feel like they come down on the, you know, certain truth.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  And that's a dangerous place to be.

• 1:24:56Speaker 07

  There is a depressing feeling of like, everything is a hot take. And that's the only thing, especially like when you like, uh, look at Twitter, um, you know, it's like anything, any rational conversation has since been beaten out with whatever the algorithm is now, like it's just, it's just hot takes left and right. I don't know. So like the movie is, maybe the movie's commenting on it, maybe it's just in the air in our, in our, in our, our, our heads as, as, um, in our guts as, as we're as writers, but, um, yeah.

• 1:25:28Sean Fennessey?

  I, I did wonder, watching the movie, do these guys listen to a lot of podcasts? Cause it felt like maybe you did, maybe, maybe not. Um, one other thing that I liked about it was, and this is also kind of internet brain. So if I'm off base, let me know, but, um, you know, you've got this, the fast food rankings. You've got the history of Monopoly and board games. You've got the Holly's Radiohead, Lana Del Rey, sequences and explanations that feel very much like, you know, on the one hand, they're a little bit of like dorm room stoner debate, history, conversation, a little bit of like Reddit. Hey, did you know going on there and really, really fun in the context of these big explanations of what could otherwise be really weighty

• 1:26:10Sean Fennessey?

  and kind of boring ideas was wondering if you just talk about like how you landed on using those portals to have some of the dialogue for Reed.

• 1:26:18Speaker 07

  So yeah, I definitely felt a lot of people, uh, making the Reddit comparison, which I have to say, I'm not on Reddit. So I don't, I don't really know much about Reddit, but, um, it is actually like, it was somewhat organic. I gotta be honest. We started writing the scripts about 10 years ago. And we kind of got to the, the, about 15 pages into the script where the missionaries sit down with Mr. Reed. And all of a sudden as writers were confronted with this character who has a genius level IQ, who knows everything about every world religion. And, and we just felt like we were not, we just weren't fluent in his language.

• 1:26:53Speaker 07

  We just didn't know quite enough about the world's various religions. And so we pushed pause on the project and and kind of spent the following 10 years writing other projects, working on other films. But in the meantime, as a hobby, almost kind of just reading different, you know, atheist thinkers, different philosophers, different like we'd never read the Quran before. So read the Quran, read the Book of Mormon, and just started filling our heads with these these the kind of history of religion. And so when we were finally ready to kind of write the script, like write it, write it for real about two years ago. Now, all of a sudden, we felt like we could put religion into terms that we could understand 10 years ago. So we could like, oh, we can put it into terms of fast food.

• 1:27:38Speaker 07

  That's something that you sadly, Brian, knew a lot about 10 years ago. You know, it's like we could the metaphors just seemed fun and obvious all of a sudden. And so that's where that's that was kind of the the birthplace of of of that.

• 1:27:52Speaker 06

  And I think you like beyond that, it felt important to us to find tonal shifts in in the storytelling, too, where kind of like you said, like, if it could just be very dry, if you're only talking about, you know, headier topics and and for us to kind of like turn the screw and you're not quite sure where the conversation is going when it deviates from talking about the history of polygamy into this diatribe of favorite fast food. And then you wrap it back like to us, we we really hope that that would create this sense of like shifting sands underneath the characters feet.

• 1:28:23Sean Fennessey?

  I really liked it. I read that you guys own a movie theater together. Is that true?

• 1:28:27Speaker 06

  We do. Yeah, we we opened up this movie theater. It's called The Last Picture House in our hometown of Davenport, Iowa. It's been open nearly a year, and it was a kind of like a side project that that was going on the last few years are that is emblematic of our love of the theater going experience and how important to us it is to watch movies in a communal space. And where where we're from, like, there's a multiplex, and that's it. So you basically you grab your popcorn, you see a movie, and then you're gone. But this theater, The Last Picture House, we've got a couple of screens. We've got like Dolby Atmos. Sound, which there's no other Dolby Atmos theater in the area. Um, we've got like a rooftop screening area. So you can watch movies outdoors. We've got a lounge. So you can like,

• 1:29:11Speaker 06

  grab a, grab a drink, grab a cocktail or mocktail and hang out and, and we can bring in special guests. Like we brought in, um, Michael Sarnofsky, who, who wrote and directed Pig and the latest Quiet Place. Uh, he, he came out opening weekend to, to show a Quiet Place, day one and, and talk to the audience. And so it's, it's like born from our love of, um, the theater going experience and trying to do something special in our hometown. But it's also like, um, bringing in some of these, uh, special guests. It's, it's creating a link between our hometown and having a career in the arts. Because in our childhood, that felt so far away. Um, and anytime like, um, someone like a Paul Schrader would come and, and talk at University of Iowa, where he went to school.

• 1:29:54Speaker 06

  It felt like all of a sudden, oh, we're like, there's Hollywood right in front of us. Like there's somebody that has, has made a career and had something incredible to say. How do you get there? And so our, our hope is that there's other, other filmmakers or artists here in the, in, um, Iowa, where we're from, that, that have a, have a little more of like a gateway or insight into what it takes to, to have a career in the arts.

• 1:30:17Sean Fennessey?

  I really love that. Um, what have you learned about the theatrical exhibition business, both as filmmakers and now as theater owners?

• 1:30:28Sean Fennessey?

  Please be honest.

• 1:30:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm curious. Well, I mean, oh my gosh, I mean, you learn so much, but you, you do learn the importance of like getting people in the doors. It's not just about, I mean, believe me, there's like so many cool obscure movies. We'd love to play all day, every day, but you have to, you have to play things that, um, you know, you have to share the screen with, with, with, uh, things that people want to see.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  I think like one of, one of the major things is really feeling the, the shift of culture in the last like 10, 15 years now with the advent of distractions. It's not just like streaming, but it's like, the, um, how movies have just become one little facet of distractions. Whereas when we were growing up as, as kids going to the movie theater and like the. Nineties, movies were one of only a couple of things that you could go spend your free time with. And, and so by virtue of that, people would just show up in, in the lobby of a movie theater, not knowing what they're going to see and be like, okay, let's see what sounds good, what looks good. And all of a sudden you have movies like, um, I just watched this the other day, Remains of the Day.

• 1:31:33Speaker 06

  That is this like quaint movie that today would probably just be on streaming. But like that movie goes out and grosses like over $60 million, probably because a lot of people just showed up. We're like, what should I see? I'll see that Anthony Hopkins movie.

• 1:31:46Speaker 07

  Well, you know, like we also like, so as a filmmaker that is now in exhibition, you learn the responsibility that the filmmaker also has to be filling these theaters like, uh, Ryan Johnson, I'll put him on blast for two seconds. Our hero, by all accounts, the nicest, sweetest, uh, person in the industry. But anytime a Ryan Johnson takes a theatrical, um, experience like Knives Out and sells it off to Netflix, you're selling out the theaters. Uh, because we as a, as a theater need that movie, we need Knives Out because people want to see that in our place. And if we don't have a cool movie that actually draws people out, you're just sending more eyeballs to Netflix and on some level that, that, that is selling out a little bit.

• 1:32:29Speaker 06

  But I do think, you know, one thing we've noticed is as much as like Blockbusters really hit, like, like a Twisters was, was very successful for, for our movie theater. There's also plenty of space for movies like Late Night with the Devil. Um, that was a movie that I think we booked, uh, like a few weeks after it, it came out. We had a gap where we could put it in and, um, and we had a great turnout for that, for that movie for like two or three weeks. And so there's, there's the love of the genre that I think is still really anchored strongly. But, um, you, you can make as many guesses, you know, of a certain movie, is it going to perform? And we're constantly, you know, flabbergasted by the things that hit and the things that miss. And I think that's, that's probably a global thing right now.

• 1:33:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's fascinating. I mean, it's really unusual for active filmmakers to be getting that up-close experience and seeing what people do want to see and don't want to see. Do you think it informs the kinds of movies that you're making as well? Like, have you learned anything and feel like it filtering into the work?

• 1:33:29Speaker 06

  That's a great question. I feel like we're so close, within the first year of opening up the movie theater, I'm not sure anything's quite hit. But I will say, our intent has always been to write for the theater, the big screen experience. I mean, going back to like, writing A Quiet Place, like, that movie was engineered in a way, let's just talk like, sonically, first and foremost, where like, even if we don't have much money, we make this movie independently, let's just say, we don't have money for CGI, sound design, like, that's where we're going to put all our resources, so that you're hearing this in a movie theater and it's terrifying you. And I think beyond that, we're always writing these scenes from the first standpoint, from an audience perspective. We're trying

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  to understand, what does the audience think is going to happen? How can we subvert that? How can we provoke them? How can we use all the tools of cinema to do that? Heretic was certainly, as we spoke a little earlier about, how do you make it cinematic, where otherwise, we could have just, you know, made it a stage play, and really demand an audience to be provoked by the choices we're trying to do with like, the camera and the sound design. So that's always at the forefront of our mind. I don't think that's going to go anywhere anytime soon.

• 1:34:41Sean Fennessey?

  You guys know what you're doing next?

• 1:34:42Speaker 07

  We are deciding between four different projects, and, yeah, they all run a different, like, we've got a big, really big science fiction idea, we've got a small, kind of contained, spiritual sequel to Heretic. We usually just, it's whatever idea just keeps us up at night and we keep coming back to. So we're kind of pushing through that right now and figuring out what it's going to be.

• 1:35:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. We're hoping, whatever it is, like, 824, who did Heretic with us, have been like, some of the best partners. Like, it was very satisfying, because we've been an 824 fan since, pretty much, they formed their studio. But it was really satisfying to see like, the internal workings of that studio. Because they are so filmmaker friendly, they're so open to have like creative conversations and not just put down like mandates of like you have to do this or like your movie tested like this, so we have to change like X, Y, and Z about the about the plot or do reshoots or anything like they're very receptive to just having an open conversation and in the best way possible, most fulfilling way possible.

• 1:35:47Sean Fennessey?

  Guys, I end every episode of this podcast by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? What have you guys seen recently that you like?

• 1:35:54Speaker 06

  Oh, man, um, I mean, I, I, I mentioned it earlier. I saw Remains of the Day, like probably last, and I was actually like really, really impressed by um the craft of that movie, James Ivory. Um, but I also just rewatched for like the thousandth time Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence with

• 1:36:15Sean Fennessey?

  Huge favorite of mine. Yeah.

• 1:36:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, wonderful to hear that because it's it moves me so emotionally. Um, it feels isolating and also this, the story of Pursuit of Love all at once. Uh, but, but I also feel like we're we're kind of tackling AI right now in real time, AI like as as a topic um in so many different industries and certainly generative AI in the filmmaking industry.

• 1:36:43Speaker 07

  Um, and then some recent stuff that I know Scott and I both liked, uh, it's like Challengers. We really loved this year. Saturday Night was fun. Um, Rebel Ridge was a lot of fun. Um, you know, I'm just naming off movies that people have seen already, but it's been a good year for movies. Um, we've been, uh, we've been, you know, thrilled with

• 1:37:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 07

  all the stuff that's

• 1:37:05Speaker 06

  Coplas Megalopolis, like we saw that in IMAX and had a hell of a great watching that and

• 1:37:10Speaker 07

  Say the least.

• 1:37:11Speaker 06

  It's not a movie that immediately you're like Eureka, like we totally get that, but like you see the ambition, you see the passion there, and it was um a really beautiful experience.

• 1:37:20Speaker 07

  And Will and Harper, that made me cry.

• 1:37:22Speaker 06

  Yes. Oh, God.

• 1:37:23Speaker 07

  Starting five minutes.

• 1:37:24Speaker 06

  Destroyed us. Yeah.

• 1:37:25Sean Fennessey?

  It's a lot of great recommendations. Scott and Brian, thanks so much for doing the show. Really appreciate it. Congrats on Heretic. I really dug it, guys.

• 1:37:31Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:37:32Speaker 07

  Appreciate that. Such an honor to be here. Thank you.

• 1:37:42Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Scott Beck and Brian Woods. Thanks to Adam Naaman, of course. Thanks to Jack Sanders and thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. Later this week, we'll discuss Netflix's awards player, Emilia Perez, and do some Best Picture power rankings. We'll see you then.

• 1:38:05Speaker 07

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