Paramount Wins Warner Bros. Now What? Plus: ‘Scream 7,’ Heat 2,’ and ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ With Matt Johnson!

On today’s action-packed episode, Sean first reacts to Netflix backing out of the bidding for Warner Brothers—clearing the path for a merger with Paramount (2:01). Next, he is joined by Chris Ryan to react to Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio’s casting in Michael Mann’s ‘Heat 2’ and give a general temperature check on the movie (6:36). Then, they cover ‘Scream 7’ and preface the conversation by discussing the rumored controversy behind the shuffling cast (16:17) before diving fully into spoilers and exploring the myriad of reasons why they found the film to be deeply unsuccessful (21:57). Later, Sean is joined by Amanda Dobbins and Adam Nayman to discuss one of their favorite movies of the year so far: Matt Johnson’s ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.’ They talk through why the movie is so hysterical, how its sincerity makes the movie feel moving, and why it became an instant cult classic (49:10). Finally, Sean is joined by Johnson to discuss why he felt he needed to make this movie right now, how having no knowledge of the original series actually makes the movie better, and what he’s doing next with ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show’ Season 3, as well as his Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony,’ starring Dominic Sessa (1:18:45). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Matt Johnson, Adam Nayman, and Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.®Drivers wanted. Learn more at vw.com 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

  I'm pro football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplyta lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824.

• 1:46Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fantasy, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Ghost Faces and Nirvana Boys. Today on the show, we are joined by multiple guests. Joining me first will be Chris Ryan to break down Scream 7. Ciara and I have been talking about the Scream movies as friends for more than 20 years, so we had to get together to see how Ghostface is doing in 2026. After that, Amanda and Toronto's very own mean pod guy, Adam Nayman, will join me to discuss- My favorite movie of 2026 so far, it's called Nirvana, The Band, The Show, The Movie. It's a madcap uber-Canadian buddy comedy from Matt Johnson and Jay McCarron, who have elevated their web series-turned-TV show to epic CN Tower-level proportions. Later in the show, I have a conversation with Matt Johnson himself.

• 2:28Sean Fennessey?

  Matt is one of the most requested guests in show history and our chat in 2023. About his movie BlackBerry is one of my favorite interviews I've done on this show. He is an incredible thinker and communicator about movies and his work. We basically picked up where we left off, talking about Nirvana, how he and Jay and their team pulled the movie off, how they think about comedy and the future of movies. Go see Matt's movie, listen to our conversation. But first, I will share my reactions to the news that Netflix has backed out of the bidding for Warner Brothers, clearing the path for a merger with Paramount. And then Chris and I will talk about some much more exciting news regarding Michael Mann's Heat 2, right after this.

• 3:05Amanda Dobbins?

  This episode of The Big Picture is presented by State Farm.

• 3:08Sean Fennessey?

  You know those friends who show up for whatever you're into? The ones who'll debate which superhero universe is better or binge true crime documentaries with you at 3:00 in the morning? Those friends are gold.

• 3:17Amanda Dobbins?

  State Farm is like that, helping you figure out the coverage that actually fits. Car, home, life, whatever you need, they've got your back. And if you want a hand, a local agent is just a tap away on their award-winning app.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 3:32Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it happened. The prospective merger that we have been tracking for years, and more specifically in these recent months, since it was announced that Warner Brothers accepted an $83 billion bid made by Netflix in December, just hit its turning point. Since that moment in December, Paramount has repeatedly claimed they had made the superior offer and would not give up the pursuit of Warner Brothers, in arguably one of the most legendary movie studios in history and the home of many beloved movies and characters. Paramount's dogged approach to the sale, its clear connections to the Trump administration, which could help clear regulatory hurdles for a merger, and David Ellison's long-rumored desire to build a mega-studio have brought us to this moment. The might of his father's wealth has prevailed, and the thing that everyone I know who knows things said would transpire just did.

• 4:15Sean Fennessey?

  It appears all but certain that Paramount Skydance's bid of $31 per share will be ...consummated by Warner Brothers after Netflix co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos announced that it would back out of the negotiations because it was quote "no longer financially attractive" and that it was quote "always a nice to have at the right price, not a must-have at any price." Netflix's stock price has been falling steadily since the announcement in December. Sarandos was recently grilled by Congress, public outcry from film fans, and regulatory watchdogs has gotten noisier. This isn't shocking, but we'll never know if Sarandos would have been true to his word about maintaining windows and supporting the theatrical experience. I will eagerly wait to see if the company's posture toward distributing their own films theatrically changes, given all the valuable knowledge he learned about moviegoing during the process of pursuing Warner Brothers.

• 4:59Sean Fennessey?

  Now that it's settled, there are several ways to look at this, and it won't be the last time we address it on the show, but I want to get this off my chest right now. There was no good outcome in this sale. The history of Hollywood studio mergers and acquisitions is littered with creative roadkill. These deals often shrink the number of people who get to work in the movie business. They tend to favor corporate synergies over creative risk-taking, and they usually take place to enrich a very small number of people. Look at the Fox Disney deal from seven years ago and ask yourself if that helps movies in any way. This one could be significantly worse. Warner Brothers doesn't need to be sold. It's a great business with enough viable properties to sustain another century of film, TV, and any other forms of media we might come up with as a society over that period of time. But the people who bought the company in 2022 bought it to sell it, and now it's being

• 5:43Sean Fennessey?

  sold to an emerging media titan who will combine it with a studio with almost as much legacy as Warner's. We don't know what Ellison's Paramount will be as a movie studio. As a news operation, CBS in particular has come under dramatic public scrutiny for its pivot rightward and in the direction of President Trump. He'll now have CNN and HBO under that same watchful eye, and don't forget about TikTok. On April 6, 2006, almost 20 years ago, David Ellison started Skydance Productions, the company behind big-picture favorites like Top Gun: Maverick and True Grit, and also lots of forgettable big-budget streaming action duds like Heart of Stone and The Adam Project. That's the movie business. Sometimes you're a genius, sometimes your taste leads you to the bottom of the barrel. Skydance's track record as a tastemaker is iffy at best, but they do specialize in theatrical spectacle.

• 6:27Sean Fennessey?

  No matter how Paramount Warner Brothers' actual movies turn out, one thing is for certain: American movies will be different. By completing this transaction at this price, it's not hard to see a world in which Paramount is over-leveraged by debt or enthralled to other corporate interests participating in the deal. That could have any number of unfortunate and ugly outcomes. People will lose their jobs. In an already shrinking marketplace for American studio movies, we will likely get less with this merger. And the sensational run that Warner Brothers Films has been under, with Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi running the show, will likely be halted by this changing of ownership. Or maybe not. We just don't know what Paramount will do when it takes over. It's reasonable to be skeptical, though. I personally don't know anyone here in LA who is excited about this news, though it has loomed over every conversation I've had with people who work in and around the movie world

• 7:11Sean Fennessey?

  since it became clear the WBD would be sold. So where to go from here? As always, keep supporting the movies you love and hope that's enough. Netflix may have just played the most successful game of chicken in the history of modern media. It lost the battle for Warner Brothers, but almost certainly won the long-term fight for primacy in streaming and entertainment amongst studios. Was it all a clever game? Or just a win-win outcome for Netflix? It doesn't really matter. They're fine. Paramount has a lot of work to do, though, and there's a lot more to learn about this deal. So I recommend you listen to Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald on The Watch to hear about the impact on TV and especially HBO. Listen to Matt Belloni on The Town to hear a deeper reading on the machinations of the deal and its ramifications in the business community. Listen to Brian Curtis on The Press Box to hear how it'll rattle an already fragile journalism industry.

• 7:54Sean Fennessey?

  On the big picture, we will keep fighting for good movies. Okay, let's bring in Chris to talk about some lighter and brighter Heat 2 news.

• 8:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, CR, we've more or less had it confirmed for us that Christian Bale is officially joining the cast of Heat 2.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Christian Bale confirmed it for us.

• 8:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio are going to be in Heat 2.

• 8:19Speaker 05

  This has now replaced Odyssey R. It's replaced the Odyssey updates as Heat 2 Watch. What's a cool name for this?

• 8:30Sean Fennessey?

  How about?

• 8:32Sean Fennessey?

  Skillet time?

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Because of the heat?

• 8:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I like that.

• 8:35Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like it's-

• 8:36Speaker 05

  It translates really well. People immediately know what we're talking about.

• 8:40Sean Fennessey?

  Well, should I, do I have to work CR into the name?

• 8:42Speaker 05

  I mean, it would be nice, you know? I mean, I know, I know I'm just the fucking third chair over here, but it would be cool if you just-

• 8:47Sean Fennessey?

  Wait, wait, that's not decided that you're third chair. Settle down.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  I like the idea. I think we should have like a kind of Calci like predictions market for like, is it Tracy? Is it CR? Is it Matt Johnson? Where's Neyman? You know, like-

• 9:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Um, no women named there. Is there a reason for that?

• 9:04Speaker 05

  That's your show. You tell me.

• 9:05Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really good point.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:06Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think's going on there?

• 9:07Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 9:08Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Heat Two Christian Bale?

• 9:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:11Sean Fennessey?

  I texted you when this news broke and I said, is this the highest possible ceiling we ever could have gotten for the cast for this movie?

• 9:17Speaker 05

  If you were worried about the floor of the film, I think that that should, this should alleviate some of your worries. I think the presence of the two, like two of the top five actors of their generation-

• 9:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm like, that tight fusion of great actor and great movie star, it's a short list-

• 9:35Speaker 05

  It also recaptures the like, wouldn't it be cool to see these guys finally on screen together? I guess I hadn't been thinking about it the way people probably thought about De Niro and Pacino leading up to Heat. And they'd obviously shared a film in The Godfather 2, but I now realize that I've always wanted to see Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio, which suggests that they will be playing Neil and Vincent.

• 9:58Sean Fennessey?

  So how, explain it. Like, what do you think the formulation is gonna be? So-

• 10:01Speaker 05

  Well, this is really complicated, man. I mean, like, this book, Heat Two, has elements of Vincent's story after Heat, Chris's story after Heat, and then a prequel set in Chicago and Mexicali, like, and also Central America-

• 10:17Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:17Speaker 05

  That encompasses, no, the, the Central America stuff sequel. So there's Chris sequel stuff, and then there's prequel stuff with Chris, Michael Chirito, Neil McCauley, and Vincent Hanna, rolling around the country in various places, solving crimes and doing crimes.

• 10:32Sean Fennessey?

  So in this formulation, then Leo would be Neil McCauley?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  Young Neil.

• 10:36Sean Fennessey?

  And- And Christian Bale would be Vincent Hanna.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  This is my guess, is my guess is that Bale is gonna do the Pacino part and and that DiCaprio will fulfill his lifelong kind of admiration and obsession with De Niro and play and play Neil.

• 10:52Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  That's that's how it's shaping up, but I will say that depending on how straight book translation they want to do, Chris is the star of the of the movie.

• 11:03Sean Fennessey?

  And who is that not Austin Butler or someone like him? It has to be someone younger than these leads.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know how they're gonna do de-aging or aging, and I don't know how you make Austin Butler look like Val Kilmer after he has been shot, had surgery, lost his family and gone to another country.

• 11:23Sean Fennessey?

  I don't either. So I was texting with our friend Alex Ross Perry about this, and he I thought he framed this interestingly. He said, the only comp I could really think of similar to this is Mad Max Fury Road, where you're taking a property that is beloved, that has a ton of iconography, you're moving decades into the future and telling a very similar story with a brand new cast.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:44Sean Fennessey?

  It's in the same world, same characters, some new characters introduced, but different cast. Now, Mad Max Fury Road pulled it off. You could make the case that The Phantom Menace and the Star Wars prequels are the same thing.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 11:55Sean Fennessey?

  Right? The same filmmaker, the same world, a lot of the same people, but different actors playing them in a different time in their lives. There's not a lot of examples of this. Mad Max Fury Road is is is goaded. Phantom Menace is has a complicated legacy.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Sure. And both are directors that I think Lucas had been on the bench for a long time. I don't think Miller had made anything that was regarded in the same level as as the Mad Max films were when they came back and did those movies.

• 12:22Sean Fennessey?

  He made Babe Big in the City, so watch your mouth.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  That wasn't like full of action set pieces and mind blowing post apocalyptic visions. If Michael Mann's got one more bullet in the chamber, it's it's the Heat one, right? Like if you were gonna if you were gonna trust him to make one more great film, I think it would be this one. I personally am so much more interested in the Chris story than the Neil and Vincent story, which I'm excited to see play out and I'm excited to see what he does with it. But there are elements of it that are a little bit more retreads of Heat. Now, I say that knowing full well that the Chris story is essentially retreads of Miami Vice and Black Hat. So I there it's all one movie with him, but it'll be deeply fascinating to

• 13:08Speaker 05

  see who they they land on for Chris. And if it is someone older like Bradley Cooper, someone younger like Austin Butler, is Adam Driver still in this movie? If he is like, is Adam Driver playing Michael Chirito but two feet taller? Like, I don't know.

• 13:24Sean Fennessey?

  I think we probably have to accept that there's gonna be mental blockage and we just gotta move on. The same way Tom Hardy is not Mel Gibson. Just like, just accept it. It's a different person. And in some ways, it will be a slightly different character because of what the actors bring to it. Let's play a little game. Can you name the last five Christian Bale movies?

• 13:43Speaker 05

  Um, Pale Blue Eye, is that in there?

• 13:45Sean Fennessey?

  That's in there.

• 13:46Speaker 05

  Uh, Amsterdam.

• 13:47Sean Fennessey?

  Amsterdam.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Is Ford vs. Ferrari one of his five previous films?

• 13:51Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Thor, the one where he's in black and white?

• 13:53Sean Fennessey?

  Thor, Love and Thunder. What's the one before that?

• 13:58Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 13:59Sean Fennessey?

  Vice.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 14:00Sean Fennessey?

  From 2018.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  Not working that much.

• 14:02Sean Fennessey?

  Not working that much. And that's not the greatest slate. Obviously, you know, for Vice and Ford vs. Ferrari, he was acclaimed. Those movies have pretty good legacies. Vice, a little bit less so than Ford vs. Ferrari. But the Thor movie was a huge bomb, even though I think he was sick as Gore, the God Butcher. Remember the God Butcher? That should be that should be your rapper name, by the way.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  God Butcher, Stove God Cooks and God Butcher.

• 14:22Sean Fennessey?

  Amsterdam's terrible pale blue eye is completely forgettable. He did do the voice of Shoichi in The Boy and the Heron in the English dub.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Fantastic.

• 14:30Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see that?

• 14:31Speaker 05

  No, I haven't seen that yet, man.

• 14:33Sean Fennessey?

  And he will appear very shortly as Frankenstein's monster in The Bride.

• 14:36Speaker 05

  Are you excited about that?

• 14:38Sean Fennessey?

  I'm seeing it on Monday and I'm looking forward to it. I've heard it's not good, but I want it to be good. It's Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I love Maggie Gyllenhaal's last movie, Lost Daughter. I hope it's good.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:48Sean Fennessey?

  Heard it's not good.

• 14:48Speaker 05

  Saw Maggie Gyllenhaal and Ryan Coogler talking. It was delightful chat.

• 14:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, what were they talking about?

• 14:53Speaker 05

  Aspect ratios.

• 14:54Sean Fennessey?

  Everybody's all about that these days.

• 14:56Speaker 05

  We've gotten really technical. It's like the way all football talk is like, what, two high shells?

• 15:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  Now everybody's like a lens guy.

• 15:03Sean Fennessey?

  I was listening to Nate Tyson, Mina Kimes on Mina's show, talking about draft prospects, which teams have the most to lose.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:10Sean Fennessey?

  And it actually reminded me a lot of being in film class where the professor would be saying words and I would be like, I've heard those words before. I don't know what those words mean, but I'm gonna pretend like I do so that I can get through this class.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  And also then go out to a bar and repeat them.

• 15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Repeat those words, yes. And of course, we've also premised our entire business on that.

• 15:30Sean Fennessey?

  He too, man, gosh, on the one hand, it gets me even more excited for this movie. On the other hand, it raises the stakes in a way that is tough.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  That's what I was saying initially was that the floor of this movie with DiCaprio and Bale is now at like, it cannot be worse than 65%. In the CR, the CR tomato meter.

• 15:47Sean Fennessey?

  I give or take like J. Edgar, Leo hasn't made any bad movies.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 15:51Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like even like Body of Lies, which would be lower on his list. I know you love it, but like, that's still a really entertaining movie. So his, his taste is historically borderline flawless.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  Yes. And I think that while he is, obviously got a lot of affection for historically Titanic figures, not, no pun intended. But like, he likes to work with extremely significant directors and he's not afraid to work with directors who are in their 80s or in their late 70s.

• 16:17Sean Fennessey?

  He's doing it right now.

• 16:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. So he shoots this Scorsese movie. I imagine he would shoot sometime this year, maybe late this year.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  And it's not gonna be a secret because I'm sure with the budget that they have, they're gonna shoot in Chicago and they're gonna shoot in, in, in the desert and we'll know about it. I'm trying to decide my level of engagement.

• 16:38Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 16:38Speaker 05

  Like. Set photo watching and stuff like that, you know, do you, how much do you want to protect the, the endpoint of this movie versus like, kind of like we went through with the Odyssey? It's like, do you want to see Matt Damon wearing Uggs and armor as he waits to

• 16:53Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I see.

• 16:54Speaker 05

  Get into a boat to do something?

• 16:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, I usually don't, but I'll accept it for something I really care about. Like, I didn't look at very much for one battle after another.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:02Sean Fennessey?

  In the run up to it, I tried to not look at any of those set photos. It's a, it's a, that's a really good question. You know, Warner Brothers, between this movie and finally greenlighting that Nancy Meyers movie, um, that had been long discussed for two or three years now, they're doubling down on older filmmakers who are kind of, you know, one last job in it.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 17:21Sean Fennessey?

  It feels like, and

• 17:22Speaker 05

  It's not their money.

• 17:25Sean Fennessey?

  Well, for now it is, but it may not be very shortly. I don't, we don't need to talk about that again.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Uh, no, I mean, I just, I saw that L. McKay, Emma Mackey dropped out of the Nancy Meyers movie.

• 17:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and she was playing L. McKay in that film.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:36Sean Fennessey?

  So it's gonna be tough to replace her.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's gonna be pretty tricky.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  Well, like he too.

• 17:39Sean Fennessey?

  Very similar.

• 17:40Speaker 05

  You know what I mean?

• 17:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I look forward to both of those films from those older filmmakers and I, I hope they're wonderful. Uh, let's, let's pivot to Scream 7.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 17:49Sean Fennessey?

  So you've been on the show talking about Scream 6 and Scream 5. This series has recently been rebooted and it was rebooted with two young stars, Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega. Neither of those actors are in this movie. Reportedly, allegedly, the reasons that they're not in the movie is because specifically Melissa Barrera expressed support for Palestine on her social media.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:08Sean Fennessey?

  And reportedly the production company behind the Scream movies did not appreciate those comments and she was fired. Jenna Ortega, though she has not confirmed this, it sounds as though

• 18:18Speaker 05

  Sort of did.

• 18:18Sean Fennessey?

  In solidarity?

• 18:20Speaker 05

  Initially it was like in a scheduling conflict with Wednesday had come up and that she would be dropping out of the film. She later went on to talk about how between Melissa dropping out and the original filmmakers, radio silence, leaving the project, it was no longer really the project that she had signed up for. Uh, I thought it was interesting that there was not, despite Jenna Ortega's like pretty significant fame, there was not like a lot of like, we're suing you to keep you into your contract. I don't know the vigories of that, but they basically did a soft reboot of This franchise midway through what was supposed to be a new trilogy of films.

• 18:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and I'll just say purely from a movie perspective, it's really unfortunate to lose both of those actors, especially for me, Melissa Pereira, because I think what the writers of those movies and the Radio Silence guys brought to that character, and those movies to me are mixed and I just revisited them and they're not, they're not as good as I had remembered and I was very positive about both of them on our episodes. But Melissa Pereira's character, who is the daughter of Billy Loomis, the killer, one of the two killers from the first film,

• 19:21Sean Fennessey?

  has an interesting psychological dynamic where she is haunted by the fact that she is a serial killer and she's got serial killer bones and blood. She is extremely violent and when the movie lets her rip.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  She's also got a body count by the end of the two movies.

• 19:32Sean Fennessey?

  She really, she kinda takes care of business in an exciting way and they don't have that energy in this movie anymore.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  No, it's really the only place for this franchise to go, and we'll get into seven, is the idea of the final girl also being the killer. And that the Scream ghost face gene is somehow passed down. And they have chosen to do different things in the movie. I revisited six to get ready for seven, was much more fond of it than I was when I first saw it. I think when I first saw it, I came out and was just extremely mad that it was not authentically shot in dime square. Remember I was like-

• 20:09Sean Fennessey?

  We were more flipped. I really liked it.

• 20:10Speaker 05

  Well, because I think I went into it being like, this is actually a great idea to put Scream in New York. And then they shot it in Toronto and I was like, this is just, I can feel how not New York this is.

• 20:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  Rewatching it, and I think you actually mentioned this in a Letterboxd note that you put up is like, it is so stabby and it's so giallo in places and it is very self-consciously referencing those films. And going into it without the expectation that I'm gonna have like this authentic midnight cowboy experience. I had a lot more time for it and especially in comparison to seven, it's like we didn't know how good we had it.

• 20:45Sean Fennessey?

  That is, I do feel a bit that way. I revisited five and six before seeing seven and I was a little let down by six in particular, but I think both of those films, like all Scream movies, they're whodunnits, right? And if the mystery isn't strong and isn't fun to revisit and see the clues being revealed, then they don't stand up that well. The first film is still really fun because of the way that the mystery unfolds for us. And obviously it's the original, so it's got a different kind of weight to it.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, when you're getting into seven-

• 21:13Speaker 05

  Now I'm likely an eighth film because of the box office.

• 21:16Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is gonna do really well, yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  That this movie will do. You start getting into now you're repeating, it's almost like Force Awakens in the sequels where you're like, now we can just remake the originals with a new cast and essentially play all the same notes. So what should have been happening here was a meta textual

• 21:37Speaker 05

  conversation about like the characters, but also the characters fictional representations. Cause that would have been modeled after Scream three, which is the one set in Hollywood. Where, um, you know, Lance Henriksen is this sort of old lascivious producer. We find out more about Sydney's mother, that this guy played by Scott Foley is the filmmaker. It's pretty, I actually like Scream three.

• 21:59Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 22:01Speaker 05

  They're off track now though. So Scream seven.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's a reset inside of a reset.

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Kind of functions as Scream one. There are scenes that are essentially recreations of Scream one with Sidney Prescott's daughter. And this movie, we can get into the sort of vagaries of this.

• 22:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's talk about the details of it. Um, you're right that the movie essentially moves from Woodsboro to Pine Grove, a very similarly leafy, small town America setting for a slasher movie. In this movie, Sidney Prescott has built a new life for herself in this town, which is in Indiana, until a new ghost faced killer begins to target her daughter, Tatum, named of course, after Rose McGowan's character from the first film, forcing her to face her past to end the killings once and for all. That's the sort of log line that does recall the Halloween films and Jamie Lee Curtis's role in the Halloween films. And there is a literal reference to that from the, um, Jasmine Savoy Brown character who returns from this film, as does the character who plays her brother, Mason Gooding. They appeared in five and six. In addition to that, we have a number of other figures from the original trilogy of films, including Courtney Cox,

• 23:00Sean Fennessey?

  who I thought had died in six and then had not died.

• 23:04Speaker 05

  She was six and five, but especially six.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  Breaks a certain even extreme rule of plausible belief in that how many people get stabbed dozens of times only to live for the purposes of franchise continuation.

• 23:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and that idea does resurface in this film as well, something that is a little bit frustrating. If you don't want to have anything else about this movie spoiled for

• 23:30Speaker 05

  It's very difficult to talk about Scream movies without getting into them, so you can save this till after you've seen it.

• 23:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there are mysteries and there are also appearances by actors who appear in the previous films who will give a bit away about where this movie is going and what it's actually about. So check the film out or fast forward to my conversation with Amanda and Adam about Nirvana and then later with Matt Johnson. Okay, so this is a spoiler zone.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Spoiler conversation.

• 23:51Sean Fennessey?

  In addition to Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox, Matthew Lillard is back for this film. David Arquette makes a brief appearance in this film despite the fact that those characters are believed to be dead. Isabel May joins as Neve Campbell's daughter and there's a whole host of new young actors.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  There's like a Paramount rep theater thing going where Michelle Randolph, who's on Landman, is in the cold open and Isabel May, who is on 1883, is essentially like the hero of the film.

• 24:18Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think is actually quite clever on the studio's part to just plug in the Taylor Sheridan young blonde players into this world. You know, they have like a feeder system now for teenage actresses. Also, you've got Anna Camp, a familiar face. You've got Ethan Embry, a familiar face, coming into the film.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  Hitmaker?

• 24:35Sean Fennessey?

  Tim Simons, our boy. I'll just say right up front, not enough to hitmaker in this movie for my taste. Could have used literally three to four more scenes.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Release the hitmaker cut.

• 24:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. The big headline on this is that Kevin Williamson was brought back to the franchise essentially to save this project, which had been so troubled, as we mentioned. And Williamson was the writer of the first film, you know, a hallowed figure in the 90s turnaround of horror writing. He obviously also wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer, which rebooted last year in, I think, in a somewhat similarly messy way.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:08Sean Fennessey?

  Attempting to be contemporary and kind of failing to be contemporary.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:12Sean Fennessey?

  So just tell me off the bat, like, did you like this movie? Did you hate it? Are you somewhere in the middle on it?

• 25:19Speaker 05

  It's my least favorite Scream movie.

• 25:20Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting, okay.

• 25:23Speaker 05

  It brings me no like joy to say that because obviously it's a franchise that I've drawn a lot of enjoyment from. Uh, I think one of the major things that I had a problem with was the filmmaking. I felt like this was an incredibly flat, incredibly self-serious, borderline looked like a TV show and that's usually your insult to Lob, but like it just felt like I was watching something on Paramount Plus. Yep. It has no life and then that translates into a lot of the, the performances, especially from Neve Campbell, who is giving a very, very stoic, emotionless, despite all of the

• 26:04Speaker 05

  emotional things that are happening, uh, turn as Sidney. Look, and so the same, same way that Halloween belongs as much to Jamie Lee Curtis as it does to Michael Myers, I'm, you can make an argument that Scream belongs as much to Neve Campbell as it does to Ghostface or Wes Craven.

• 26:22Sean Fennessey?

  This movie certainly announces that. It is, it is insinuating that.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  This film played way more like a vigilante justice movie than it did like a slasher or a fun horror movie. And I don't think it found the right tone or it kind of settled on the like easiest common denominator tone. To watch her go through what like her character goes through in this movie, you would never know it given like her reactions, except for like a few brief moments. Like her daughter is essentially being stalked by a series of Ghostface killers who may or may not be ghosts from her own past. Her husband is brought into harms way. Pretty much everyone around her is either killed or almost killed. And she kind of just like rolls through it like it's another day running her coffee shop.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  So there was something really off about this one and it really didn't have the things that I go to Scream movies for.

• 27:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so you made an interesting point there, which is that it does play more like a vigilante justice movie than it does like a horror movie. The movie's not scary. It doesn't really have any scares. It has a couple of jump kill moments, but we come to expect those in Scream movies. So there's nothing exciting. I did find that there were two, maybe three clever kill set pieces.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 27:36Sean Fennessey?

  There's one in a bar that I thought was very good that features a tap.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  But as a Ghostface originalist, I like, I like knife work.

• 27:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  And they get away from that a little bit in this one.

• 27:47Sean Fennessey?

  It is very, it is more, it is more 80s slasher kind of presentational horror where it's like, let's stop the movie. So the killer can do something extravagant that will get a chuckle out of the audience, which is not really what these movies do. And I, I guess I'm not totally sure why they went in this direction. Now, there are parts of the movie that I think are classic Kevin Williamson, who is also the creator of Dawson's Creek and has worked on in a lot of kind of prefab YA over the years. And the relationships between some of the young actors, I think is totally fine and serviceable. It's kind of like placeholder-y, but you get this tension between Isabel May's daughter character and Neve Campbell and like something that I expect to see in my life, like a mother and a daughter kind of disagreeing

• 28:29Sean Fennessey?

  about what they are and are not allowed to do. And I think some of that stuff could have worked well if there was a little bit more time spent on it, but there's all of this worry in Scream movies about building out the rep company because you have to introduce all these potential suspects. So there's not enough time to forge real relationships in these movies. So then, when you get to the point where like someone might die, Joel McHale, perhaps, the husband character, I was like, oh, he died. Okay. Like, I didn't care. It was not that big of a deal.

• 28:59Speaker 05

  But he lives.

• 29:00Sean Fennessey?

  But he lives, which is even worse.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. He gets stabbed dozens of times and loses a lot of blood and is wrapped up in a piece of plastic in his, the addition that they're building on the.

• 29:11Sean Fennessey?

  Also a huge Jallow move there, the sort of like wrapped around and you can see through the cellophane, there's literally a perspective shot through the.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  Here's a, here's a way of looking at this entire thing. I don't think they wanted to make a Scream movie. I don't, I think Neve Campbell came back for like almost, I'm not supposing why she did this, but like one of the reasons why she apparently didn't go to Scream Six, or she says the reason why she wasn't in Scream Six is because she felt like she wasn't being paid adequately, or what, compared to the value she brings to the franchise.

• 29:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 29:40Speaker 05

  You know, there are actors in this film like, uh, like Hitmaker, like Joe McHale, who are quite funny, who are not given a lot of funny material to work with, or even given the space to ad lib or riff or create any kind of like light to the dark. And all the teens are acting like they know they're about to die in the second act anyway. So that you don't really ever get invested in Tatum, Tatum's boyfriend, Tatum's friends, anybody. Whereas like, if you go back to the Scream movies, man, like, you're like, I care about what happens to Sarah Michelle Gellar. I care about what happens to Rose McGowan.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  I care about what happens to Parker Posey. And even through four, like, it's a pretty good ensemble of people having like, a ton of fun and acting like teenagers. And that's just really not, they're all like, we're, we're meat puppets, man. We're about to get stabbed to death.

• 30:39Sean Fennessey?

  There's no way to get around that, though, because the whole premise of the movie is around this idea of Sidney being a person for whom trouble is always found. You know, like, she can't get away from the fact, she's defined, even though she's working in this coffee shop in Indiana, has a target. And so everyone, any drifter who comes in, any true crime obsessed teenage boy who comes in, knows she's a knife magnet. And that's just a, it makes the story hard to tell, because the only thing you can really talk about is, oh my God, you're Sidney Prescott. And so it's just, there's like a flaw in the design of the series, and I hope Neve Campbell got paid. That's cool. And I think the movie's gonna do really well, because they're just slapping Neve Campbell right in the center of the poster. And they're like, Scream is

• 31:20Sean Fennessey?

  back, and you're 30 years older, and so am I, and so are you. And don't we all love that feeling we had when we saw Neve Campbell get terrorized in 1996?

• 31:28Speaker 05

  But there are some things that I want to grow old with, and there are some things I want to keep me young. And Scream is just something that I think should belong to younger people. And the pivot that this movie, this franchise made, and especially the last two, where it's like, way more about... This kind of like, I don't really, kind of a non-existent bond that would have been between these characters over the course of these movies, where now there's a lot of the time spent in Scream 7, where people sat in static positions, talking about the trauma that they've experienced, but also how close they are. Whereas, it's obvious that like, these characters are not interacting, were not in a Scream movie. And, I like David Arquette too, but like, we're acting like-

• 32:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Dewey is-

• 32:13Speaker 05

  The last American eagle was assassinated. And it's, it's just this really weird sentimentality that comes out of that kind of Fast and Furious, like, "One more time, brother," and like, looking at all the ghosts on the beach. It's like, this isn't what I come to these movies for.

• 32:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's also not really what legacy horror is about, and it's different in that way. Fast and Furious is a much better comparison, where it's like, you're back with your old friends, and they'll always love each other. You know, Friday the 13th, 7 is not about that.

• 32:43Speaker 05

  It's the whole premise is like, the person you are having sex with is actually a killer. Like, there isn't supposed to be trust and relationships-

• 32:51Sean Fennessey?

  But not in this movie.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  Sure. And, you know, I think one of the things that's been really interesting over the last three films is the steadfast presence of the twins. It's Chad and Mindy is-

• 33:04Sean Fennessey?

  Chad and Mindy, yes. Two super horror fans who are obsessed with the history of also the Woodsboro murders, and were-

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Yes, and they are present in the town that Five is set in. They're friends, they're kind of like, you know-

• 33:17Sean Fennessey?

  They're Randy's, uh, Randy is their uncle-

• 33:21Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 33:21Sean Fennessey?

  Randy, Jamie Kennedy's character from the first film.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  And then they follow Tara off to college in New York, and now have hooked up, interning for Gale Weathers, as Gale tries to rebuild her journalism career by going back to her crime reporting roots. And, these two have been stabbed dozens of times now, like, upwards of a hundred times-

• 33:41Sean Fennessey?

  Mason Gooding's character has been annihilated. I can't believe he's walking.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Where he is like, stretched out, as two ghost faces stab him, right?

• 33:50Sean Fennessey?

  All through the stomach for some reason, never in the heart.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  And-

• 33:54Speaker 05

  I always laugh when we do this, when we're just like, that's against the rules. But it's the combination of the extreme trauma that they've experienced, how maudlin most people in this movie are, and they yet still are trying to do the glib, winking.

• 34:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Randy, they're Randy.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Joss Whedon, you kinda like chit chat.

• 34:17Sean Fennessey?

  Here's how this world works. Here's what a requal is.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  That really like, it just shatters, it shatters it for me.

• 34:23Sean Fennessey?

  It does.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  Except I'm like, if you guys want, just make them the stars of the movie.

• 34:27Sean Fennessey?

  I was, that's what I was gonna say is like, I like them and I think they're fun and I think they're, the only time the movie has fun is when they're like nattering at each other. And for a movie that, as you say, is not very funny, I don't know that I needed more of them. They felt very tacked on. The idea of like them teaming up with Gail is just like very overworked, in my opinion, but I think they're both charming. I think they're both fun to watch on screen.

• 34:48Speaker 05

  Oh, they're, they're the only two people having fun in this movie. But if that's the case, just make that the movie because you can't also have them, they would just be physically deformed at this point. And also like, I'm never going near a knife ever again in my life, right? Like, it's sort of like a silliness to it that I think kinda takes me out of the movie.

• 35:10Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree with you. One of the components of the movie that is somewhat similar to, as I said, I know what you did last summer, reboot last year is the idea of true crime obsession. And in this movie's case, what AI and deep fakes can do to horror movie storytelling. And I thought that, I thought the first stroke of Matthew Lillard's reveal on a phone call was pretty effective in the movie. Now, I knew it was coming because I knew Matthew Lillard was in this movie and he's been doing press and been getting quoted around. I wish they hadn't done that. I wish it would have been a surprise. If it had been a surprise, I think it would have been even more effective. But this idea of a character who we definitely thought was dead could be back. Would be hard to accept, but was exciting in a way.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 35:55Sean Fennessey?

  And then the movie attempting to use the impossibility of that to show you like maybe the nefariousness of deep fakes or AI. But it kind of shows it to us and it has some characters be like, fuck that shit, man. But it doesn't really follow through on anything, kind of thematically or intellectually.

• 36:14Speaker 05

  Well, can I just ask you a a straight up question? I, did I miss something? It's like Tatum's boyfriend Ben has been creating these AI videos of Stu Mocker, Matthew Lillard's character, FaceTiming Sydney and harassing her.

• 36:30Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 36:32Speaker 05

  And Tatum figures this out. She sees Ben's laptop open and he's been making these videos. Is he just trying to see if he could do it?

• 36:38Sean Fennessey?

  No, my impression was that he was not responsible for sending those videos, that the two killers are the ones who sent the videos, but that when he heard that Stu Mocker was alive, he was like, and he heard the possibility of, could it be deep fakes? He, because he's interested in computer science and is going to be, you know, where's he going? Stanford to study? They talked about this.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 36:58Sean Fennessey?

  He was like experimenting himself to see if it could be done.

• 37:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 37:02Sean Fennessey?

  But he is, as far as I could tell, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but as far as I could tell, he wasn't responsible for sending those videos. He was just kind of hanging out and also left his laptop open in his truck for some reason.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  Well, because the movie is kind of like tonally flat. It doesn't feel the way lots of recut or rewritten movies would usually feel like that will usually suggest a massive tonal shift. This is pretty consistent in its tone, I'll give it that, but it does feel like there are plot lines that they're like, no, we can't, we gotta stop doing this, you know, like.

• 37:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  And whether or not this guy Ben was supposed to be Billy Loomis reincarnated for Tatum, who was the stand-in for her mother, and they reenact like Billy coming to her window and everything like that happens in the first, first film. I I was like, oh, I wonder if they just like pulled the plug on this.

• 37:50Sean Fennessey?

  My my read on it was that it was always an intentional red herring. And then that, in fact, the two people who revealed as killers who we can talk about now in a utterly bizarre choice. Are Ethan Embry's character who plays a

• 38:04Sean Fennessey?

  an aide at a local mental facility.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  Used to work for Google.

• 38:08Sean Fennessey?

  Who used to be a security officer for Google, apparently, and it has an interest in AI. And Anna Camp, who plays Sidney Prescott's neighbor. And it turns out is a person who is obsessed by her and read her memoir and used it as a launchpad for her own killing spree.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  Really, but first to kill her abusive husband.

• 38:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  But then because Sidney wasn't in New York in Scream Six, essentially, took that as like a betrayal of what Sidney's ethos is and went on to start killing people in Pine Grove in order to reactivate Sidney as a character in her life.

• 38:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, as the real final girl.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  This also, just for, as a note, marks like, I think, three or four shots that this movie takes at Scream Six, which made me like enormously defensive of Scream Six. I thought was like, kind of dirty work and weird to do that. It's like, for a movie, for a franchise that is so at pains to be like, thank you to all the people who have made this what it is to like, piss all over something because Melissa Barrera spoke her mind.

• 39:16Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's what I totally agree. I think that's exactly what it was too. It was a very pointed, like, see, this is the real star of these movies. And I didn't enjoy that. Now, I do think that this movie commits an extremely similar sin to number six, which is when Anna Camp shows up in the movie, I'm like, Anna Camp is way too famous to not be the killer. Way too famous, just like with Dermot Mulroney. I'm like, why is Dermot Mulroney playing a cop with nothing to do?

• 39:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 39:38Sean Fennessey?

  Like. They can't keep doing that. It's somewhat similar for Ethan Embry, but we're 90s kids who are familiar with Ethan Embry being a borderline movie star.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  I was like, oh, that's cool. They're just, Ethan Embry happens to be in this film. I thought it was weird that he was on the poster and I was like, I guess, I doubt it's Mark Consuelos and it doesn't seem like it's Tim. So I suppose like just by deduction, now that you've killed all these people, although they've started messing around with like, you thought I was dead, but I was actually faking my own death so that I could then join my father in the killing spree.

• 40:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Here's the problem with screen trilogies. There's really only two films worth of story. The first film, there is, uh, somebody close to Sydney or whoever is the killer. So in Scream 5, it's Jack Quaid's character. In Scream 1, it's Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard. Then Scream 2 is the revenge of that character's friends, family, whoever.

• 40:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  So that's what happens.

• 40:34Sean Fennessey?

  Took this person away from me.

• 40:34Speaker 05

  In Scream 6, that's what sort of happens with, well, I mean, I guess in Scream 2, it's Olafant is obsessed with it. And then Laurie Metcalfe is Billy Loomis's mom.

• 40:44Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Okay. I love like trying to make sense of these.

• 40:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Scream 3, the reason Scream 3 works for me is because Scream 3 is not about Ghostface. It's about how would you tell this story? It's about the stab movies. It's about all this stuff. This should be, Scream 6 did this where it was like Dermot Mulrooney and his daughter were Jack Quaid's.

• 41:07Sean Fennessey?

  Father and sister and also the other brother.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Right. And so what's Scream 7 about? Like I, like they, they almost need to make these sets of two.

• 41:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's why, it's why maybe even more so than the previous films, this movie is a Giallo, because you'll get to the end of Giallo sometimes and be like, it's actually that guy who was down the hall in minute 38. And you're like, well, who the fuck is that guy? Um, and I like that in Giallos because they're so grisly.

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Like for me, that for some reason, like then you need a more contained space. Like it needs to be a little bit more Agatha Christie where it's like, even in Hunt for October, you're like, oh, it's that guy.

• 41:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  In this, you're like. Why is she doing this?

• 41:46Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, she has to explain so much in that final scene, so much of her motivation that it is like on the tip of camp, like there's some, pardon the pun there, but it's like really ridic- and she's playing it kinda funny. I really like Anna Camp. I think she's a really good actress. I think she's a really funny actress and she's, she's definitely going for like crazy Pilates mom.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Everything she does in that last scene is like everything the rest of the film is missing.

• 42:10Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't have, that's exactly right.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  It's kinda like, what I like about four, which I know you don't like, four.

• 42:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, the Anna Roberts one, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Is Mikey Madison and, and the Colkin brother kind of, and, and that vibe of that like weird unhinged energy that that movie has. And you know, that, that film is trying to do a lot with like catching up with smartphones, which was always gonna be a difficult element to this film.

• 42:33Sean Fennessey?

  This is the issue is a lot of these movies, part of what's so great about one, to a lesser extent, two and three, but also in two and three, is those are movies about movies. The Randy character is this kind of surrogate explainer.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's a video store movie.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Quentin Tarantino in the video store telling you what the rules are.

• 42:49Sean Fennessey?

  Watching, they're watching Halloween while they're, you know, all the, the movie is happening. In two, it's film class and it's all these references to sequels and learning about them. In three, it's we're actually making a movie and we're in Hollywood and here's how it works. I think they're as effective in that order personally. I think it's scream, scream two, scream three. Some people think three is better than two, whatever, we can disagree. After that, it's all kinda like people who are not as obsessed with movies as they are being in true crime stories.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  Yes, and Reddit and, and pods.

• 43:26Sean Fennessey?

  It becomes the internet, it becomes smartphones, it becomes true crime documentary, it becomes podcasts. That stuff's just not as interesting to me.

• 43:34Speaker 05

  Kinda interesting. I think one thing that would have been, and you know, this gets referenced a bunch in five at the Jenna Ortega cold open, which also sort of introduces the idea of someone getting stabbed a lot and living.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  Is Jen Ortega is talking about elevated horror and there's like this conversation with Ghostface about like whether or not elevated horror-

• 43:53Sean Fennessey?

  The Babadook, movies like that.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  That is probably where, and maybe that's sort of what five and six, maybe that's what Radio Silence were sort of thinking is like, what we now have to lampoon or talk about is the need for horror movie characters to be self-aware about how traumatic what they're experiencing is.

• 44:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. No, I think, I think that's overt and I think that the idea of the Mindy character is very much like explaining how things changed and here how, here's how horror movies work now. They still love movies, but the movie is still stuck on cellphone technology. Like the Dylan Minette character, like everything being like a, just a, a near miss with like your mom gets killed and you could have avoided it, but because the technology didn't work as well and it just doesn't, it doesn't hit as hard. And this movie in particular, the AI, the AI stuff is like, it's not insidious, but it's not interesting. And so it's just, it's kind of nothing burger.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  And I think also like in com, in concert with, if you go back and watch Scream one, it looks like the conformist compared to this. So just like-

• 44:53Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Kevin Williamson's just not a great filmmaker.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Widescreen, beautiful, like Kevin, like Wes Craven shooting these scenes with such incredible awareness of space. And Kevin Williamson, I think was like, yeah, we're gonna put the camera there. They're gonna have this conversation. It's shot like a, like an episode of television in a lot of ways.

• 45:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's um, there's a book that came out last year by Clark Collis called Screaming and Conjuring: The Resurrection and Unstoppable Rise of Modern Horror. And it's basically a compendium, a pocket history really of horror movies from the nineties through today. And there's a big chunk of time in the beginning of the book spent on the Scream franchise and the original Scream movie. And a lot of the choices that Craven made and the ways in which even the cast were like, I don't know about this, but he's like, I've been making horror movies for 25 years. Trust me. And how he had to navigate the Weinsteins and he had to navigate the script and the sensitivities of the actors who were involved in the movie. And then I believe in that movie, they talk about basically everyone going to a friends and family cast screening of the movie. And they're like, holy fucking shit. Like Wes did it and he was right.

• 45:56Sean Fennessey?

  And I thought of that moment in the book when I was watching this movie and there is a, as has become standard, montage of the town shutting down and going into a kind of quarantine, set to Nick Cave's Red Right Hand, which to me is like one of the more iconic recent horror movie sequences in the Wes Craven film.

• 46:16Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 46:16Sean Fennessey?

  Where it's like, end of the first act, there's a killer, that killer has just, not just killed

• 46:20Speaker 05

  It's town before sundown.

• 46:21Sean Fennessey?

  teenager, but it's town before sundown.

• 46:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:23Sean Fennessey?

  And I remember being in the movie theater at 13 years old and having chills at that moment. I'd never heard that song before. I'd never seen horror movie making that felt that elegant.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:33Sean Fennessey?

  And we overrate these things because we saw them when we were younger, but still.

• 46:37Speaker 05

  We also overrate them because, not even overrate them, but I think the level of, I mean, if we saw another average slasher that was shot like a TV show that was just coming out on a Friday, we probably wouldn't be talking about it 30 minutes into it.

• 46:52Sean Fennessey?

  No, no.

• 46:53Speaker 05

  But Scream's great magic trick was, was this idea that in the sequels, there is also a series of films called Stab that people are going nuts for and that Sidney has become this iconic figure whose life has been documented by these actresses and she's played by Tori Spelling and all this stuff. And even when you watch the cold open for Two, which is the Jada Pinkett Smith, Omar Epps ones, and everybody's going so crazy at the movie theater, even when I was rewatching Two the other day, I also was getting hyped up where I was like, that's right, motherfucker, Scream. And I was like, I'm 48, why am I doing this?

• 47:34Speaker 05

  But I've been watching these movies for such a long time that its own, its echo chamber of enthusiasm has worked for decades.

• 47:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's true that, we didn't talk about the cold open of this movie too much, where Jimmy Tatro and who's the actress in?

• 47:47Speaker 05

  Michelle Randolph.

• 47:48Sean Fennessey?

  Michelle Randolph.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  From Wayman.

• 47:50Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not familiar with that show, but you are.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, she does great work. She's a TCU cheerleader and daughter of Billy Bob Thornton and Ali Larder.

• 47:59Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Great genes. That sequence where those two characters are visiting a, I couldn't tell, was it, is it actually Stu Mocker's house?

• 48:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's Stu Mocker's house has become an experiential Airbnb where you go in and it's like an animatronic ghost face is like, I'm gonna get you.

• 48:16Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 48:16Speaker 05

  And there's still body tape on the ground.

• 48:18Sean Fennessey?

  The problem with that sequence is very similar to a lot of the most recent Scream movies is just like, these people are gonna die. And the another ingenious act of Scream is you would have no idea that Drew Barrymore would ever die in the opening scene of the original film. It was a surprise.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:33Sean Fennessey?

  And we're no longer in surprise territory. There's nothing that a movie that is seven films into its franchise can do about that, but we're hard on the things that we love.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  Well, I still think four is my favorite cold open.

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 48:44Speaker 05

  Which is the Russian nesting doll of girls watching stab movies and then getting killed.

• 48:49Sean Fennessey?

  The cold open of Scream four is very fun.

• 48:53Sean Fennessey?

  You haven't seen Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie?

• 48:54Speaker 05

  It's to my, my great chagrin.

• 48:56Sean Fennessey?

  You have any relationship to those guys? You know, you know about those movies?

• 48:59Speaker 05

  I mean, no, I don't know about this series that they're doing. I can't wait. I've really been enjoying Matt's interviews that I've been seeing online. Huge BlackBerry fan, so I'm excited to check it out.

• 49:11Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. There is such a thing as becoming too comfortable in your day to day, but our favorite films with stories that make us change the way we think, they weren't made by people content to just sit back and watch the world pass by. This is your sign that you shouldn't either. From us, from VW and the other drivers out there, grab the wheel. Do what you love, even if it means taking the road less traveled. Learn more at VW.com. Anything else you're watching out there that you want to recommend?

• 49:39Speaker 05

  I would, I would just heartily recommend Industry to any big picture watcher, just because I think Mickey Down and Conrad Kay, who are the creators and oftentimes directors of the show are doing some real cinematic shit this season and. This concludes on Sunday, so it's really cool.

• 49:56Sean Fennessey?

  This new season is turning into Endor Season Two for me, where I'm like, I'm like bobbing and weaving to avoid any information about it. Yeah, and I'll see it next year, I'm sure. Hopefully, no, I will see it. I'll see it when I go on spring break.

• 50:07Speaker 05

  Are you going on spring break?

• 50:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, with my family.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  It's a, it's a, it's a fun show to watch with the fam, for sure.

• 50:12Sean Fennessey?

  You think my five-year-old's gonna be into it? Probably not.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  If your daughter became like a big Harper stan, I think you'd have a lot of problems.

• 50:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we'll see. She's very independent-minded, as you know.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  I know, man. She was directing me when I was reading the Star Wars book tour. She was just like, read that and read that, and then don't read this, but read that.

• 50:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, welcome to my life. All right, Sierra, thank you very much. Let's go now to my conversation with Amanda Dobbins and Adam Nayman.

• 50:40Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, joined by one special guest and one co-host. Amanda's here and Adam Nayman is here, making his Netflix debut. Hello.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  Well, this is gonna be on Netflix. That's, that's great. I love that.

• 50:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you're, you're part of the Borg now, my friend. I'm very sorry, but this is how it works.

• 51:01Speaker 06

  No, I, I, I, I, I love it. Hi, hi, Netflix.

• 51:06Speaker 06

  We have, we have Netflix in Canada, you know, in both, in both, in both languages, yeah.

• 51:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, and I do think that this is on the Netflix in Canada.

• 51:16Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Not, not all of them, so congratulations, Canada.

• 51:21Speaker 06

  This is great. I'm gonna tell all my friends to, uh, watch their Netflix. Can't wait. Yeah, I'm good.

• 51:27Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you're here because we are going to be talking about a Canadian product.

• 51:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 51:33Sean Fennessey?

  That is called Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, which is a very normal name for a movie, for a very normal movie. We've all seen this movie. I've been talking about this movie for six months. Adam, I think you've been talking to me about this movie for over a year.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I, I like to check in or make sure you check in on what's happening in Toronto. And often, you're like, what's happening in Toronto? And I say, not much. And then some, and then sometimes things happen, like this film, which carries a lot of, uh, local pride and, uh, the, the, the long history of our relationships, uh, our National Cinemas' relationship to the United States, which is pretty one-sided. So it's, it's, so, so it's interesting to see if and when and how and to what degree things cross over. And I'm sure you, you know, I know you talked to Matt, who's just so shy and he has no thoughts to share about anything. He needs to really work on his interview technique.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  You know, if only the guy could do, if only the guy could do some interviews and talk about what he does, there'd be a real chance of him and him and his collaborators breaking through, you know?

• 52:43Sean Fennessey?

  I've never seen a person will a film to success by sheer force of their quality of podcast interview, but Matt is, Matt is trying to do that. So, you know, all three of us have had a chance to see the movie, as I mentioned, and Adam, I think you'll be very helpful in setting some of the context around the movie, but I thought it was just an absolute marvel of a movie comedy. And I, Amanda, I was so excited when you told me last week that you just, you went out to go see it of your own volition. You were just like, I checked out Nirvana.

• 53:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I was influenced by, by you and by Adam and, and, and by the, the will of Matt Johnson and the way it makes its way across the internets and the different internets that we're all on. Yeah, I just went to the Lamley on a Friday afternoon and started laughing and I had the experience, I haven't had a long time in the theaters where I was laughing at things and then random strangers were also laughing and then the laughing, laughing kind of compounded. It's genuinely very, very funny. I have a lot of questions for you about what Matt Johnson said to you during the interview, because I, I wasn't there and I, and there is a real like, how did

• 53:53Amanda Dobbins?

  they do this element to the movie? But, um, you know, Adam, you highlighted that this is a, a Canadian export and, and a major, a film of significance to, to your community. I did have-

• 54:11Speaker 06

  There are, there are 30 million of us, you know, Amanda.

• 54:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I just wanted to say that I, I, watching this, this film, having quite literally never been to Canada, which I don't know how that's happened, did feel like I was also part of the community. And, and I didn't get all of the Canada references, probably. And if you, if you want to, you know, do a TED Talk on that, I'm excited to listen. But there was something about watching this, this movie. And I think some of it is, it's a great like buddy comedy. And I think the sense of humor and it is very founded in like pop culture references, both of 2008 and now. So the, the language was familiar to me, but there was a real, just like, one of us, one of us vibe to watching these guys make this happen

• 55:01Amanda Dobbins?

  on a, on a big screen and, and feeling like, knowing what we would want to see. And also, I, I, I just, I felt included. I was like, oh, these are, these are my buds. This is part of a, I like, I'm a part of this movement, even though I'm fairly new to it. And once again, I'm not Canadian. So.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Amanda, can I ask, it's a Canadian to an honorary Canadian, a very important question. How much longer was the lion in the men's washroom at the Nirvana screening?

• 55:31Speaker 06

  Ratio, ratio was like 95?

• 55:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I was the only woman in the, in the screening. That's okay.

• 55:36Sean Fennessey?

  I, there were, you know, it's funny that you saw it at the Lamley, because I saw it a second time at the Lamley in Glendale as well. And there were, there were quite a few women in there. And it was the exact same thing that you described. Everyone was laughing. And we used to do this as a community. There have been a couple, you know, The Naked Gun, I think was a recent example, where like, people went to the movies and they laughed. And that was a unique experience for us. But this movie does tap into a very specific experiential quality of movie going that has as much in common, I think, with maybe when everyone saw The Hangover together in 2008, which is referenced in this film, as seeing a Jackass movie in theaters. And that's sort of how did they do this quality? And this sense of the real and the meta fictional and the fictional all meeting. I'll

• 56:19Sean Fennessey?

  just very quickly set up the movie, Adam, before you give us both your insights into it and kind of the broader context that it exists inside of. But as I said, directed by Matt Johnson, screenplay by Matt and Jay McCarron, his co-star and co-conspirator in this project. They've worked with a very small team for a number of years on what was first a web series and then was a television series and is now a feature film. Matt has directed a handful of other features, including 2023's BlackBerry. He was on the show for that. Easily one of my five favorite conversations in the history of the show. And he is a great showman and a great character. He's created a great character in the world and he and Jay together are great characters operating off of each other. And even though people may not have seen the web series or the television series,

• 57:04Sean Fennessey?

  or maybe they didn't see The Dirties or BlackBerry or Operation Avalanche, or any of the other things that he has done over the years. It takes, it took me 30 seconds to know exactly what the movie was doing and to find a way to love it. And that is an amazing magic trick and something that I just kind of want to get off my chest before anybody who is listening to this and thinking like, should I see this? Can I see this? Am I going to understand it with all this lore? Like Adam, as somebody who's, you know, known Matt for a while and is much more versed in the history of this project, you know, how do you, how would you set it up? And what did you think of it?

• 57:36Speaker 06

  Well, there's a big, big picture, which is that the long history of filmmaking in Toronto is always people running around without permission. And because I can feel Netflix subscribers cancelling as I say this, I won't do a long history of filmmaking in Toronto. But the short version is that you have movies like Nobody Waved Goodbye or Going Down the Road, which are shot kind of illegally and on the cheap and about what an alienating city Toronto is. Like, most of Canada hates Toronto. That's the job. So they like watching movies about what a crappy place it is to be. That's the plot of Going Down the Road. And Matt is not unaware of this. I think he's very aware of this. He talks a very good game, seeming unaware of everything. And he makes it seem, based on his references, that he's completely enthralled to Hollywood.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  But if you watch his movies from the beginning, like The Dirties, it's an ambivalent relationship to American film and a really funny idea about Canadian success. So, I mean, The Rivoli, which is the nightclub in the film, is a real nightclub in Toronto and playing it means nothing. I mean, the great joke of the show is that in 20 years, they haven't played The Rivoli. You would almost have to like be trying to not. You know? The Rivoli is a symbol of success that's really disproportionately big to them and recognizably small to anyone who lives here. And also, if you live in Toronto, you're very used to seeing the city play other places. Like, if the CN Tower shows up, it's an editing mistake. Or, like, it's set here, you know?

• 59:01Speaker 06

  So, this whole idea of local iconography is important to a lot of Toronto filmmakers and Nirvana. Like, it doesn't, I don't think it exoticizes Toronto, but it doesn't hide it. It turns the CN Tower into a prop. And like, the closest Canada's gonna ever get to a Mission Impossible scene, but it's like, also a Jackass scene. Like, they fused Mission Impossible and Jackass in a way that I've always thought made sense. You know, the idea of stunt takes on like, a triple meaning in the work. But, this is like, the third iteration of the Matt and Jay thing. And the way I read the film, I've written about it a little bit, is I find it a very interesting movie about getting older. Because they are literally chasing their 20-year-old selves.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  And I think chasing the freedom, and to some extent, the irresponsibility of not doing this professionally. And they put an awful lot of talent and resource to try and erase any progress they've made. Like Nirvana's about not making progress. And having to escape that progress and disguise it by replicating the camera types and shooting style. And then recreating Toronto in the image of 2008 and trying to fit into their old clothes and matches wears the same hat. There's a meaning there. It's just like, a lot of things that are kind of meaningful and about something superficially, it's very stupid. And the stupidity is like, expertly done. The highest compliment I can pay to this movie is if someone watches and said, "Those guys seem really stupid." I would be like, "Absolutely, does seem that way."

• 1:00:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's part of the design of it, for sure. I think there's also something in like, the technical approach that they take to it. Where you've got a lot of things that feel very 2008 culturally, like, into camera, fourth wall breaking. Or like, the whiteboard idea generation format of the series and the movie. Where they're constantly like, flipping down a whiteboard to write down one of Matt's schemes.

• 1:00:55Sean Fennessey?

  Or the black and white flashbacks with the slowed-down audio. That are all these like, callbacks to early YouTube culture and early like, handmade stuff. That is in the lineage of what you're talking about with the Canadian stuff. Plus, the movie, I think, is kind of- I'll speak for myself. Appropriately, as you're like in your early 40s and you're looking back at your long time friendships and the ways in which they change and the ways in which they don't change and the ways in which you become annoyed with your friends, but you're like, I will never leave this person. And it's a pretty soulful movie. I thought about that, even though it is very silly and very kind of stupid at times. It felt very genuine and very sincere while also being like an episode of Scooby Doo.

• 1:01:37Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that that's great. I it felt very unshackled by like expectations or irony or, you know, the a lot of stuff that I think kind of gets in the way of a lot of American comedies, a lot of American movies about friendship. It was just these guys kind of getting up to trouble at scale. And I don't know, it was very invigorating for me as a as a movie watcher. I really was moved by it.

• 1:01:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I I was surprised by the scale as well because it does because of the format and using like the older footage and there is like a two guys in a like shitty apartment with some orbits, you know, quality to this and like what mischief can we get up to? And that is the major appeal. And then they are suddenly on top of the CNN Tower, which, Adam, I do know what that is, even though I've, you know, never been and it's not prominently featured in most media made in Toronto. So it

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  Can you name another? Can you name another building in Toronto?

• 1:02:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, of course, the Rivoli.

• 1:02:39Speaker 06

  The Rivoli.

• 1:02:42Amanda Dobbins?

  And then a Drake's house.

• 1:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:02:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, that's three. But I've seen a lot of Architectural Digest features on that one. So

• 1:02:52Sean Fennessey?

  You've also seen it in this film.

• 1:02:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. Well, yeah. But but so it has this like these dueling, you know, it feels very small and intimate. And then it is also just suddenly when they're the the scene of the security entrance to the CNN, the CNN Tower.

• 1:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:03:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I just a mix of I can't believe this is happening. And also, he needs to cut a hole in his pants, like the explanation and is so weird and funny. And also, as you know, the jackass of it all is like, very apparent. A magical chemistry. I really, I really enjoyed it. But it is like the big and the little simultaneously that make it so exciting.

• 1:03:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I totally agree.

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  They, when they made Operation Avalanche famously, they like kind of broke into NASA. And to, to, to like, not just the characters, but the filmmakers, there's always a kind of one to one ratio between like what the characters get away with and their crew gets away with and with the actual actors and crew get away with because there's really no distance between them. I think the difference now is in the past, they would have to lie and prevaricate and cheat to get into these places. And now they can do that. And then CGI themselves doing something impossible like that's, that's putting the money on screen while still hiding it a little bit. But I mean, in Operation Avalanche, the thing I think of as a Canadian viewer, you know, I've, I've, I've written about this before when that movie came out. He doesn't just break into NASA. I mean, he films himself mad at one point as Matt Johnson shaking hands with Stanley Kubrick.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  Which is not just a good joke about John, about Kubrick faking the moon landing. That's really forward thing for a Canadian filmmaker to do. We have this kind of cinematic inferiority complex here where it's like, we either sneak into the American pipeline or we assume that Americans don't care. Couple of years ago, uh, you know, they did a list of the best Canadian films of all time. And because they were worried people wouldn't read it, they put like Titanic on it. Because technically James Cameron is from here, you know? I mean, didn't, I mean, Denis Villeneuve is not a Canadian filmmaker anymore either. So you have, you, you know, it, there's a lot of cultural baggage that we're talking about here. But within Toronto, the stuff you're talking about, they were doing this stuff forever. But the CN Tower represents the leveling up of where they're trying to break into these days.

• 1:05:06Speaker 06

  You know, it's a wonderful metaphor for the vertical integration of their project. It's like, well, at this point, it's not enough to just like, you know, sneak into some alt weekly office, you know, they got to breach the CN Tower.

• 1:05:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think the whole thing is an escalation in so many ways. I am, I think there's also something really, really clever about the time travel quality of the story. The, these two guys who are trying to play a show are always hatching schemes to attempt to get booked at the Rivoli and by some magical orbits infused circumstance, they both traveled back in time to 2008 and that allows them to.

• 1:05:45Sean Fennessey?

  Explore how our social mores have changed over that time and like what we would what we would accept and not accept. There's like a lot of great, really obvious, but very clever visual sight gags that feature figures who are no longer welcome in acceptable society these days. The Hangover gag in particular is kind of amazing because it's a reminder that 2008 is actually not that far away. And that joke, and that being the inciting incident for Matt's character to have the dawning realization is just like, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in a movie.

• 1:06:19Speaker 06

  I'm torn because, and I've talked to Matt about this, I'm not going to say who it was, but there's a well-known Canadian media personality who was at a screening of The Hangover in 2008, for real, which I was at, because I reviewed that from one of those alt-weeklies where you see the boxes turned over in the movies. They identified 2008 by the fact that there's an overturn now magazine box. And I used to, I used to, I used to write for the other Toronto alt-weekly. I mean, there was an early screening of The Hangover where that joke that you're referring to was laughed at for about five straight minutes by a, in real time, you know, by a character, by a media figure who's like a paragon of progressive virtue in Canada. And at the time, I was like, give me a break. And seeing that joke in the movie, I had to ask myself, I was like, were they at that

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  screening? Was Matt Johnson or what the producer, you know, at that same screening? Because it's so specific. The way they use 2008 joke, 2008 to tell jokes about that period and this one, I'm going to levy a little criticism here, analysis, without actually saying the joke themselves. It's very slippery. They kind of let the period tell the joke. They still want to tell the joke. They're just letting the period tell it. But it's very funny.

• 1:07:29Sean Fennessey?

  You know, so when I talked to Matt, I didn't ask him as many questions. And I know you spoke to him too. And I thought you guys had a great interview. And I used some of the things that you spoke about in it. But when I spoke to him, I didn't ask him like, how'd you get up in the CN Tower? It wasn't really about, I wasn't, I was more interested in what I think Adam is describing, which is The kind of edgelord quality that is infused in The Nirvana Project, where they're sort of like, kind of, if you look at the show too, in the past, always kind of nosing up to the edge of what is gonna be socially comfortable. And Matt, I thought, was very insightful about that. And like, why he explores it and why he's interested in it. And why, it's almost like this act of reexamining what they made 20 years ago by making a movie about going back 20 years ago.

• 1:08:12Sean Fennessey?

  But they can use the other cultural artifacts that are exposed in the movie to show, like, maybe this is why what I did back then was kind of like that. Because this is kind of what comedy was. Or this is what, to some people, this was a good idea. Again, a very, kind of labyrinthine, psychological concept inside of a dopey movie about time travel, that I think is really, really successful. The other thing that is sort of meta-textual in that way that I love is that, you know, Jay McCarroll, who, this is really his movie. He's really the star of this movie in many ways. He is a musician in real life. He's a composer. He's written film scores. He's worked with Matt for years on film scores. And he's a pop musician, too. And he has managed to, like, retrofit music that he wrote in the past

• 1:08:58Sean Fennessey?

  to show how he could be a pop star in this alternate reality that is portrayed in the movie. And they use one of the songs that he wrote in 2014. And now I just looked at that song on Spotify and it has like 10 million streams. And I'm like, I wonder how that happened? Like, the whole thing is such a clever Jenga tower of reconstruction of their lives.

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  His fake Weekend song. I love that Jay writes a song that would have like, you know, he like, beat the Weekend to the punch by like, three years for that kind of production. I mean, Jay, Matt thinks that the movie is not, he agrees with you. Not just that it's about Jay, but I mean, that Jay's the main character. And that Jay's dilemma is being yoked to this person who cannot shut off.

• 1:09:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  You know? And I think-

• 1:09:41Sean Fennessey?

  What does that be like for you?

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. Which one of you is the Matt and which one of you is the?

• 1:09:46Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, come on.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  Is the Jay. But I, but I should say for the people who are, you know, learning about these small Canadian movies through, you know, Netflix, uh, The Dirties, I don't know if you guys have watched it or watched it recently.

• 1:09:58Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen it, yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 06

  It's a very troubling movie.

• 1:10:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  Because it's really close to some of the stuff that Sean's talking about. I mean, it's close to it in a way where it's not mediated by cuteness or by nostalgia or by jokes. I mean, it's really about an aggressive strain in male cinephilia that's not attractive. And that can manifest in incredibly ugly ways. And I say that's a compliment to the movie. The highest compliment I can pay to it is even after 10 years of Matt's stuff, you know, here in Toronto, I watched The Dirties last fall at U of T. He came into the screening of it and I was watching it. It's quite a frightening movie.

• 1:10:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  I mean, it's good and it's funny, but it's not nice, you know? And, uh, it's very interesting to consider with each iteration of Nirvana, the band, the show, as they're getting more self reflexive, is it also kind of gentrifying themselves too? Because they're recreating their early twenties and this cheap jack way of doing it with more and more resource. And that'll probably drive them crazy to have people say that because I think by a lot of standards, this is still a small movie. And when you're opening in the U S against, you know, Project Hail Mary or something, this movie is like something you hold up on a toothpick. But it's not the same thing as when they were truly broke making this show. But man, for people in Toronto, that show was legitimately a big deal. And now it's not available on any streaming service.

• 1:11:17Sean Fennessey?

  I know. It sounds like that's going to change, um, based on my conversation with Matt.

• 1:11:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm sure it will, but people, but I, but my, my social media feed in the last three weeks, it's all clips from the show.

• 1:11:29Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:11:29Speaker 06

  And I promise you, I'm not looking for them. I've seen this already. I don't need to see it again, but it's.

• 1:11:33Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there, there's even like a wonderful thing in the movie where if you haven't seen the show, it doesn't really matter. But there's a sequence when they go back into the past and they go to encounter their, their younger selves where they don't purposely encounter them. But they go back to that apartment to get something that they need. And It's a it's a box of orbits. Yes, a box of orbits, which is super powerful. And they're hiding in their own closet at the time. And through the closet, you can hear them doing bits from episodes of the show. You know, like the video game song that Jay sings, which is like iconic on the show. But just to give you like 20 seconds of that in the movie is fan service. But it's also like a reflection of this whole arc of creativity that they had together. I think all that stuff is really wonderful.

• 1:12:17Sean Fennessey?

  What you're saying is really interesting, too, which is like Matt now. I heard a rumor about a gig that Matt interviewed for 18 months ago. And I was like, wow, that would be quite an elevation. He didn't actually get that job, and I don't even know if it was really true. I didn't ask him, but he's he's just made a movie about Anthony Bourdain for A24. And now the next movie he's making is an adaptation of Magic the Gathering, the card game. That is, that is, he's now really on the kind of step ladder of Hollywood ascension. Those are two big steps, and they're very different. They're going to be very different, I presume, from what he has done previously. So we did talk a bit about that, but I'm so interested in in his where he goes. Do you feel betrayed by that, Adam?

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  No, but I mean, it's business as usual, right? I mean, the Canadian Film Center was founded by Norman Jewison. And Norman Jewison won an Academy Award for Best Picture for In the Heat of the Night, which has nothing to do with Canada. It's about American race relations. The filmmakers who've stayed close to home have done so either out of excessive pride or practicality or some combination thereof. I'm contractually mandated to mention David Cronenberg, you know, who's a filmmaker who made it work, even with international money, making movies here. But all these Canadian filmmakers get tempted towards Hollywood. Some of them like it, you know, some of them don't. And I think Johnson is someone who with BlackBerry, that's the movie where this all seemed possible.

• 1:13:43Speaker 06

  I have a standard for certain kinds of movies where I'm like, what does a normal person think of them? And our definitions for normal people might change. But, you know, I know a lot of abnormal people, and I also know a lot of normal people. I have a pretty normal life outside of my movie writing. And I would ask the normal people, like friends, parents, you know, or other moms or dads in the playground, be like, you guys watch BlackBerry? Like, oh, yeah, I saw that. And that's because the Matt Johnson-ness of that movie is compartmentalized into Matt's own performance.

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:14:10Speaker 06

  Which has less than nothing to do with the story of BlackBerry. But because there's a cipher in that company, no, the the whole story of the way they make movies and the BlackBerry is a startup, those two things are allegories for each other.

• 1:14:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 06

  But like J. J. J. Barishel was playing a kind of real person and Glenn Howerton, who is dead friggin brilliant in that movie, is playing a version of Jim Ball silly. Matt's just there because that's what he does and it's funny. He can't do that with Anthony Bourdain.

• 1:14:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:14:39Speaker 06

  You know, he he can't do that with a prestige drama or something. So that's what I'm wondering is how will we let go? Or how will he let go? Like, is there going to be a Matt Johnson, Magic the Gathering character? I know, but another project he's working on, which I won't talk about, which also has this possibility for sort of, you know, bridging these things. This is what I wonder, because I can't think of too many other Canadian filmmakers who are as visible as he is in the work. I can't think of too many filmmakers, period.

• 1:15:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:15:06Speaker 06

  God forbid, like, who are we talking about? Are we talking Jerry Lewis? You know, I mean, it's like quite.

• 1:15:11Sean Fennessey?

  No, I know.

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  It's it's really, it's really essential to the work. And I wonder at a certain point if that's going to bump up against some practical thing of like, he can't do this anymore.

• 1:15:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was, I mean, it's like.

• 1:15:21Speaker 06

  Or you do it in perpetuity.

• 1:15:23Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's like Woody Allen or like Melvin Van Peebles. Like, there's like a very short list of people who are like, the way that the way that they look and communicate in like, organizes and informs what the movie is. And a lot, auteurs don't have that. I'm so interested in Tony. I I'm fascinated and, you know, it sounds like that was a complicated movie in some ways and he did talk about it a little bit, but just for him to not be in the movie, representing his point of view and his energy is is different. But, you know, I'm just so happy that people are seeing this movie and that they like it and that it is, you know, you've you've given us this wonderful gift. Once again, Canada has blessed American movie audiences. We salute Canada. We will annex you soon, but otherwise we salute you.

• 1:16:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, we've we've been feeling really great about the relationship lately. The Olympics were really the chair. The Olympics were really.

• 1:16:15Sean Fennessey?

  You guys watch that?

• 1:16:16Speaker 06

  You you've you've not lived until you've been waiting like on a pool deck while your kid is doing swimming lessons and 18 moms and dads are watching the hockey game on their phone and just collectively you just hear, fuck. It was great.

• 1:16:31Speaker 06

  Just everybody in like a couple. Exactly opposite of my household, I gotta tell you.

• 1:16:34Amanda Dobbins?

  It was really, it was 7:53 in the morning. We needed that.

• 1:16:38Speaker 06

  But yeah, I think it's, I'm always interested in how these things that wear their Torontonian-ness on their sleeve get received. And this seems to be a successful incursion, you know? This, this is like a backdoor entry into, to taking over some version of the, the Hollywood film cultural establishment.

• 1:16:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I mean, designed to be an instant cult classic, right? Like it's, it's not gonna make a hundred million dollars or anything, but.

• 1:17:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but even as I was just looking around today of where it's showing and it is, you know, at a, at my favorite theaters here in Los Angeles, but also like the Music Box in Chicago and at the Coolidge in Boston and all of these, like the other, like great local community, like vibes theaters across the US, um, where we've done events and where you know, it's like, well, what real ones know to go see what's at that. So it, it, it is definitely, I mean, it's very, very highly rated on Letterboxd.

• 1:17:32Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It's found its people.

• 1:17:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 06

  Hypothetical Toronto walking tour with you guys, if you ever dated to visit here, you know, I'll show you all the spots. I'll be like, and that's the place where they also didn't get in somewhere.

• 1:17:44Speaker 06

  That's also the, the, the, the, the most, the most Torontonian moment in the whole movie, of course, is when he runs across the raccoon and freaks out.

• 1:17:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I wrote that down in the notes. There's like, watching that the second time is so fucking funny.

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Well, cause there's a great, there's a movie by someone who's collaborated with Matt a lot, Kuzick Radoski, and in his first film, Tower, it's the only movie in history that builds to a confrontation with a raccoon. And it's like, you know, Nirvana only has the raccoon as a kind of throwaway moment, but you know, they filmed, but they filmed the Resident Evil movies here. You know, Paul W. Anderson, Mila Jovovich are off, were often seen in Toronto because Resident Evil was set in Raccoon City and Toronto, you know, but also the movie that hasn't come up on this pod that I just want to mention maybe in closing or in passing. I mean, it is so funny how close this movie is to Scott Pilgrim, to the point where they are actually traveling back to roughly when Scott Pilgrim was happening.

• 1:18:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  Because indie rock and that indie rock insular culture, and particularly the critique of the, the whiteness of it and the edgelordiness of it, if you're gonna give the movie the benefit of the doubt, where it's not just symptomatic, but it's like a critique. That's the way Scott Pilgrim looks 15 years later, too. And I think that there's a great piece to be written or a great series of thoughts to be had about the dialogue that those movies are having. I don't mean that Scott Pilgrim is an influence, but I can't think of the two things separately, maybe because Scott Pilgrim was the last time that a global audience had Toronto shoved down their throat.

• 1:19:10Sean Fennessey?

  Totally, that's what it is. Yeah. It is such a deeply Canadian movie and we don't get a lot of those through the Hollywood system. This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

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• 1:20:28Sean Fennessey?

  Adam, what a delight to see you. When will you be back on the show?

• 1:20:31Speaker 06

  I don't know. When will I be back on the show? I wait by the phone for you.

• 1:20:35Sean Fennessey?

  What do you want to talk about? What is it you want to say to the people?

• 1:20:38Speaker 06

  What is it I want to say to the people? I'm so grumpy, you know? I want to talk about whether the Raptors are going to get home court in the playoffs. I would love to talk further about Toronto. Who knows if that will happen? I look, I look, I, I, I'm around.

• 1:20:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. We'll see. Maybe we will at some point in the future. Fingers crossed. Adam, thank you so much. You can read Adam on theringer.com and in many other places. And you can hear him on this pod. I don't know. We're going to find a really good topic soon.

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, you know, you guys take, take care of yourselves. It's nice to see you guys.

• 1:21:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Congrats on all the Netflix, Adam. Bye. Okay, let's go now to my conversation with Matt Johnson.

• 1:21:25Sean Fennessey?

  Back by popular demand, Matt Johnson. So it's three, not quite three years ago that I saw you.

• 1:21:31Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Sean Fennessey?

  And as I just said to you, one of the most requested return guests in the history of the show. I think people were touched, moved, thrilled, amused by your last chat about BlackBerry. And you're here for a movie that started as an inside joke. And I've heard so many people ask you, how did you make the movie? But I don't know if I've heard too many people ask you why you made the movie.

• 1:21:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, which is, it's funny, the secret of everything is behind that. Because right after you and I had spoke, it was like, it was really my first time being in Los Angeles, where people were, were talking about that film, which also was a small Canadian.

• 1:22:10Speaker 08

  The fire alarm went off.

• 1:22:11Speaker 09

  I was, I was warned of this. Zara Larson is shooting a music video and they're using a fog machine. There's not an actual fire.

• 1:22:18Sean Fennessey?

  We should leave this in the episode, seriously.

• 1:22:21Speaker 08

  Zara Larson.

• 1:22:23Sean Fennessey?

  Damn you, Zara.

• 1:22:24Speaker 08

  You couldn't have picked a better name. But that, that, the success that came from that, I think I was, for the first time faced with like, the opportunity to make movies in Hollywood. And I was so, maybe not worried, but I kind of felt, you know, this German term, torschluss panic?

• 1:22:44Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:22:44Speaker 08

  It's an amazing, an amazing, the Germans had this great, great ability to combine a bunch of different words to create a new kind of idea. And what it means, it translates to gate closing panic. And it's the type of fear that you only feel when an opportunity is about to be gone forever. It's like the feeling of rushing towards a door before it closes. And I was feeling that about being able to do something completely on my own, where, where I was in charge of it all and could do essentially anything. And so I was like, okay, maybe this is my last chance to make a movie where. Where I make it only with my friends, only in Toronto, and we do whatever we want. And so I took the opportunity to make Nirvana, the Band of the Show, the movie as opposed to doing something else.

• 1:23:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny because I feel like the instinct of most people would be I have to race toward the gate closing on my big Hollywood movie.

• 1:23:33Speaker 08

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:34Sean Fennessey?

  And not, I'm gonna stay local, stay personal, make that choice that you, like, what do you think informs that?

• 1:23:41Speaker 08

  I think the fact that I had been making movies in Canada for so long that there wasn't, there was no novelty behind the opportunity of doing a bigger movie. And I don't mean to say that I was inured to it because I've been offered so many opportunities. I've been offered zero, but I was like, well, I've been making movies for no money by myself with my few friends for whatever 15 years. It's not like another year of people waiting to make a movie with me is gonna change. Do you know what I mean? I think a lot of filmmakers that I know specifically are so in their own heads that even the opportunities they do get given take two, three, four years to manifest anyway. So also, I mean, the truth is, I thought it was gonna take me like

• 1:24:25Speaker 08

  two and a half months to make this movie and it took two years. So that is another big thing with.

• 1:24:30Sean Fennessey?

  Was a factor, I know that BlackBerry had some American financing in it and this movie didn't, right? This movie was entirely Canadian. So was that a factor too of like kind of going back to just that style?

• 1:24:39Speaker 08

  No, I just knew that it would be impossible to pitch this movie to anybody, right? I mean, you've seen it and I think there's a kind of survivor bias with it where you watch it and you're like, oh yeah, this is marketable in a way. Like I can see giving this like a few hundred thousand dollars to make, but before it's done, it really is like trying to like buy a jar of chaos. Like, how am I supposed to pitch this movie to you?

• 1:25:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, okay, so I want to pitch something to you then. So I just, I wrote this down last night as I was thinking about what you guys have been doing together. And so like, it's kind of an aesthetic semiotic question around this project. So there seems to be some concern, and I've gotten this even just from people who have heard me talking the movie up, that. The uninitiated seeing the movie might be confused about what it is, right? That like the context of the web series or the TV show, if you haven't seen it, you're gonna be confused. But the movie works, I think, because you and Jay are not just charming and the movie's not just really entertaining and well-made. But it's like you're using archetype comedy characters.

• 1:25:40Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:25:40Sean Fennessey?

  That are so instantaneously legible in the first scene, that it's like, I know exactly what this is. And it doesn't matter if you don't have that context. Do you agree with that?

• 1:25:49Speaker 08

  I'll take this a big step further. I think the movie is twice as effective on people who have no idea what's happened before. My experience is that fans who see the movie love it, but they always have a kind of, ah, but you guys really went crazier in the TV show. Which of course we did, because I'm on a tiny network in Canada and it's television, so the same rules don't apply. I think that the ideal situation for this movie is watching it from a place of complete ignorance, being like, how did this ever happen? There's more layers that you have to crash through, whereas if you've seen the show or you know anything, even if you've seen BlackBerry,

• 1:26:30Speaker 08

  I think it gives you a bit of a nod to the, not the surreality of it, but to the way these characters speak.

• 1:26:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:36Speaker 08

  I think, I think Jay and I specifically, but in all my films, 90% of the comedy is the intonation of the English language. Like, I find that funnier than almost anything. And so if you've just never been exposed to that in this type of work, then I think you're really being like, whoa, what is this? But I'll, I'll address your point directly. Yes, Jay and I are basically playing versions of adults in the way that children think of adults, right? Like, whenever, whenever I'm thinking of Dravon and the Band, I, I always, that, that image of, uh, Brain from Pinky and the Brain, when he gets inside the robot of the president's suit, like, that's really what this is. If Calvin and Hobbes could put on adult clothes and go out and have an adventure, that's what it is.

• 1:27:18Speaker 08

  And so that archetype that you're talking about is so fun to play in because this is the way prepubescent boys see. Adulthood.

• 1:27:28Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:29Speaker 08

  We are, our band's gonna get a show. Well, how do we do it? Well, we've got to trick them. Well, we've got to climb up the big tower in the city. Well, we've got to lie to everybody because of course we're kids. They're never gonna let us go do it for real. Like, we're six years old. And so I think that without ever stating that, it makes it so that the audience gets it without even needing to. I heard somebody say something so great. Nirvana, the band, the show is, it's the kind of movie that you cannot explain. But if you watch two minutes of it, you could write your own episode.

• 1:27:58Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:27:59Speaker 08

  And that sums it up beautifully.

• 1:28:01Sean Fennessey?

  Do you and Jay intellectualize it in this way when you're coming up with ideas?

• 1:28:05Speaker 08

  No.

• 1:28:06Sean Fennessey?

  Cause you, you, you are like uniquely articulate about the process and you're willing to engage with complex intellectual questions about what you've made this very silly fun movie that you've made. But it does feel like sometimes you've really labored over something and other times it feels like you just thought it would be fun and you just did it.

• 1:28:23Speaker 08

  I don't know that there's any difference between those two things because, well, one, it's not like we are ever, I heard this great quote. I forget who said it, but like work that's trying to be clever first, often sabotages itself. You wind up getting hamstrung by the fact that you tried to, tried to lead with clever. And so it's not like my friends and I are sitting in a room being like, okay, so what would be like a smart way to do this? Really, the process, as silly as it seems, is like we're all trying to remember the same dream we had. Like, that's how all the writing happens. We're like, oh, it'll be a time travel movie where we go back to 2008 and then we change something and then the future is different. And that's like the, the beginning idea.

• 1:29:07Speaker 08

  And then somebody would be like, oh, and in the future Jay's famous. And then everybody in the room just goes, yes, that is what happened. Not that's what should happen. It's as though we're remembering a dream we had the night before. And that's every single detail of it. So it's not like we're saying, oh, that's so smart. It just, it just all feels right. Which is again, getting into this archetype thing you brought up.

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's really interesting. You called movies an American religion recently in an interview, which I'm obsessed with and is certainly how I view them and how, kind of how I've organized my life in many ways. And I was wondering how you filtered that through the movie. There's the obvious like Back to the Future aspect of it, but what about the other ways you thought about that concept inside the movie?

• 1:29:46Speaker 08

  Well, you, one.

• 1:29:50Speaker 08

  In the same way that religious language was, it's funny to think of it this way, but was pop culture throughout most of human history, where when you would talk with people, when you read old books, oftentimes they are quoting or relating things to scripture casually in conversation with one another, because it was the kind of common culture. Everybody knew it. Everybody knew, like you, have you seen that Star Trek episode, Darmok and Gilat at Tanagra? Have you heard this?

• 1:30:20Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 1:30:20Speaker 08

  You'd love it. I'll teach it to you in a second. So Captain Picard is sent to a planet, and you know how they have the universal translator?

• 1:30:26Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:26Speaker 08

  Where everybody can speak the same language, it doesn't matter? Well, he's on a planet with this alien creature, and they are both speaking English, but the guy that he's with only speaks idiomatically. So the things that he's saying are intelligible, but it's all idioms from his own culture. So no translator can get through them. It doesn't matter what Picard says, they don't understand each other, because this guy's talking in idiom, and the episode is about Picard learning the idiomatic history of his culture, so that they can talk to one another. And anyway, that's what the Bible was to us, and so the idea that now instead we have

• 1:31:08Speaker 08

  all of these movies that we quote has totally replaced that. And so these characters in Nirvana the Band, again, this isn't the kind of thing that my friends and I talk about. In a million years, we would, it would be like, but it's not interesting, really, to us. But, but that's what these guys are doing. They're kind of speaking in the new religious language, that's why the movie is about Back to the Future, and they're talking about Back to the Future as though it is, in the way that a kid thinks that the Force is real, it, Back to the Future, time travel, is real to these guys, so long as they can get their toys to move in the right way.

• 1:31:44Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that that is just a micro-generational experience, or something that has legs?

• 1:31:49Speaker 08

  It's funny, as you walk around in Los Angeles, you'll notice that a lot of the old movie theaters are being converted into churches, and so, who knows, maybe it's going back. But, but, like, the references may change, but again, it's exactly like that Star Trek episode. We have no choice. We are gonna speak in the stories of our culture. And that's that's never gonna change. In fact, I think it's a tragedy that in some ways that we all don't have to sit and watch the same TV channels like we used to when I was a kid. Because even if those shows were bad, or even if like, it didn't matter. It was so great having this like, common muck that we could all make inside jokes about to one another.

• 1:32:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. I feel like the the show and the and the film and a lot of what you've made is kind of like, bound by nostalgia, not defined by nostalgia. And a lot of what you're describing here is how much of it is the affection we have for things that we experienced at a young age and maybe can't even really see clearly because of the time that we saw them. Is there any part of you that was like worried about that? Because the film is kind of about that, right? About going back to a time when things seemed more innocent or more fun or more like possible, more open?

• 1:33:02Speaker 08

  Well, you're just describing childhood for everybody.

• 1:33:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Speaker 08

  Right? Like, if we were here with somebody who was born in 1950, they would feel as though they had more options in terms of what they could do when they were a kid than when they were in their 30s, too. I think that that's a universal feeling, that I don't know if it's gonna go anywhere. Again, it's it's sad that we don't have the same universal references. But, you know, it's strange. Like, I'm I've done so many Q and A's for this film now, and it it's like people who are 19 and 20 years old are watching this movie being like, oh, my God, it was so great. I love all the references. And so, I mean, how do you explain that? Like, there's a there's a big 9/11 reference that, I mean, I suppose that's such a major cultural moment, but like, we thought that would only be funny to people who had lived

• 1:33:49Speaker 08

  through it. So, yeah, I don't know, but that's a hard question to answer because I'm not an anthropologist. Like, I have no idea how these things work.

• 1:33:57Sean Fennessey?

  I know, but I feel like you're kind of doing that work, even if it's not academically, by making these projects. Like, they do seem like these kind of socio-historical explorations of yourself.

• 1:34:05Speaker 08

  Well, I am very interested in the things that I went through when I was a kid, and I'll keep making movies about it until I I don't even mean to. Like, BlackBerry, my favorite part of that film is in the 90s, when I'm in that engineering room with those other guys. Like, I look at that and I'm like, that is what my childhood was like. I wish I could live in that world. And and obviously, Black, I mean, Nirvana, the band, the show, is exactly that. It's me recreating the sleepover culture that I had when I was a little boy. But.

• 1:34:35Speaker 08

  I don't have an intention behind it, other than to say that I'm attracted to those things. Right?

• 1:34:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I've, I've, it's as I've, I've talked to so many filmmakers over the years. Last time Greta Gerwig was on the show, I was like, okay, so, you know, you made Lady Bird, a movie about your adolescence.

• 1:34:50Speaker 08

  Then your favorite toy, then your favorite book.

• 1:34:52Sean Fennessey?

  And then your favorite toy, and then your favorite book, and Little Women, and your other favorite book, Little Women. So it's like, all of these explorations of like, coming of age, girlhood. That's what a lot of your stories are about. And she was like, I hadn't thought about that, you know, common interviewer question, though, of just like, trying to find centrality thematically around what you do. And you're kind of describing something similar, but not intentional. Just like, this is how I feel.

• 1:35:12Speaker 08

  But what's intent? Like, why do you love somebody? Like, why do two people look at a painting and one person says, I love it, the other says, I hate it? Would you call that intent?

• 1:35:23Speaker 08

  You, I mean, that's just, that's the, that's the, that's the soul you were given. Right, in a way, right?

• 1:35:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:35:28Speaker 08

  I don't pick my eyes.

• 1:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think I'm looking for the middle ground between neuroses and, and artistic intention, you know, or sort of like, the things you keep getting drawn to, back to why, like, looking into why that happens.

• 1:35:39Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, I think the, the best feeling I get, either when we're writing something, my friends and I together, or when I'm watching a movie, it's not where I'm like laughing hysterically, or when I like love something, it's when I, a little light in my head goes on and says, that's true.

• 1:35:55Speaker 08

  Oh, that's true. Like, I watch a movie, like, I, like, I mean, I'll pick anything. Like, I'm watching the movie Whiplash, and I'm seeing all this terrible stuff, and I go, yeah, that's true, that's real. And when I say that's real, I mean, it's, it doesn't matter that it didn't happen.

• 1:36:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:36:08Speaker 08

  It's real.

• 1:36:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. And not just authentic, although it does feel authentic, but you're like, it's happening right now before me? I know exactly what you mean when you say that.

• 1:36:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, and I think that that is, again, strangely, the connection with it and religion. There's this, I mean, this Carl Jung idea where, I forget what the word for it is. It might be synchronicity, even though that word now is talking about like, computer, computers taking over reality. Where the fiction world and the real world touch, it's like these magic moments where you see something and it is fake. But it's also real. Right? I think the, the example he uses is like the story of Jesus, where it's like a fictional story. Everybody acts like it's real. Like, so how do you explain that? And, and those types of moments, I, I see all the times in movies. Werner Herzog's a master of this. And they, they animate me in a way that I can't explain.

• 1:37:00Speaker 08

  And so for me to think of like the intent behind my own movies is impossible. Because I have no idea why I'm drawn to certain things. I remember I saw the, the Orson Welles film F for Fake. And I'm sitting there watching it on like a tiny computer. I forget who'd shown it to me. And I was like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. How have I never heard of it? I feel like it was made just for me. Like it was meant for me and it was meant for me to steal from it. It was like literally instructions for me. And when you find something like that. Every, everybody has these experiences, but, but yeah, I, I guess I just, I run after them.

• 1:37:40Sean Fennessey?

  It's a coherent touchstone because I feel like a lot of people have been desperately trying to explain or make comparisons for what the, this new movie is. And you hear a lot of Jackass, right? Because there's sort of real world experiential stunt quality to so much of what you're doing. And Borat, yes. Well, and I think part of that is like the convulsive, like I had no idea this was coming feeling that the movie gives you.

• 1:37:58Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:37:59Sean Fennessey?

  Which was a great experience when we saw those movies in movie theaters.

• 1:38:01Speaker 08

  Right, a kind of chaos out of controllness that only in my opinion, like America would like, look, it, it's no coincidence that Sacha Baron Cohen had to come to America to make that movie. Right? And Jackass, although they were hardcore ripping off a Canadian Tom Green. It's still, it's like that collision with American anything goes ism that, that really lets it take off. In fact, all three of these examples, like Jackass really is like Tom Green via America. And then Borat is literally the BBC via America. And even our movie is Canadians creating an American movie. We're remaking Back to the Future. So there's, there's something about that, that, that the, I want to say like a Commonwealth

• 1:38:46Speaker 08

  sensibility combined with this American freedom that gives you this feeling of, oh, this could go anywhere. Yeah. And also it's a lot of like culture worship. I think all three of those are basically. American advertisements.

• 1:39:01Sean Fennessey?

  They are, but they're simultaneously undermining and almost lampooning an American idea of like civility or comfort, you know, like by sending figures into the world who can kind of like show you how silly and distorted some of those experiences are.

• 1:39:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, of course, but that's, everything has to have an up and a down, like, otherwise everyone would reject it.

• 1:39:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious about you and Jay.

• 1:39:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:26Sean Fennessey?

  So you've known each other. When did you first meet?

• 1:39:28Speaker 08

  In high school, when we were just, I think in grade nine or ninth grade, as you guys would say.

• 1:39:31Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so you, it's over three decades that you've been, or about three decades that you've been friends. You're directing him now in a mainstream film that is about a project that you've been doing for almost 20 years.

• 1:39:45Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:39:45Sean Fennessey?

  And you both have had individual success and you've worked together a lot over the years as well. But Jay is really centered in the movie in a way that he's not in the show.

• 1:39:56Speaker 08

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:39:57Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm curious like what it's like to direct him, because you get a really good performance out of him.

• 1:40:02Speaker 08

  He's unbelievable.

• 1:40:03Sean Fennessey?

  And so can you kind of talk about making sure that that happens, doing it in the way that is like, where you guys can trust each other, like it feels, it felt different from the show.

• 1:40:13Speaker 08

  Look, the word trust is the big one. I gotta give Jay all the credit here. I mean, I would direct him in as much as I would like, give him lines in his voice when we'd be acting together. Sometimes even on camera, you can see me giving him lines that we've, that in my mouth will be moving, but no words are coming out. But I am not, I'm not directing him in the way that's, let's say I was directing a movie like BlackBerry. Like, both of us are just waiting for the other one to say something interesting and then following it up. So like, I mean, I can't take very little credit for that. That's, that's 99% Jay McCarroll, who's just become an extremely gifted thespian. And I think because he's so like,

• 1:40:55Speaker 08

  He really wanted to do a good job like like he he he thought about what his character was going through and because he was on set for BlackBerry and both of us really, really watched Glenn and Jay Baruchel like we really watched them because we'd never seen real actors do anything and the amount that they were able to do with just their faces without talking like they were just so disciplined and I know that left a big impact on him and so he he was really trying to do something great and we both knew early on that he was the protagonist of the story because he was the one who needed to change right he was the person who at the beginning was like this life isn't working for me and then in the last second not to spoil anything but but but well this

• 1:41:37Speaker 08

  will spoil the whole movie but you know what I mean like and so he realized that he was gonna do most of the lifting and specifically relating to your question about mostly first audiences seeing this movie he was gonna be the person who anchored them he is the audience right like when he looks at the camera and is like this is crazy or when he gets convinced it's really the audience is being convinced and so again I I don't want to take any credit for that but he just has a really brilliant aptitude for understanding what the real world would feel in these moments.

• 1:42:12Sean Fennessey?

  When you say it took two years to make the movie, what do you mean by that and how did you know when you were done?

• 1:42:19Speaker 08

  We just added a new ending to the movie that's only gonna be released on DVD two days ago and and I'm telling you it changes everything. There's a scene after the credits where you get to see, well I mean this will spoil it, but you get to see a scene from another angle.

• 1:42:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:42:38Speaker 08

  That changes the entire movie and I mean literally.

• 1:42:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:42:42Speaker 08

  It's like the creation of a supervillain.

• 1:42:43Sean Fennessey?

  I feel comfortable talking about some details of the movie because I think

• 1:42:48Speaker 08

  Oh yeah, most people.

• 1:42:49Sean Fennessey?

  Serious, serious, serious listeners of the show will be all over this movie. They already are. The doubling.

• 1:42:55Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:42:55Sean Fennessey?

  The time travel and the doubling seems very complex.

• 1:42:58Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Sean Fennessey?

  And especially for a movie at this scale. How did you do that?

• 1:43:01Speaker 08

  So we were really, really lucky in in that the movie jumps back and forth between 2025 and in 2008 and we had been shooting.

• 1:43:10Speaker 08

  Web series versions of this show when we were kids, basically. And we had just shot so much of it that when the idea of making a time travel movie came up, the first thing the editors Kurt and Bobby did was just watch every single one of those DV tapes, waiting for like split second moments of like useful story beats. And, and the first one they found where we were like, oh my gosh, we can build an entire movie around this, was that clip that opens the film of me next to Jay going, you know what, Jay? I think things are going to work out for us. And then in that same shot, you see us walk down Queen Street. And we turning and Jay goes, hey, does that guy look like me? And then I go, that guy? He looks like me.

• 1:43:53Speaker 08

  And we were talking about an advertisement outside of a FCUK store, but the camera pans over and then back and then we keep walking. And when we saw that clip, it's like maybe one minute, we were like, okay, we can build the entire movie around this because it answered so many questions. It's like, okay, so we saw ourselves as kids. So then what were we as adults doing there? And why were we trying to get something? And that's where we got the idea that we need to steal fuel for the time machine that would have got us there. And so we just built the whole story backwards out of it. And everything else, although it seems like it's like special effects is all just clever editing.

• 1:44:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's alarmingly effective.

• 1:44:33Speaker 08

  It's one of my favorite things I've ever been a part of in my life. When you're seeing young me talk to young Jay about the meaning of life. When we're literally talking to one another through 17 years of time. And that conversation is thematically resolving the movie that these guys are trapped inside of. Yeah, I, it's one of those things that as you, as you see it, you're, it's depressing because you're like, I will never be able to do anything like this ever again.

• 1:45:01Sean Fennessey?

  So there's an incredible hangover joke in this movie.

• 1:45:04Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:45:05Sean Fennessey?

  That people love and that.

• 1:45:06Speaker 08

  Which we did, which by the way, for us was just a minor plot point. We never thought that that was going to be that big of a laugh.

• 1:45:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think maybe American audiences and their relationship to that movie. And you know, over the years, podcasting about movies so much, we are, especially on that show, the rewatchables that we do. We go back and like, look at the core essence of what was comedy in 2008. What was acceptable, or what was understood to be really funny? And that's something that's really great about what you're doing in the movie, but also kind of sort of turning it on yourself and like the web series and the TV show.

• 1:45:37Speaker 08

  Definitely.

• 1:45:37Sean Fennessey?

  Are these like, kind of like Cliff's Edge of bad taste, or like confronting what is acceptable?

• 1:45:42Speaker 08

  It was open, open edgelordism. I mean, that's really the ethos that was driving that show.

• 1:45:47Sean Fennessey?

  So can you like, talk about that and maybe how you feel about that now you're at this stage of your life and even making a movie that seems to be like, looking back at your own edgelordism?

• 1:45:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's strange. Again, like I said, it was sort of a means to an end. I'm talking about this hangover joke in the movie that we all just thought was a great way for the characters to realize they're in 2008. And I didn't realize that it was going to become such a, as you so definitely put it, like a, like a true talking point around me looking at my own childhood. Because so much of it, I filmed my first movie is about me as an edgelord school shooter, literally. And, and it's funny. It is a kind of like millennialism that I grew up in. But I, I have to be honest, I'm not judgmental of it whatsoever. I actually think that for

• 1:46:37Speaker 08

  a kid, I talk from my own experience, there's something really magical about taboos. And whenever our society creates a taboo around anything, doesn't matter what it is. Like, kids, especially naughty little boys, are going to be like, well, what happens if I do touch it?

• 1:46:54Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:55Speaker 08

  And that is somehow addictive and it animated me in a way that I would not have made my early films if I didn't have that, that feeling of wanting to, to deal with something that was taboo. Because it's like when you're given a rule as a little kid, that your parents just tell you because they're trying to make you quieter, have you stay in your room where you're like, wait a minute, is this a real rule?

• 1:47:18Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:19Speaker 08

  And what is a rule?

• 1:47:21Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think it's sometimes correlated to ultimate bad behavior, but just because you're an edgelord doesn't mean you are doing bad behavior, but you're so close to the line of someone else who's crossing the line.

• 1:47:32Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:47:32Sean Fennessey?

  And so, you know, when we talk about it on that show, at least in terms of comedy, it's so, it's literally framed by this category, what's aged the worst?

• 1:47:39Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know, and the idea of paging doctor from The Hangover is like, that hasn't aged well. That's not a joke you would do right now.

• 1:47:45Speaker 08

  In a million years. And what's so crazy is that eve, it's not even, I mean, here I am judging comedy.

• 1:47:50Sean Fennessey?

  It's not even judgment. It's sort of a like, I don't even, I'm not sure what the right way to phrase it is because there's no clear way to communicate what's right and what's wrong. It's just like, that doesn't feel right anymore.

• 1:47:58Speaker 08

  No, it doesn't. But my point was that even at its time, I don't even know that that was that great of a joke. It's, I suppose the idea is the expectation of this guy who's a doctor and his wife has got these high expectations for him and his friends. And then Bradley Cooper says, the worst possible thing in terms of him trying to be like, no, my friends are trustworthy people. We're going away, everything will be fine. So.

• 1:48:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's like kind of good character building for the Cooper character.

• 1:48:23Speaker 08

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:48:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is like, he's the boorish asshole.

• 1:48:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:25Sean Fennessey?

  Now you know, he's the one who said that. At the time, we knew that, but now there are like, I think a lot of the boundaries and you kind of going back to your own boundaries and even just me looking back at the web series, I'm like, wow, Matt was pushing it.

• 1:48:37Speaker 08

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:48:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like this is, this is unusual to, to go back and see this this way.

• 1:48:40Speaker 08

  But isn't it so crazy? Because to me, I'm making that show with Jay and Jared, our cinematographer, and we're making it for like seven people.

• 1:48:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48Speaker 08

  Who live like within a mile of us.

• 1:48:51Sean Fennessey?

  Is that good though? Do you want people to be finding it now? Is, are you excited about that?

• 1:48:55Speaker 08

  Uh, excited? No, but I'm certainly not against it. But it's so strange because what you're watching is like a childhood project that was made in total anonymity by people who were in Canada, never thinking that anybody would ever in a million years watch this stuff. And so I, it's why I'm so cautious around saying like, oh yeah, that was so stupid or I would never do that again, because I would be lying. Like I, I, I think that the, the things that were animating me and the things that I found funny, I have to honor those things because.

• 1:49:33Speaker 08

  That was me.

• 1:49:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:36Speaker 08

  And that child still exists inside me.

• 1:49:38Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:39Speaker 08

  So, yeah, I'm sorry. I have no choice.

• 1:49:43Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I know that you and and your your lawyer have become

• 1:49:47Speaker 08

  Very good friends.

• 1:49:48Sean Fennessey?

  And samurize in the face of fair use.

• 1:49:50Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:49:51Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:49:52Speaker 08

  He who he literally wrote that somebody came to a screening last night with the textbook that he's learning in law school with my lawyer's name on it called Something and Fair Use. Literally wrote the book on it.

• 1:50:03Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, I have like a little bit of experience in this realm, but it does seem like you guys have like figured out some dark arts to in order to pull off what you pull off. And I think part of the thrill of the movie is like, how are they getting away with this as a feeling that you have while watching the movie that is so exciting?

• 1:50:17Speaker 08

  Right.

• 1:50:17Sean Fennessey?

  So, like, what is the process? Like, when do you know you've gone too far? How do you? Because you're it's a it's a creative act and you're making something. So how does he help you figure out what you can and can't do?

• 1:50:27Speaker 08

  It's, I think, the opposite of what people think. I think people imagine that BlackBerry is a good example that we would go film it and then show it to our lawyer and be like, is this okay? It's the exact opposite. In this, it would be like, okay, so we're making a Back to the Future parody. Here's all the reasons that I think that this is important to the story that I would write. And then Chris Perez would then look at my reasoning behind justifying these parodies and be like, okay, yes, I believe this. I believe that that that your artistic license to tell a story about this is going to uh justify its use. And then we just do that for every single piece of copyrighted material in the movie.

• 1:51:08Speaker 08

  Where it's like, kind of like going back to high school where you need to create a coherent argument as to why you, as a storyteller, need this and only this. And we do it way before we shoot anything.

• 1:51:20Sean Fennessey?

  Have you heard anything from the Zemeckis camp?

• 1:51:23Speaker 08

  I mean, I wish, but no, not only not nothing from the Zemeckis camp in all of my time making all of these movies from the dirties to the TV show to BlackBerry, which it has got more fair use in it arguably than this movie. We've never heard anything from anyone.

• 1:51:40Sean Fennessey?

  Is that a good or a bad thing?

• 1:51:41Speaker 08

  That's great. That's what you want.

• 1:51:42Sean Fennessey?

  But you don't want to get the letter that's like, I saw your movie and I loved it. Like, that's also a thing you sometimes hear.

• 1:51:48Speaker 08

  You know what? Those letters don't go to me. I don't, I don't get, I don't get those letters.

• 1:51:52Sean Fennessey?

  You're getting one right now.

• 1:51:53Speaker 08

  Sure.

• 1:51:55Sean Fennessey?

  You've been asked a lot of questions about some of the house stuff, as I mentioned, how you pulled off so many sequences. Is there one that you have not been asked about or are really proud of that you want to talk about?

• 1:52:05Speaker 08

  That's a great question. It's funny that I'm trying to think of something that's in the film that I, for us, the hardest thing to shoot, and although it doesn't seem that impressive when you see it, is there's a scene in the movie at the very, very beginning, in the first 10 minutes, when I go up to a girl outside the sky dome and I, oh, it's, yeah, outside of the sky dome, the CN Tower. And I say, hey, is this the line to get into the edge walk? And she goes, yeah, I think so. And I go, okay, great, because I need to jump off of it. And then she gives this look like, oh, my gosh, really? And then I say, thank you very much. Goodbye. And then we leave, and it's a totally innocuous moment. And then in the third act of the film, because time loops perfectly, you see Jay and I walk, now I'm covered in climbing ropes and he's pushing

• 1:52:50Speaker 08

  a wheelbarrow full of extension cords, and we see the same girl in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. And I say, oh, my gosh, I remember you. You're the girl from Brazil. And she goes, what? Like, she looks at me and she's like with this look of, you're insane. And I go, oh, my gosh, that's right. I've never met you before in my life. And she goes, no. And I go, okay, goodbye. And then I climb up the CN Tower. And that was easily one of the hardest things to shoot. It was next to impossible. We shot it 20 times.

• 1:53:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:53:19Speaker 08

  With 20 different people, could never get it to work. And in the movie, it goes by in a split second. I don't think anybody even really noticed.

• 1:53:25Sean Fennessey?

  No, but she's so memorable. I saw the movie in November and I can see her in my mind's eye.

• 1:53:29Speaker 08

  She's incredible.

• 1:53:30Sean Fennessey?

  But, okay, so how do you? Land on people like that. I think that's something about the kind of like in the real world experiential aspect of the filmmaking.

• 1:53:37Speaker 08

  That's the, the, the.

• 1:53:38Sean Fennessey?

  The right person, you know?

• 1:53:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, the Safdie style street cast thing where you're like, okay, yeah, this person's got the magic. Ah, I mean, Toronto's full of travelers, which makes it great. Um, and we approach interesting looking people and, and interesting people approach us. So how do we decide? I don't know that much decision gets made. In that case, she was in the right place at the right time. And we had shot that thing so many times with so many different people over and over and over again, and had to do that switch so quickly because in real life, me asking her the first question into the second question needed to take place within a span of 30 seconds.

• 1:54:13Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm. Yeah, it is like, did you guys have wonder shows in, in Canada? Have you ever seen one?

• 1:54:17Speaker 08

  I'm a hu- like huge influence on me.

• 1:54:18Sean Fennessey?

  There's like a little, you've mentioned Tom Green, there's wonder shows, and there's a couple of things where I'm just like, only a rare breed of comic mind knows how to do this. He knows how to find the right, I mean, obviously, this is something Sacha Baron Cohen is expert at too.

• 1:54:30Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:54:31Sean Fennessey?

  Um, but it, it's a very memorable aspect of the movie itself. Um, I'm, I, can we talk a little bit about like the getting the Hollywood water bottle tour that you went on and like

• 1:54:42Speaker 08

  Sure.

• 1:54:43Sean Fennessey?

  your experiences in your career kind of adjacent to this because a lot of filmmakers who make films that are, you know, critically acclaimed and have small but passionate audiences usually get funneled right into the system, right? You start taking the, the agency tours and you start going to the studios and they, they want you to do something.

• 1:55:01Speaker 08

  And then they just find anything that fits and that's what you do.

• 1:55:03Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty much, right? And so I know, I know you're making an A24 movie. I know you're making more after that as well. Like, can you just give me from your perspective what that experience was and is like?

• 1:55:15Speaker 08

  You, I think everybody's different. I, it's hard to totalize that. I don't know how in a sentence to describe it.

• 1:55:24Sean Fennessey?

  Were you excited to be doing those conversations? Were you scared?

• 1:55:27Speaker 08

  Uh, no, I wasn't scared. Uh, here's what I think all filmmaking comes down to is. Do you have true enthusiasm for something, right? Like, I mean, you, the creator. Do you have enthusiasm for something? And is that enthusiasm transferable to somebody else in a way where you can tell they're getting it? And so, in some ways, Jay has told me this quote about bike riding. He says, you know, the more you learn how to ride a bike, it doesn't get any easier. You just go faster. And that, I think, is really deeply true about filmmaking, which is that it feels like exactly the same as trying to pitch my friends or trying to pitch just Jay on an episode of our web series. It's identical.

• 1:56:11Speaker 08

  And so, the process, it doesn't feel any different, other than I'm talking with strangers. And oftentimes, we don't see things the same way. But it's so great, because if you don't, like, you can't lose. It's like, okay, I want to make this movie. And they're like, I don't really see it that way. It's a great bye.

• 1:56:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you're such an articulate and smart interviewee. So I wonder if you are, are you like a dynamo in the room? Is everybody like, this is awesome? Or did you find like doors getting slammed in your face? What was it like?

• 1:56:40Speaker 08

  No, that's, you'd have to ask somebody else who was in one of those rooms. I can't talk about, like, how would I know? I know that I've never been at a pitch meeting for something and that I wanted to do, and it didn't get made, literally ever. But I think that has something to do with the fact that it's not like I've got a thousand different movie ideas and I'm like, let's do this. Like, if I'm gonna talk about something, it's because I am like, oh, it feels true. It feels like it should get made. And here's what's amazing. I think there's some cynicism around Hollywood, around like executives or studios, that they have some kind of design or like, basically that they have an agenda beyond they love movies and they're waiting to meet somebody else who loves movies so they can make a movie together.

• 1:57:23Speaker 08

  That's been exclusively my experience, that people are excited by something that is new or that seems unsynical, and they want to do anything they can to make it.

• 1:57:36Sean Fennessey?

  You think that's self-selecting because you make a very particular kind of thing?

• 1:57:39Speaker 08

  It's quite possible.

• 1:57:40Sean Fennessey?

  And if they located you, then maybe that indicates something about what their interests are?

• 1:57:44Speaker 08

  I'm sure that's 100% true. And so, so it's why I can't give a, like, a universal opinion on this, but that's, it's just been my experience.

• 1:57:52Sean Fennessey?

  What was your experience like making a movie that was not in the very specific orbit of your personal experience?

• 1:57:59Speaker 08

  Oh, well, I've never done that. When you mean, you mean, you're talking about the Anthony Bourdain movie? I mean, that movie is. I decided to make that movie because of the actor Dominic Sessa. He and I met and we realized that we saw that period of life, like nineteen, twenty years old, leaving home, trying to find an identity for somebody who was young and lied a lot. We had a very similar experience. So that is, that's an extremely personal movie. So it's not like, but, but do you mean, what's it like making a movie outside of the system that I have in Toronto with all strangers?

• 1:58:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:58:36Speaker 08

  That was extremely complicated.

• 1:58:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 08

  That was a very, that was a very difficult time in my life.

• 1:58:40Sean Fennessey?

  I, I wondered, because you, you are, you make things so specifically and so personally. And you have like hacked the system in a way to do things in your own way.

• 1:58:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, by making them with a small group of people in Canada. Yeah, so that was a real splash of cold water. It turned out amazing and I met incredible friends. Michael Baumann was my cinematographer, who is a dear friend. I mean, I can't say enough about this guy. He's a genius. But that took a lot of getting used to, because I didn't have a single Canadian with me. Not one of my friends got to come.

• 1:59:10Sean Fennessey?

  What was the difference between not having any Canadians then?

• 1:59:13Speaker 08

  It was crazy, man. Like, it was like I was making a movie on another planet.

• 1:59:17Sean Fennessey?

  What's the defining character, though? Like, what explains the difference between the two?

• 1:59:21Speaker 08

  If I could answer that, I could write a book about it. I have no idea, but it's like, it's like, it's.

• 1:59:30Speaker 08

  Well, okay, you know, you know where it starts? Americans don't take off their shoes when they go in the house.

• 1:59:38Speaker 08

  And somehow from that.

• 1:59:39Sean Fennessey?

  We do in my house.

• 1:59:40Speaker 08

  You do?

• 1:59:41Sean Fennessey?

  We do.

• 1:59:41Speaker 08

  Oh, that's beautiful.

• 1:59:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Speaker 08

  And I'm not judging them, because of course, like, why not? This is your country. Do what you want, and I mean that deeply.

• 1:59:49Sean Fennessey?

  Is there some sort of politest that is, that is lacking? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:59:52Speaker 08

  I don't know what it is. There's a kind of like. Yeah, it's like, I think that somebody once said about Toronto, Toronto feels like every single person in the city is like, just trying to keep to themselves because the city, they know that they're visiting. Doesn't matter who you are, you feel like you're a visitor there and you're like, okay, yeah, I gotta be polite because I'm just visiting here. In New York, everybody owns New York. This is my city, get out of my way. This is mine. Like, you know what I mean? This is my kingdom. And so I think that that, that describes the difference well. Also, it was like a studio movie, like, we were on a completely different schedule. I was working with a huge team of professionals. Every single person at every

• 2:00:31Speaker 08

  single crew level knew more about making movies than me. Everybody. And so I'm like, the person from Canada who's never made a real movie, who really has a totally unique process that, that to me is just like, well, that's just how I make movies. But to everybody else was like, what the hell are you doing? And so it's not like it was a negative experience in that way. People were incredibly supportive, but there was a lot of getting used to one another, definitely. I would say not with the actors at all. Like, those actors are some of my best friends. And now, and I mean, that's the part of filmmaking I adore, where you're basically just working with five or six people to, to play and tell a story. But working with like a crew of that size was like crazy.

• 2:01:16Sean Fennessey?

  What do you take away from that then, going forward to do the next couple of things?

• 2:01:19Speaker 08

  Um, well,

• 2:01:26Speaker 08

  I think that I was very lucky to have formed strong relationships with the cast that could be the central fulcrum of the entire creative process. Because I had, because me and Dominic were trying to do things in the scenes that really, and I'm using the word forced, but I don't mean that coercively, that forced the production to move at a certain pace and operate in a certain way. And I think that if you're a filmmaker, all of a sudden working in a studio system for the first time, that will help you a lot. Because, again, this never happened, but I can picture it being very easy for a crew to turn on a director, but they're never going to turn on the cast in a million years. And so if, if you are

• 2:02:10Speaker 08

  in an alliance with the cast and they really believe in what you're doing, Then it creates an environment where everybody's like, okay, we're doing things a bit differently, and it's great. Whereas if the director is trying to do things differently and the cast is like, I don't feel comfortable with this, you are so dead, you have no idea. Like you'll make, you'll basically never make a movie again.

• 2:02:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's very interesting. I've not heard it put that way, but that does make sense. Why do you say they won't turn on the cast? Just because it's a different kind of relationship that they

• 2:02:35Speaker 08

  Have you been on a movie set before?

• 2:02:36Sean Fennessey?

  I have, but not in the way that you have.

• 2:02:39Speaker 08

  They

• 2:02:40Sean Fennessey?

  Because they are the blessed, the blessed people.

• 2:02:42Speaker 08

  They're, they are like the holy few.

• 2:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:45Speaker 08

  They're magic.

• 2:02:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:46Speaker 08

  And look, actors are magic people, and we've all decided that's true. So

• 2:02:51Sean Fennessey?

  It is the premise of this show.

• 2:02:52Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:02:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 08

  They're, they're magic people. And so, you know, like, they, they, they can't have bad days, like they're every, like, they're just, and I don't mean this cynically, like, you, you're there for them.

• 2:03:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. They have something that no one else has, and you have to kind of wait, make a way, make a way to make that special.

• 2:03:08Speaker 08

  They are the movie.

• 2:03:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Speaker 08

  And I, and I, and I think one of the, I mean, I love movies, but whenever I see a movie and I'm like, and I'm not connecting with it, it's because I'm feeling at a deep level, the director doesn't understand that. They're showing me all their tricks. They're showing me how they can move a camera. They're showing me their awesome plot. They're showing me all these things, instead of just an actor thinking.

• 2:03:27Sean Fennessey?

  I was thinking about this last night about you too. Like, do you see yourself as, forgive the phrase, but an auteur? Like, is that something that resonates with you?

• 2:03:33Speaker 08

  No. But I mean, I, my movies are all specifically me, but I, I don't think that there's any kind of individual thing that ties them all together, apart from the fact that I had to use these busted Canadian production techniques because we had no money.

• 2:03:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know, but your films have a look and style that is consistent, you know, even when you're changing time period, changing, you know, black and white or color, like, there, there is a vibe, a visual connectivity to all of the things. Don't you agree?

• 2:03:59Speaker 08

  Well, put your actors in close-ups. Yeah, sure.

• 2:04:03Sean Fennessey?

  Cutting style, though, you know, like

• 2:04:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, that

• 2:04:06Sean Fennessey?

  Reaction shots, you know, the sense of like when the camera wanders away for a second, like, that you have moves.

• 2:04:12Speaker 08

  Sure. Yeah. A lot of those I have to credit both to Jared Rab, my cinematographer, and to Kurt Lob, the, the person who's been editing my movies since the dirties, and now Bobby Upchurch, who edits with him. Like, I would say that we all have the same worldview.

• 2:04:25Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:26Speaker 08

  We all think the same things are funny, like, literally, and we all love the same things. And so, it's funny, though, because it's hard to explain. Yeah, I know what you mean, where, you know, you cut at a certain time, or you, or you show a certain expression. Yeah, again.

• 2:04:45Sean Fennessey?

  We, we sometimes talk about here, like if you put your hand over someone's byline and you read their piece, you can tell who wrote it.

• 2:04:51Speaker 08

  Oh, wow.

• 2:04:51Sean Fennessey?

  The sign of a great writer.

• 2:04:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:04:54Sean Fennessey?

  Even if your face wasn't in the movie, the energy of the film, I'm like, I could probably tell that was Matt Johnson movie.

• 2:04:59Speaker 08

  Well, let's see what you think about Tony.

• 2:05:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:05:01Speaker 08

  When I'm back talking about the Bourdain movie, you'll be like, so everything I said, I was really wrong about you.

• 2:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe I will, we'll see.

• 2:05:09Sean Fennessey?

  So Nirvana, the band, the TV show, the show, season three?

• 2:05:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's why we made the movie. I made BlackBerry to make the movie so that I could make the third season of the show.

• 2:05:22Sean Fennessey?

  What's going on with that? Where is it? What's going, what's the status?

• 2:05:25Speaker 08

  If the, if the movie keeps doing as well as it's doing now in theaters, then it will be released for sure.

• 2:05:30Sean Fennessey?

  In what capacity?

• 2:05:32Speaker 08

  Well, it's funny, at first I thought we'd have to release it physically because I was like, no network is ever, ever, ever going to put this on. But now it seems like whatever network winds up taking a chance on season one and two of the TV show, will probably also release the third season.

• 2:05:46Sean Fennessey?

  So you think that's what, someone will license the shows?

• 2:05:48Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:05:48Sean Fennessey?

  And then put them, oh, boy.

• 2:05:49Speaker 08

  That's what I think is going to happen. And then what's great is that you're going to get to see the first attempt at us shooting this movie, which I'm not sure if you know about this.

• 2:05:56Sean Fennessey?

  I don't.

• 2:05:56Speaker 08

  So that movie that you saw is actually the second draft. And I mean, second time we shot the Nirvana, the band movie, because when we first shot it, we thought we should make it as a Confederacy of Dunces talented Mr. Ripley homage.

• 2:06:10Sean Fennessey?

  I read about this, yes, okay.

• 2:06:12Speaker 08

  Which we actually shot all through the United States in New Orleans for a month and a half, two months.

• 2:06:17Sean Fennessey?

  How long ago was this?

• 2:06:19Speaker 08

  It would have been right after, shortly after the Berlin premiere of, of BlackBerry.

• 2:06:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:06:24Speaker 08

  So, so around the time that I was speaking with you is when we were planning to leave for the first time.

• 2:06:28Sean Fennessey?

  What happened to all that material?

• 2:06:29Speaker 08

  We're turning it into a double episode of season three. Because when we got back and watched it, we were like, oh, this is great, but it does feel like television. And that's when all of a sudden we just decided to make this time travel movie. But hey, that's why I said it was a real change, all of a sudden working in the American system.

• 2:06:48Sean Fennessey?

  Sounds like it. A Confederacy of Dunces, though, you may be, maybe one of the precious few who could crack that.

• 2:06:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, I was, it's cursed every single production, including mine.

• 2:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57Speaker 08

  Like, we tried to make it into a movie and now at, at best it'll be two episodes of television. But speaking of edgelords, Ignatius is the OG. That's the original edgelord.

• 2:07:06Sean Fennessey?

  Truly.

• 2:07:06Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Sean Fennessey?

  What an inspiration. Another Nirvana movie?

• 2:07:11Speaker 08

  I mean, this movie's just in theaters right now. I don't know. These things are so hard to make that, yes, I'd love to do it. But the thing is, it would need to be.

• 2:07:22Speaker 08

  So we'd need to have such a good idea to top what we did. Like. The only, I mean, the only clue I'll give, and this is something Jay and I have been talking about, is that we should do it in real time. It should be kind of like, like a bit of a time code Figgus. Oh, my. Where, where we, where we do it in real time. So that at least it has something where you're like, where it truly is unbelievable.

• 2:07:49Sean Fennessey?

  Was that the four box film?

• 2:07:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, we wouldn't be doing, we wouldn't be doing it like that. It would be hard because there's two of us.

• 2:07:56Sean Fennessey?

  You and Jay and 2008, you and 2008 Jay.

• 2:07:58Speaker 08

  That's what I mean. We can't, we can't, we can't go back to 2008.

• 2:08:01Sean Fennessey?

  You have so much raw footage. Come on.

• 2:08:02Speaker 08

  Yes, we do. Yeah, we've probably got a couple features in there.

• 2:08:04Sean Fennessey?

  That footage in a way.

• 2:08:05Speaker 08

  Well, I'll tell you what, you can pitch the editors that they've got to do this again. How about that?

• 2:08:09Sean Fennessey?

  Let's re-watch all the stuff you shot 20 years ago. It'll be fine.

• 2:08:12Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Sean Fennessey?

  What are you really excited about doing right now? That's what I'm most curious.

• 2:08:20Speaker 08

  The honest answer is the Magic the Gathering movie. Like, it's the, it is the.

• 2:08:25Sean Fennessey?

  You're such a millennial as fuck. You're like an elder millennial. I do feel a real kinship with you in that way.

• 2:08:30Speaker 08

  That game taught me to read. And when I was a kid, my dream was to be a professional Magic card player. And I mean that literally. I made day two in Detroit, 2006. Pro tour, uh, Champions of Kawagama. And I drafted like garbage. I sat next to Richard Hoen, who just beat the shit out of me. And, and I made that decision right then. I need to take filmmaking seriously because I'm never going to be a pro Magic player. And I just quit, broke my heart. And for years I've said I would trade my entire career to be a professional Magic card player. And now I'm making the Magic card movie. And so it's almost like, yeah, someone was listening. I got it. It was like making a wish on a monkey paw. You're like, please, please, let me stop being a filmmaker and let me play magic cards instead.

• 2:09:15Sean Fennessey?

  But what happens when it curls?

• 2:09:17Speaker 08

  That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Who knows what's what's gonna happen to me. But that to me, that's like my Star Wars, like getting to revisit a world that I know so well, that I love so much, that meant so much to me. It's it's surreal, to be honest, to be able to do a project like that. But, I mean, it's still early days. Who knows?

• 2:09:37Sean Fennessey?

  Matt, we end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? Can I just preface that question quickly? Do you feel as into like cinephilia as you were as a kid?

• 2:09:47Speaker 08

  No, I think it's a big curse that any filmmaker will tell you.

• 2:09:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:50Speaker 08

  Is that um, that as soon as you start making movies, it's really, really hard to have the same kind of maybe the word is even curiosity about what is is happening. I'm assuming you're talking about new movies?

• 2:10:04Sean Fennessey?

  It can be anything if you want.

• 2:10:05Speaker 08

  Oh, really?

• 2:10:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:06Speaker 08

  It can be literally anything?

• 2:10:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, that when we were prepping this movie over and over and over, I watched the documentary Streetwise. Now, have you seen this film?

• 2:10:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:10:23Speaker 08

  So this, I mean, this to me is like one of the greatest films ever made about Seattle. And if if your listeners haven't seen this movie, I promise it'll feel brand new when they watch it. They'll be like, I can't believe I've ever heard of this before. And um, yeah, although, I mean, in some ways, that's a real film. Like, everybody in film school has seen that film. But but that's probably the last thing I saw where I was like, oh, my gosh, this is unbelievable.

• 2:10:50Sean Fennessey?

  Why did you watch it over and over and over?

• 2:10:51Speaker 08

  Because we were trying to completely steal the aesthetic from it. When we would be shooting in public, Jay and I would always say to our to the camera operators, Jared and at that time Nikolai, we'd be like, Streetwise, Streetwise, we're doing this Streetwise. We're doing this one Streetwise, which is basically just saying the camera is so far away, shooting in a wide, while action is happening over a wireless microphone. And basically, it just meant like, whatever happens, happens like just, just, just let it be the way it is. But if you are a film student and you're thinking of shooting things or making movies in this style, watch that film. It's like a how to. I don't even know how they did it. Do you know how they did it?

• 2:11:31Sean Fennessey?

  Of course not.

• 2:11:31Speaker 08

  It's like you watch it, you're like, what? This seems impossible. Is this all recreation? Like, there's no way.

• 2:11:38Speaker 08

  You're watching crimes get committed. Yeah. It's, I mean, yeah, it's a masterpiece.

• 2:11:44Sean Fennessey?

  Matt, it was nice seeing you.

• 2:11:44Speaker 08

  I love speaking with you. I can't, I can't wait to, um, to be back to talk about Tony. And I'm sure the tone's going to be quite different.

• 2:11:53Sean Fennessey?

  Well, hopefully not too different. I hope you're, I hope you're ecstatic and thrilled and always questing for the truth. Congrats on Nirvana. It's genuinely an extraordinary accomplishment.

• 2:12:03Speaker 08

  It's a huge compliment that you liked it. And I mean that. I am, I'm totally grateful. Thank you.

• 2:12:10Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Matt.

• 2:12:16Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you to Matt Johnson. Thank you to Adam Nayman. Thanks to CR. Thanks, Amanda. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for additional production support. Next week, Wesley Morris returns. It's time for the Sixth Annual Alternative Oscars. Are you ready?

• 2:12:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm excited.

• 2:12:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'm excited as well. We'll see you then.

• 2:12:54Speaker 10

  This is US Bank's Cozy Cash Formations with your chief financial playmaker, Fernando Mendoza.

• 2:13:01Speaker 11

  You are worthy of financial security. Budgeting is not restriction, it's freedom. You are smart. You are capable. You are giving your money a purpose. You are learning the language of saving, of growing, now streaming.

• 2:13:22Speaker 10

  Member FDIC Copyright 2026 US Bank.

• 2:13:25Speaker 12

  This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Fall is here and Whole Foods Market has everything you need for cozy meals, seasonal treats, and easy entertaining. Elevate your hearty dishes with tasty bone-in beef short ribs or New York strip steaks with no added growth hormones or antibiotics. And as the fall evenings draw in, why not get ahead of cold season with immunity shots, herbal teas, lozenges, and supplements? Make sure you look for sales throughout the month. Shop fall flavors with higher standards at Whole Foods Market.